Content

Cinema and Religion

This Project addresses the following questions:

1. How is religion depicted and communicated within the cinematic space over the decades: what has changed from 1945 to 1989 – who and what is represented and in which context?
2. How are religion and ontological concepts communicated explicitly and implicitly through film language?
3. How are faith and religious imagery communicated in adaptions, partisan films, historical spectacles, and how are they employed for social criticism of the 1960s?
4. What can we learn about the role of religion in the wider society from the films?
5. Can the context (off-screen) be understood from the ‘reel’ (on-screen) and in what ways?

Genre: Documentary and Feature

• Period: 1945- 1989

• Place: Yugoslavia

• Documentary and Feature Films to include underrepresented, banned and ‘educational TV documentaries’

Time Period: 1945-1989

• 1945 – 1960 The Post-War Period
• 1961 – 1972 The New Movements and the New Auteurs
• 1973 – 1980 The ‘Hollywoodization’ of Yugoslav Cinema: 1973-1980
• 1981 – 1989 The ‘Transition Period’

Focus: Faith, Religion, Ethic and Religious Communities

• War and Faith
• Religious and Ethnic Communities
• The New Understandings of Faith
• Religious Objects and Symbols within New Political Contexts
• The Conceptualisations of Faith and Religion
• New Concepts of Spirituality
• Religion, Iconography and Film Language
• Breaking the Script: the Unexpected Authors and Representations of Religious and Pseudo-Religious Narratives