Mark Graham

Associate Professor; Curriculum Committee Chair of South Asian Studies

Why Study Religion and Film?

Once upon a time, scholars imagined that secular modernity would lead to a privatization and disappearance of religion from the world. Our experience of recent decades suggests this is not so, and rather than secularization requiring the diminishment of religion, we see instead cultures becoming at once more secular and more religious. Film is one of many places to observe religious modernity. Since its invention in the late nineteenth century, film and its related electronic moving image technologies have appeared as a distinctively modern and secular set of techniques and locations for communication, entertainment and aesthetic expression. Since their inception, such moving image technologies and the locations where their products are seen have been identified as being in tension (if not outright conflict) with techniques and locations of religions. However, as with most things modern, such technologies have also been locations of religious expression, whether that is devotional, critical, or otherwise. Thus, to study film and religion is to ask – by means of some of the most enjoyable and challenging art created in the last century – What does it mean to be “modern”? By what means do we as modern persons make sense of our selves and our lives? In pursuit of these questions, I have for the past few years taught a course titled “Religion and Film” and in Spring 2013 will for the first time be teaching a course titled “Documenting Religion: Documentary Film and Religions.”