Tracking the Fallen Apple: Ineffability, Religious Tropes, and Existential Despair in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia: a religiously complex film and a complex filmmaker, from a complex nation. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Turkey is constantly balancing a secular constitution, Muslim majority (around 99%), and unavoidable early Christian history. This complexity—indeed, tension—shows forth in the film. In the end, the film can be seen as a type of ritual of skepticism, whereby one confronts darkness, horror, and hopelessness consistently, for a constructive purpose. This essay explores these complex religious dynamics through an analysis of Ceylan’s formal choices. From the mythic title (“Once Upon a Time”), to his theologically suggestive use of natural forces (wind, fire, lightning), to his complicated relationship with the aesthetics and power of the religious icon, we see a formal articulation of timeless issues beyond words. It at once evokes religious experience and existential nihilism, co-present as hammer and anvil, able to create or destroy the shield of faith

Inflancka Travelogue: 10 Short Essays on “Decalogue”

Kieślowski scholar Joseph G. Kickasola documents his efforts to find and explore the Warsaw apartment complex where Krzysztof Kieślowski filmed his Decalogue series. His startling, unexpectedly emotional experience at such an ordinary place becomes an opportunity to reflect on the films, theorize on the function of place in them, and consider the way that human life and cinema feed into each other. Fictional stories and their cinematic constructions can deepen our experience, and make the world feel more lived in, more true. Nothing magical happened, but everything ordinary happened in all its fullness, like a kind of prophecy, fulfilled

Facing Forward, Looking Back: Religion and Film Studies in the Last Decade

On November 17, 2012, at the American Academy of Religion’s National Meeting, the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group sponsored a session entitled, “Facing Forward, Looking Back: Religion and Film Studies in the Last Decade.” The session focused on four recent books in the field of Religion and Film: John Lyden’s Film as Religion: Myths, Morals and Rituals (NYU, 2003); S. Brent Plate’s Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (Wallflower Press, 2009); Antonio Sison’s World Cinema, Theology, and the Human: Humanity in Deep Focus (Routledge, 2012); and Sheila Nayar’s The Sacred and the Cinema: Reconfiguring the ‘Genuinely’ Religious Film (Continuum, 2012). Each author was present to make remarks on his or her book, and then three respondents made remarks on each of the books as well. The respondents were Stefanie Knauss, Rachel Wagner, and Jolyon Thomas. Joe Kickasola introduced the session, and moderated the discussion that followed. This session represented a rare opportunity for scholars of the field of Religion and Film to reflect on the past, present, and future directions of the field, and the Journal of Religion and Film is happy to be able to include the remarks of all the presenters here