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Seeing Is Believing
The Revelation of God Through Film
Richard Vance GoodwinSeries: Studies in Theology and the Arts(0)
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How might film reveal God?
In its most basic form, film is a series of images displayed over time. Of course, film has developed greatly since the Lumière brothers by adding components such as sound, special effects, digital recording, and more to create an increasingly complex artistic medium. Historically, film studies have often focused on the narrative aspect of film as it seeks to tell a story. More recent studies, however, have turned attention to other elements of film, such as the musical score. Yet, film remains, in a sense, a series of images.
In this study, the latest in IVP Academic's Studies in Theology and the Arts (STA) series, theologian Richard Goodwin considers how the images that constitute film might be a conduit of God's revelation. By considering works by Carl Theodor Dreyer, Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Robert Bresson, Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, and more, Goodwin argues that by inviting emotional responses, film images can be a medium of divine revelation.
Blessed are those who have seen God... through film.
In its most basic form, film is a series of images displayed over time. Of course, film has developed greatly since the Lumière brothers by adding components such as sound, special effects, digital recording, and more to create an increasingly complex artistic medium. Historically, film studies have often focused on the narrative aspect of film as it seeks to tell a story. More recent studies, however, have turned attention to other elements of film, such as the musical score. Yet, film remains, in a sense, a series of images.
In this study, the latest in IVP Academic's Studies in Theology and the Arts (STA) series, theologian Richard Goodwin considers how the images that constitute film might be a conduit of God's revelation. By considering works by Carl Theodor Dreyer, Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Robert Bresson, Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, and more, Goodwin argues that by inviting emotional responses, film images can be a medium of divine revelation.
Blessed are those who have seen God... through film.
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Reviews
"Lucidly summarizing multiple ways theologians through the ages have understood God's revelation, Richard Vance Goodwin suggests that cinema can be a source of revelatory power for those with eyes to see. Seeing, in fact, is key to his approach as he discusses the way visual techniques in four classic films mediate divine content. Astutely arguing against the reduction of film to a vehicle for either Christian messages or transcendent experiences, Goodwin gives a refreshingly new and thoroughly Christian spin to reception studies and cognitivism in film theory."
Crystal L. Downing, author of Salvation from Cinema: The Medium is the Message