Joe Kickasola: IntroductionGood morning. My name is Joe Kickasola. I teach at Baylor University and I’m privileged to introduce this panel and share my perspective on it, which may be somewhat different from those that are here in the room. I come at this topic as a filmmaker and film theorist interested in religious faith and experience, not as a theologian interested in film. In my own field, very few people are interested in faith as a point of focus, despite its obvious importance in human life. I’m sure you all could articulate the reasons for this strange omission far better than I, but I puzzled over it most intensely as I was writing a book on the filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski. In that process, it became clear that to ignore the faith questions – and, more importantly, the dynamics of questioning and wrestling with faith – would be to completely miss the heart and soul of that filmmaker’s work. The importance of the sacred, and the way it suffuses life and cinema became more and more obvious as I worked on subsequent projects. To make a long story short, after 16 years of thinking on this topic, I am here at my first AAR with several of the authors who have guided me along the way.This session provides an overview of “religion and film” as a young, but important discipline, offering critical commentary on academic works from the recent past, while projecting new and important topics and methods to consider into the future. The panel surveys four important books from the past decade: John Lyden’s Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals (NYU Press, 2003), S. Brent Plate’s Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (Wallflower/Columbia UP, 2008), Sheila Nayar’s The Sacred and the Cinema: Reconfiguring the “Genuinely” Religious Film (Continuum, 2012), and Antonio Sison’s World Cinema, Theology, and the Human: Humanity in Deep Focus (Routledge, 2012). All have played important roles in establishing the discipline as it stands today. But there are particular virtues of each of these books, which I’d like you to briefly consider, as a way of introduction to the panel.John Lyden’s Film as Religion helped the discipline out of the small rut it had created for itself. He moved us beyond explicitly religious films and issues of religious representation to religious behavior, broadly defined, and the ways in which cinema matters to people in ways that are strikingly similar to the ways religion matters to the religious. In other words, Lyden helped get religious scholars out of the pews and traditional church buildings into the culture, without watering down what religion is. He helps us see how thoroughly religious films really are in their social functions, but also how thoroughly religious people are in their film viewing (however disguised and “unrecognizable” their religions have become).Brent Plate succeeded in articulating the relevance of religious categories like worldmaking, myth and ritual to the experience of viewing a film. For me, however, the book’s chief virtue was to employ phenomenological, material and corporeal theories of reception, beyond the limiting linguistic-based models of traditional film theory. I’d broached these theories of engagement and embodiment before, but Brent did so uniquely, with religion front and center. Believing that religion informs far more of our films and film viewings than we usually account for, he showed us how we make meaning – and search for ultimate meanings – in unlikely places. Additionally, we don’t just “make” them with words and concepts, but through our dynamic interactions with the pushes, pulls, rhythms and riffs of the world around us, as well as the ways we negotiate the boundaries of space and time. Instead of the typical discussions of the “religion and film” film canon (Babette’s Feast, The Ten Commandments, Jesus of Nazareth, etc.) he challenged us to see, and feel, the sacred in films as diverse as Chocolat, Antonia’s Line, and Stan Brakhage’s experimental mortuary film The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes.