Religion and American Film
Spring 1999

January 19:   Approaches to the Study of Religion in Film

• John Lyden, "To Commend Or Critique: The Question of Religion and Film Studies," Journal of Religion and Film, 1:2 (Fall 1997).

January 21: Social Reform and Early Cinema

Film: Regeneration (Raoul Walsh, 1915)

• Kevin Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence - Sex, Violence, Prejudice and Crime: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era, 182-207
• Kay Sloan, Loud Silents: Origins of the Social Problem Film, 17-35
• Joseph Medill Patterson, "The Nickelodeons: The Poor Man's Elementary Course in the Drama," Saturday Evening Post (1907)
• Sam Fox Moving Picture Music Volume 1 (1913): (requires a sound card and a midi player)
      Church Music; Sailor Music; Plaintive Music; Death Scene

January 26 and 28: Imagining Religious and Racial Others

Film: Broken Blossoms, or The Yellow Man and the Girl (D.W. Griffith, 1919)

• Gina Marchetti, Romance and the Yellow Peril: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction, chapter 2
• Kevin Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence - Sex, Violence, Prejudice and Crime: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era, 320-341
• Interview with Lillian Gish (1927)
• Sam Fox Moving Picture Music Volume 1 (1913): (requires a sound card and a midi player)
  Chinese Music; Oriental Music

February 2 and 4: Religious Voices

Film: The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927)

• Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, chapter 4
• Laura Levitt, "Redressing Jewish Difference in Tania Modleski's 'Cinema and the Dark Continent'" Journal of Religion and Film 1:2 (Fall 1997)

February 9 and 11: Hollywood Pictures an All-Black World

Film: Hallelujah! (King Vidor, 1929)

• Judith Weisenfeld, "For Rent: `Cabin in the Sky': Race, Religion, and Representational Quagmires in American Film," Semeia 74 (1996): 147-165
• Jessica Howard, "Hallelujah!: Transformation in Film," African-American Review (Fall 1996): 441-451.

February 16 and 18: Gender, Religion, and Censorship

Film: The Miracle Woman (Frank Capra, 1931)

• Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942, chapters 1 and 3
• "The Production Code," in John Belton, ed., Movies and Mass Culture

February 23 and 25: Black Independents and Religious Melodrama

Film: The Blood of Jesus (Spencer Williams, 1941)

• Thomas Cripps, Black Film As Genre, selections.

March 2 and 4: Picturing Catholics in Pluralist America

Film: The Bells of St. Mary's (Leo McCarey, 1945)

• Mary Gordon: "Father Chuck: A Reading of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s, or Why Priests Made Us Crazy," South Atlantic Quarterly 93 (Summer 1994): 591-601.
• Francis G. Couvares, "Hollywood, Main Street and the Church: Trying to Censor the Movies Before the Production Code," in Francis G. Couvares, ed., Movie Censorship and American Culture

March 9 and 11: Religious Passing and the Post-War Message Movie

Film: Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947)

• Stephen J. Whitfield, "Our American Jewish Heritage: The Hollywood Version," American Jewish History 75 (March 1986): 322-340
• Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, chapter 7

SPRING BREAK

March 23 and 25: The Bible Epic

Film: The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. Demille, 1956)

• Alan Nadel, "God's Law and the Wide Screen: The Ten Commandments as Cold War 'Epic'," PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 108:3 (May 1993): 415-30.
• Thomas Pauly, "The Way to Salvation: The Hollywood Blockbuster of the 1950s," Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cultural Studies 5 (1980): 467-487.
• Stephen Powers, David J. Rothman, StanleyRothman, "Religious Decline," in Hollywood’s America: Social and Political Themes in Motion Pictures, 120-137.

March 30 and April 1: American Film Takes on Fundamentalism

Film: Inherit the Wind (Stanley Kramer, 1960)

• Tennessee v. John Scopes (1925) - Famous Trials in American History Site
      Introduction
      Tennessee’s Anti-Evolution Statute
      Textbook Used by Scopes
• Inherit the Wind in Popular Culture

April 6 and 8: Religion and Horror

April 13 and 15: Memory and Black Feminist Cinema

Film: Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1993)

• Joel Brouwer, "Repositioning: Center and Margin in Julie Dash's Daughters of The Dust," African American Review 29 (Spring 1995):5-16
• Secrets and Whispers Home Page

April 20 and 22: A Saint is Born

Film: Household Saints (Nancy Savoca, 1993)

• "The Domus-Centered Society," in Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115^th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950
• Edvige Giunta, "The Quest for True Love: Ethnicity in Nancy Savoca's Domestic Film Comedy," MELUS 22 (Summer '97), 75-89
• Aaron Baker and Juliann Vitullo, "Mysticism and the Household Saints of Everyday Life," in Voices in Italian Americana 7: 2 (Fall 1996): 55-68.

April 27 and 29: The New Southern Religion

Film: The Apostle (Robert Duvall, 1997)