Ron Austin’s In a New Light: Spirituality and the Media Arts
This essay was originally published at Sojourners.
Motion Pictures During World War I and II
Note: Writing an entry for an encyclopedia intended for high school and college libraries, as it turns out, is a lot like writing an undergraduate research paper: the concerns seem to be quantity rather than quality, breadth rather than depth. I found the process more than a bit maddening.
The New American Old West: Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms
This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.
Talkin’ About Movies
Last night I delivered the following talk at the 2004 NEXUS Interdisciplinary Symposium: Reconstructing Theory and Value.
Holy Moments
Film, when rightly enjoyed, can offer holy moments such as this during which we are able to escape, even if only temporarily, from this “extraordinary egoism” into the freedom of God’s grace, experiencing anew the beautiful complexity of his creation and our selfless calling in it.
Benito Cereno (1855)
As Mike Frank has recently asked, “What might narratology look like if we were to take cinema — particularly ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ — as the paradigmatic instance of storytelling?”