WesMaps - Wesleyan University Catalog 2022-2023       Summer Session       Winter Session       Home       Archive       Search
CS92PROD
Awesome Cinema: Religion, Art, and the Unrepresentable
FILM 318
Spring 2023
Section: 01  
Crosslisting: RELI 318

How does one represent the unrepresentable? In particular, how might a medium like cinema--founded on recording the visible world--move us to sense something beyond human experience? Various artistic, religious, and religiously artistic traditions use mystery, horror, surprise, disgust, and pleasure to evoke the uncanny, the majestic, the terrifying, and even the sublime in us. This class examines how filmmakers prompt audiences to feel awe (which might be awesome, awful, or both) and how that relates to religious engagement with the nonrational. Noting parallels in painting, ritual, architecture, and other means of expression, we consider how art structures emotion, perception, and cognition to exceed representation of the known. This class will examine how aliens, avatars, black holes, death, deities, demons, saints, saviors, superheroes, and nature have been conduits to that which appears to escape reason. Films may include "Arrival," "Interstellar," "The Exorcist," "Jai Santoshi Maa," "Passion of Joan of Arc," and "Yeelen."
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA FILM
Course Format: Lecture / DiscussionGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: RELI151 OR FILM307 OR FILM304
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (FILM-MN)(FILM)(RELI-MN)(RELI)
Past Enrollment Probability: 75% - 89%

Last Updated on MAR-29-2024
Contact wesmaps@wesleyan.edu to submit comments or suggestions. Please include a url, course title, faculty name or other page reference in your email ? Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459