**** Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, showcases the feminist psychoanalysis rebuttal to the Freudian suggestion that women terrify because of their.

' Journal of Religion & Film: Vol. 2 Journal of Religion & Film John C. Lyden 0 0 Grand View University, Des Moines, Iowa, USA Recommended Citation - Article 6 To Commend or To Critique? The Question of Religion and Film Studies Abstract This paper examines two approaches to popular film to come out of religious studies. The first assumes popular culture is as valid as any culture, in which case 'religious' analysis of films seeks to identify the iconography and mythology of film as expressive of a viable popular religion.

The second method critiques popular film as a form of hegemonic discourse to be unmasked as supportive of classist, racist, and sexist ideologies. This paper accepts the validity of both methods and seeks to balance them by asserting that all films should be seen both as viable expressions of culture and also as ideology. Films are both to the extent that all contain multiple 'texts' and multiple meanings, held together in an aporial and not entirely rational fusion.

We do not need to decide which meaning is fundamental, as all are present in the film. This article is available in Journal of Religion & Film: The study of film from a religious studies vantage point has produced a broad consensus. Films include religious symbolism, consciously or unconsciously, and films may project a world-view which functions much like a religion in our culture.

Films are a creation and a reflection of the popular culture which produces and sustains them. They support this culture through creating myths, icons, and values which are celebrated and reinforced in a ritualized fashion. A variety of methods are used by religious scholars to study films.

There are representative of the range of methods available within film studies generally: semiotics, textual or formalistic studies, psychoanalytic methods, ideological or political critiques, reader-response theories, genre and auteur studies, and so on. There is a fundamental tension, however, between two basic approaches to the study of film as exemplative of a popular religious tradition. Psx emulator. On the one hand, popular culture may be accepted as a culture which is as valid as any other, and which expresses its own values through media such as film. Even though the films are not produced by the people but by a technological industry, they are produced for the people and (in part) out of response to what people believe in and hope for. An analysis of their religious impact will then seek to identify the mythology of popular film with the purpose of establishing how it contributes to the religion of popular culture, and will often (at least implicitly) celebrate the values expressed by this mythology. On the other hand, the opposed method views films' presentation of popular culture and its religious aspects with great suspicion. The films are defined as a form of hegemonic discourse which ultimately supports the status quo of classist, racist, and sexist ideologies (to name the most significant).