Film - Think

I just recieved an email this morning with news that Dr. Laura Copier (Universiteit van Amsterdam) is looking for papers on the representation of Rome in Film for the International Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Rome this upcoming July.

It is nice to see ISBL picking up some more film related topics, especially with Laura Copier's name attached. I met her briefly at the 2007 San Diego meeting and was thrilled to discover an actual film critic at SBL. She told me all about her dissertation ("Preposterous Revelations: Visions of Apocalypse and Martyrdom in Hollywood Cinema 1980-2000"), which must have done well in defense. Abstract:

My project focuses on the recycling of Biblical images and narrative structures regarding the Apocalypse and its conceptions of martyrdom and self-sacrifice in contemporary Hollywood cinema. I examine to what extent representations of martyrs and self-sacrifices are informed by traditional religious notions of Apocalyptic martyrs and self-sacrifices, and how these notions are reproduced, but also transformed and redirected in the process of transmission. Hollywood cinema can be regarded as a site of re-use and re-interpretation of Christian and non-Christian visual and linguistic traditions. However, these adaptations and interpretations are performed by a secular, not (explicitly) religious system. In her book Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History Mieke Bal provides a methodological framework for integrating visual and linguistic traditions of interpretation. She proposes the term ‘quotation', which consists of both iconography and intertextuality. Taking my cue from Bal's theory of quotation, Hollywood may recycle certain elements of the original texts; the discourse of the historically precedent text still exerts its power in the new text. Therefore, I examine the influence of the precedent text. Once the historical source is traced, I analyse in what ways the new text is an active intervention in the earlier material. And finally, I attempt to define the transfer of meaning from past to present and from present to past. This implies a radical rethinking of Hollywood as a mere duplicator or recycler of ‘original' images and narrative structures. Here, one could perceive the original to be functioning as an after effect caused by the images of Hollywood cinema.

I won't make it to Rome this year, which is depressing as both this and a nifty papyrology session will be underway. But I would love to talk about the cruciform indictment of paparazzi in La Dolce Vita if I could.