"This two-part volume contains a comprehensive collection of original studies by well-known scholars focusing on the Bible’s wide-ranging reception in world cinema. It is organized into sections examining the rich cinematic afterlives of selected characters from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament;
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considering issues of biblical reception across a wide array of film genres, ranging from noir to anime; featuring directors, from Lee Chang-dong to the Coen brothers, whose body of work reveals an enduring fascination with biblical texts and motifs; and offering topical essays on cinema’s treatment of selected biblical themes (e.g., lament, apocalyptic), particular interpretive lenses (e.g., feminist interpretation, queer theory), and windows into biblical reception in a variety of world cinemas (e.g., Indian, Israeli, and Third Cinema)." (Publisher description)
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"It has not been uncommon in the history of Jesus in film for commercial movies of Jesus' life to be conscripted for Christian evangelism around the world. Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927), John Krish and Peter Sykes' Jesus (1979), better known today as The Jesus Film, and Mel Gibson's Th
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e Passion of the Christ (2004) are but three notable examples. Each of those movies, however, was first produced in America for American audiences. In the case of Karunamayudu (1978), a Telugu commercial movie of Jesus' life, the target audience was South Indian viewers raised on a steady diet of mythological and social films and immersed in a pluralistic religious environment unlike any Western society at the time. In this essay I explain how and why this film, with its unique production history, was co-opted by evangelicals for Christian witness in India." (Abstract)
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