Films are moving pictures in more than one sense: they are images in motion via the cinematic apparatus, and they are visual artworks that affect us emotionally. In this co-sponsored session, presenters attend to the dynamics of artistic interpretation, aesthetic expression, and audience reception in a variety of films and genres. How do the unique cinematic aesthetics of two “pilgrimage” films—Luis Buñuel’s “The Milky Way” and Tsai Ming-liang's "Walker"—affect religious/theological imaginations? What are the religious dimensions of melodramas and the affective dimensions of Christian faith-based films? Ultimately, how do movies move us in religious ways, and how might scholars of religion better appreciate the affective power of cinema?
A film’s moving images move us, the viewers, in our bodies, minds and feelings, draw us out of ourselves and into the world of the film, and create a shared affectivity among viewers. This presentation will inquire about how cinema is able to move and affect us, focusing specifically on the genre of melodrama with its characteristic intense emotional expressivity and impact. Through the formal analysis of select scenes from non-typical melodramas – Shane, Breaking the Waves, Au hasard Balthazar, 120 BPM – I will argue that the careful construction of images and scenes through aesthetic forms creates an affective economy that reflects and impacts religious sensibilities (here focusing on Christianity) in several ways: it deepens the sense of self as gift, encourages the experience of shared creatureliness, draws attention to the affective dimension of moral orders, and opens up a space of new possibility of healing and flourishing.
When Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker (2012) was released on the Chinese internet, it generated a maelstrom of emotional responses. While some lauded it as an expression of authentic Buddhism, others voiced an overwhelming urge to pummel the eponymous walker—a monk who quietly performs slow walking meditation across Hong Kong. How did an unassuming short film affect such heated responses? This paper explores the interrelations between religious ethics, film aesthetics, and popular culture in Tsai’s slow cinema. Analyzing the film’s production, text, and reception, I trace the formations of Buddhistic wisdom, which reshapes psychoaffective experience while guiding skillful action in everyday life. Reflecting its artist’s devotion to Mahayana Buddhism, Walker’s film language resists modernity’s fixation with speed, seeking to foster viewerly states traditionally shaped by Buddhist ritual practices. Despite slow cinema’s limited reach under regnant patterns of media consumption, a diachronic perspective reveals generative possibilities that bear fruit over time.
This paper focuses on Luis Buñuel’s 1969 film La voie lactée (The Milky Way), a curiously understudied masterpiece of modern religious cinema. The film follows two pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, but its real focus is Buñuel’s avant-garde cinematography and nonlinear storytelling, which reinvent the cinematic language of religious experience. Here, pilgrimage is presented not as a pious journey, but as a surreal expedition through time and history, set against the backdrop of modern France and moments like the Mai 68 protests, Jesus’ ministry, and Roman heresies. Buñuel’s long camera pans and striking architectural shots juxtapose the banality of the landscape with the film’s ever-shifting emotional and temporal landscapes. Infused with the techniques of Surrealism, La voie lactée creates a filmic world where faith, doubt, Catholicism, and heresy collide. Ultimately, Buñuel captures the deep ambiguity of belief, revealing Catholicism’s fragile place in 1960s France.
While it is tempting (and not always without merit) to criticize Christian films on their predictable, sometimes risible storylines, this misses the main appeal of the genre to the target audience. Similar to how grindhouse horror films appeal to nice audiences not for their plot but for their gore, Christian films appeal not based on narrative but based on affect. This essay will build on Linda William's framework of genre affect to conceptualize how Christian films create their own unique affects that appeal to their target audiences. Only with this understanding can scholars truly begin to combat the genre’s extremist rhetoric found in its more conservative entries.