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Perspectives pour penser le rapport entre religieux et cinéma

Jonathan Quesnel

La dimension spirituelle des films de Terrence Malick : une herméneutique de l’expérience humaine

Jacques Quintin
Terrence Malick’s films invite us to question the status of images that can introduce an experience of beauty, love, grace, and light, whose particular features bring human beings into dialogue with the transcendence of a Presence. The mysterium of this Presence calls forth wonder that raises a plethora of existential questions. The issue is whether the authenticity of a spiritual experience is not characterized more by questions than answers and whether it is not the experience of beauty and art that will save spirituality.

À la recherche d’un spiritualisme cinématographique

Anne-Marie Baron
This paper provides examples of filmic interpretations to incite film critics to highlight cinematographic spiritualism, as theorized by Paul Schrader. After defining his “transcendental style”, the paper illustrates mythocritic in action, and presents the means to enable a stylistic analysis.

Les Diables de Ken Russell à l’aune de Michel de Certeau : protester par les corps

David El Kenz
Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) is at once an infamous film, a founding film of “nunsploitation” and, today, a cult film. Loosely adapted from Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun (1952), the film recounts a demonic affair in Loudun in 1634 that caused a scandal at the time. a local priest was executed for having bewitch the prioress of the Ursuline convent. Ken Russell turned the event into a political trial to denounce the abuse of power. This study draws on the work of historian Michel de Certeau, author of a monograph on the Loudun affair, to examine the film’s religious motifs: bouts of demonic possession versus exorcisms, politico-religious manipulations and the priest, Grandier’s martyrdom. Far from being an anti-religious film, Russell exploits the most spectacular resources of his art to promote redemption through love, a sign of individual freedom when confronted with the prerogatives of the State.

La foi qui vacille dans Le septième sceau (Bergman), Andreï Roublev (Tarkovski) et Sous le soleil de Satan (Pialat)

Manon Gibot
In this article, we reflect on how cinema conveys the harshness of the internal struggle between faith and worldly experience. Based on our analysis of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Andreï Tarkovsky’s Andreï Rublev, and Maurice Pialat’s Under the Sun of Satan – three films considered as sources in their own right –, we argue that cinema offers new insights into the theological theme of inner struggle. By embodying spiritual life and making this struggle perceptible, cinematic language goes beyond the mere representation or inventory of those tensions : on the contrary, it questions their reality.

Les visages du Christ sur grand écran : ethnographie d’une retraite spirituelle cinéma

Nolwenn Briand-Delache
This article provides a review and an analysis of an ethnographic study undertaken during a Catholic cinema spiritual retreat. The aim was to compare two specific moments of film reception involving the theme of “Christ’s face”. This ethnography can assess the influence of those cinematographic works on the spirituality of the retreaters and their impact on the elaboration of a collective religious identity. It includes a methodological reflection on the conditions of carrying out a survey, at the crossroads of religious anthropology and film studies.

Du père céleste aux pères terrestres : réflexions sur la paternité dans le cinéma évangélique des frères Kendrick

Yann Vincent Fanti
This article explores the cinema of the Kendrick brothers, evangelical pastors turned filmmakers. It analyses the fatherhood discourse they incorporate in their filmography. By mobilizing the concept of hegemonic masculinity, this study aims to elucidate the gender theory underlying the Kendrick brothers’ films and to demonstrate how this theory ultimately aligns with the continuity of their pastoral practice. Indeed, this article seeks to show that the role of the Kendrick brothers’ evangelical cinema is rooted in a deliberate intention to use the image as a tool for theological transmission.

Une narration intime de l’expérience du salut dans The Tree of Life : analyse du film de Terrence Malick à partir de la sotériologie tillichienne

Nathalie Plaat-Goasdoué
The entire body of work of theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich is permeated by a desire to shape the expression of the Christian mystery in ontological terms (Sesboüé, 1981). Tillichian soteriology focuses on man’s existential conditions as a form of alienation from its essentially good nature. Man would experience the passage from essence to existence in a symbolic manner where, contiguously or successively, he would be inhabited by the phases of dreamy innocence (the Garden of Eden), the fall (sin), and then the possibility of salvation (reversal), in which he would have to « accept to be accepted despite the fact that he feels unacceptable » (Tillich, 1949 : 267). The Tree of Life, by director Terrence Malick, lets us accompany members of a family, which is faced with the loss of one of their sons, each member going through phases that we will analyze based on Tillichian soteriology (dreamlike innocence, sin, fall, and salvation).

La religion et la négation d'autrui : de l'exclusion métaphysique

David De Meyer
Within their corpus, religions develop a differentiation principle between those inside and outside their system of reference. From this principle, a fundamental value, of a metaphysical nature, is promoted as the true and the universal essence, thus considering all other values as false. In fact, this principle ends up negating the ontology of the other. While the encounter of distinct traditions can generate syncretism, the aim of this article is to study the opposite process – that of hermeticity –, and to propose an interdisciplinary study of contempt that certain religious discourses can foster and maintain. The analysis of this two-stage process of negation of the other, first, by acceptance and, then by rejection, questions, from a “religiological” angle, the link between the view of the universal, mental representations, and otherness, as well as the (im)possibilities of ecumenism and of coexistence.

La démonologie de Dom Augustin Calmet (1672–1757) : continuité et rupture avec la tradition

Patrick Snyder
The first volume of Dom Augustin Calmet’s Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Ghosts of Hungary, Moravia, etc. (1751) focuses on demonology. In this treatise, he expands on several elements of demonology published in his biblical analyses and dissertations. This article presents the most important themes: the power of evil angels, exorcism, the witches’ sabbath, and God’s permission. On each of these themes, we compare how Dom Calmet relates to his main demonological sources. This scholar of the great demonological treatises defends the existence of the Devil, while refuting several beliefs presented in these treatises. We argue that, in this XVIII century caracterised by the loss of the hegemony of demonologists, Dom Calmet seeks a reasonable path between demonological tradition, popular credulity, and the new criticism of the Enlightenment.

Cécile VANDERPELEN-DIAGRE. 2023. Des voix dans le siècle. Culture et engagement catholique en Belgique francophone depuis 1945

Catherine Foisy