International Symposium on Film and Secularism

A quick canvas of academic research on film and religion will reveal that there is a copious amount of work on this topic and field, albeit mostly (but not exclusively) by scholars working in religious studies. Surprisingly, if one were to search for work on the complementary, and perhaps what we’d expect is the more naturally suited topic, cinema and secularism, one would find among all types of film scholars almost no research. Drawing on the recent emergence of critical secular studies, this symposium, like the volume out of which it grew, faces this void and reflects broadly on the relationship between cinema and secularism. Why do academic scholars not attend to secularism? How do uncritical and unreflective secularist assumptions shape film theory and its treatment of religiosity and its nontreatment of secularism? How does critical reflection on secularism help us to rethink longstanding themes in the study of film, such as wonder, the magic of the movies, the dream factory, the miracle of cinema, fetishism? What would become available to thought if we re-saw certain dimensions of cinema and/or its analysis as secular or secularist, or alternately as religious? Would we discern cinema as a secular medium, or would we have to give that up? Is there a secular aesthetic? This symposium will reflect on these and other issues.

Programme

9:30–10:15 Mark Cauchi (York University), Screening the Secular: The Occlusion of Secularism in the Study of Film
10:15–11:00 Catherine Wheatley (King’s College London), A secular wonder?
11:00–11:15 Break
11:15–12:00 John Caruana (Toronto Metropolitan University), Gilles Deleuze and the Secularist Foundations of Cinema: An Unlikely Critic
12:00–12:45 Joseph G. Kickasola (Baylor University), Sensual Convictions: Embodied Cinematic Meaning, Secularized Film Theory, and the Endurance of Theological Aesthetics
12:45–13:00 Final Q&A. Discussants: Susana Viegas, Patrícia Castello Branco, Paolo Stellino

Event supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e para a Tecnologia) of the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science under the project UIDP/00183/2020.