Catholics in the Movies

by McDannell, Colleen

• ISBN13: 9780195306569
• ISBN10: 0195306562
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-24
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Catholicism was all over movie screens in 2004. Mel Gibsons The Passion of the Christ was at the center of a media firestorm for months. A priest was a crucial character in the Academy Award-winning Million Dollar Baby. Everyone, it seemed, was talking about how religious stories should be represented, marketed, and received. Catholic characters, spaces, and rituals have been stock features in popular films since the silent era. An intensely visual religion with a well-defined ritual and authority system, Catholicism lends itself to the drama and pageantry of film. Moviegoers watch as Catholic visionaries interact with the supernatural, priests counsel their flocks, reformers fight for social justice, and bishops wield authoritarian power. Rather than being marginal to American popular culture, Catholic people, places, and rituals are all central to the world of the movie. Catholics in the Movies begins with an introductory essay that orients readers to the ways that films appear in culture and describes the broad trends that can be seen in the movies hundred-year history of representing Catholics. Each chapter is written by a noted scholar of American religion who concentrates on one movie that engages important historical, artistic, and religious issues and then places the film within American cultural and social history, discusses the film as an expression of Catholic concerns of the period, and relates the film to others of its genre. Tracing the story of American Catholic history through popular films, Catholics in the Movies should be a valuable resource for anyone interested in American Catholicism and religion and film.

Author Biography

Colleen McDannell is Sterling M. McMurrin Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of History at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. She is the author of Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America and Heaven: A History.

Table of Contents

Why the Movies? Why Religion?	p. 3
The Silent Social Problem Film: Regeneration (1915)	p. 33
Boys to Men: Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)	p. 59
Jews and Catholics Converge: The Song of Bernadette (1943)	p. 83
America's Favorite Priest: Going My Way (1944)	p. 107
God and Guns: Seven Cities of Gold (1955)	p. 127
Life on the Frontier: Lilies of the Field (1963)	p. 149
Praying for Stones Like This: The Godfather Trilogy (1972, 1974, 1990)	p. 177
Catholic Horror: The Exorcist (1973)	p. 197
Cops, Priests, and the Decline of Irish America: True Confessions (1981)	p. 227
Worldly Madonna: Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story (1996)	p. 251
Border Saints: Santitos (1999)	p. 277
Catholicism Wow!: Dogma (1999)	p. 297
Votive Offering: The Passion of the Christ (2004)	p. 317
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