2019 | 2

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Festival Review. 72nd Festival de Cannes
Mayward, Joel (2019) , S. 204-213
Narrative and Experiment, Religion and Politics in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life
Powell, Russel C. (2019) , S. 167-185
While most interpretations of Terrence Malick's 2011 The Tree of Life concentrate on the film's theological resonances, I focus here on The Tree of Life's political vision. I locate this vision in the fraught relationship between two influential strands of American religio-political thought, Augustinianism and Emersonianism. The Tree of Life's theological concerns are undoubtedly Augustinian, yet it takes up a similar radical politics as what Emerson did in his best-known essays. The result, I argue, is a cinema of religio-political possibility with important implications for a potential rapproachment between religionists (namely evangelical Christians) and secularists, particularly on the topic of environmental conservation and sustainability.
On (Dang) Quesadillas and Nachos: Mexican Identity and a Mormon Imaginary in the Films of Jared Hess
Dalton, David S. (2019) , S. 141-165
Across his cinema, the US, Mormon director Jared Hess has represented the Mexican Other in ambiguous ways that affirm the humanity of the US’s southern neighbors while at the same time signaling them as irreconcilably different from—and perhaps simpler than—their North American counterparts. This holds especially true in Napoleon Dynamite (2004) and Nacho Libre (United States 2006), his two most commercially successful films. The Mexican protagonists of both movies win the audience’s affection in part by playing to stereotypes that rigidly separate them from US culture at large. Mexico’s oversized role in Hess’s aesthetic is obvious even to the casual viewer; however, few critics have attempted to reconcile the director’s combination of paternalism and solidarity with people from south of the US border. In this article, I argue that Hess’s ambiguous representation of Mexican peoples and cultures reflects a type of “benevolent racism” that is common within white, North American Mormon communities who paradoxically view people of Mexican descent both as Others and as the physical and spiritual heirs of the peoples of the Book of Mormon.
Reading Bond Films through the Lens of “Religion”: Discourse of “the West and the Rest”
Taira, Teemu (2019) , S. 119-139
Religion has been absent from the study of James Bond films. Similarly, James Bond has been absent from studies on religion and popular culture. This article aims to fill the gap by examining 25 Bond films through the lens of “religion”. The analysis suggests that there are a number of references to “religion” in Bond films, although religion is typically not the main topic of the films. Furthermore, there is a detectable pattern in the films: religion belongs primarily to what is regarded as not belonging to “the West” and “the West” is considered modern, developed and rational as opposed to the backward, exotic and religious “Rest”. When religion appears in “the West”, it is seen positively if it is related to Christianity and confined to the private sphere and to the rites of passage. In this sense, representations of religion in Bond films contribute to what Stuart Hall named the discourse of “the West and the Rest”, thus playing a role in the maintenance of the idea of “the West”. This will be demonstrated by focusing on four thematic examples from the films. This article also provides grounds for suggesting that reading Bond films through the lens of “religion” contributes to both Bond studies and studies on religion and popular culture.

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