Religion and fillm

Religion and film: Part I: history and criticism

"Perlmutter (1997) reads Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Decalogue and sees a fusion of the Father-God and the Father Land. The loss of morality and personal freedom in Poland is marked by absent lawgivers, images of a recurring angel, and a need for more than the impersonal god of the commandments. Looking at the cinematic art of Kieslowski, Kickasola (2004) brilliantly charts the liminal spaces of his films (Red), "demarcating the apparent thresholds of metaphysical and physical, transcendent and immanent, eternal and temporal" (p. 4). For Kickasola, this is the "same liminal ground that philosopher and critic George Steiner describes when he states that the arts are 'rooted in substance ... immanence,' but 'do not stop there'" (p. 5). We may begin with the human, but the presence of the "Other" demands we investigate. Kickasola finds that for this Polish director, metaphysics matters."