Absence and Desire: Kierkegaardian Silence in Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland
By Culture Issue 118
We watch as the cross is carried out of sight. The land is speaking here. It says: Be patient. You do not need this. You cannot tame me with this cross. You cannot replace me. Be still. Listen.
Read MoreI Trust My Soul to Grace: Paul Schrader’s Religious Imagination
By Culture Issue 113
Like a person caught in quicksand, the Schrader male antihero struggles toward salvation only to be driven deeper into the thing that’s swallowing him whole.
Read MorePortraiture and Personhood: Hubbard and Birchler’s Flora
By Visual Art Issue 111
The soundtrack alternates between David speaking about his mother’s life and his memories of her, and a voiceover narration in which Flora recalls her life in Paris. However, a viewer can only watch one side of the screen at a time—either Flora’s or David’s.
Read MoreThe Uncontained Life
By Culture Issue 110
It’s as though the movie represents an alternate life for any of us. Take away a job. Take away a spouse. Take away an able body. Take away good mental health. How many of us could maintain our current lifestyles for long before we’d feel the crunch, the walls closing in?
Read MoreUntranslatable Mother: Tarkovsky, Zurlini, and the Madonna del Parto
By Culture Issue 108
Later on, in high school, I would see those same artworks in my books and listen to my professor explaining their importance. Probably because they were within a five-minute walk and I knew them by heart, I didn’t have any real interest in them, nor in any of what Pasolini would call “my intimate, profound, archaic Catholicism.” I was interested in Hegel.
Read MoreWitness/Time
By Essay Issue 103
Sometimes, to comfort myself, I think of myself as a city, not a woman, but a city that can be rebuilt again.
Read MoreA Conversation with Ron Austin
By Interview Issue 93
In the conversation around faith and film, Ron Austin is an elder statesman. He has worked a lifetime in the entertainment industry, and his essays and books, including In a New Light: Spirituality and Media Arts, have influenced generations of filmmakers (much of his writing is also on his website). His seminal essay “The Spiritual…
Read MoreAdaptation
By Essay Issue 93
I’M AT A LAKE IN WEST VANCOUVER, British Columbia. At least I think it’s a lake. It could be a sound, or an inlet, or a bay. In any case, it’s a body of water, and with the evergreens and sizable rocks lining the shore and covering the smaller land masses across from us, against…
Read MoreThe Spiritual Frontiers of Film
By Essay Issue 93
An Introduction by Guest Editor Scott Teems The first issue of Image I read was Issue 31, in the summer of 2001; it was the first in a subscription gifted me by the Act One screenwriting program in Los Angeles, which I had just completed. Initially, I was intimidated by the journal’s focus on fine…
Read MoreLove Letters
By Essay Issue 93
Then it enters the upstairs room, to rest beside my grandmother, a Korean War widow who sold her home and bid farewell to clan and country, arriving in Arkansas to raise two children while their parents worked, who surrendered her strength in the last days of 1988 to a second stroke, but not before teaching me how to read a love letter.
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