Documentary Filming of Cultural Interaction

Description

A workshop organised by the Andrew W Mellon funded project Religious Diversity and the Secular University.

Abstract:

In this workshop our CRASSH-Mellon project Religious Diversity and the Secular University will approach our broader set of questions by looking at the work of documentary film-makers. In so doing we add two key elements to our explorations: the changing impact of the medium of the visual, on the one hand; and the role of documentary analysis, on the other. The medium of the visual brings a special claim on the real, and hence has played a special role in the politics of self-representation in and against the other. So too, on the other hand, has the claim to truth embodied in the form of the documentary.

The films (and film-work in progress) we will discuss range from the trans-generational memory of Egyptian-Jewish culture and identity in contemporary Israel to the last three elderly nuns in a large but now nearly empty Flemish monastery, and from Jewish, Islamic and Christian traditions of pilgrimage in North Africa to the ghostly presence of a pre-war religiously diverse Poland, to the ‘secular Scripture of America’ that is the poetry of Walt Whitman.

What does the camera see, what can it capture, that academic writing cannot? How do documentaries inform and regulate the practices and comprehension of religious diversity? What questions can the camera ask, and how can it pose them, about varieties of religious diversity and secularism in the modern world? Is documentary film, even about explicitly religious phenomena, necessarily a secularising genre?

Attendance is free, but space is limited and registration is required, and participants are asked to commit to attending both days.

To register, please write to Samantha Peel.
For further questions, please write to Theodor Dunkelgrün.

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