Page - 137 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/01

of methods that allow analysis of the work itself, its context of production and its reception, focusing on how culture, and especially the religious dimension of a culture, are represented and understood. This includes virtual participant observation, in which the viewer enters the world of the film to participate in its culture, combined with auteur criticism, which helps uncover the meaning of the film intended by the filmmaker and understand choices and biases in the filmic representations, and context criticism, the author’s term for analysis of the reception of the film studied through focus groups and expert interviews. The particular field of application of this methodology is world cinema as a space for intercultural and interreligious encounter when viewers enter into another culture through the story told and performed in a film. Chapter four offers a brief introduction to world cinema as the cinema(s) of all cultural con- texts, which, while valuable and necessary, is too brief and lacks analytical and theoretical depth. The description of Bollywood as a production context and a genre offers some interesting insights in view of the case study of the Elements trilogy, but a problematization of the term as well as a critical analysis of its potential are necessary. The second half of the volume, chapters five to eight, is dedicated to analysis of the Elements trilogy, and specifically the film Water. The author applies the methodology developed in the first part, starting with detailed analysis of the conditions of production and authorial intentions as derived from an interview with Mehta. Here, a discussion of the “diasporic gaze” of Mehta as an Indian woman living in Canada is especially interesting as this situation combines both emic and etic perspectives in a complex relationship which often leads to a con- troversial reception in the country whose culture is represented. In fact, Mehta’s work has been criticized in India for exoticizing and denigrating Indian culture and, especially, victimizing Indian women. Feminist and decolonial criticisms of Mehta’s films discussed by the author provide a glimpse of the multiple layers that the country’s colonial past and continued relationships with former colonial powers as well as neo-colonial dynamics have created. A more detailed theoret- ical reflection, taking into account post- or decolonial theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (whose thoughts on suttee, the sacrificial burning of a wid- ow alongside her husband’s body, would have been especially important for the analysis of Water), would have provided more depth to the author’s account. In chapter six, the author combines an analysis of the film’s representation of the stigmatization and deprivation of widows in 1930s colonial India based on ethnographic studies with the outcomes of focus groups and interviews about the reception of the film in 21st century India. The combination of two different methodological steps is not helpful because it leads to the underlying implica- tion that while Mehta represents the cultural situation adequately (or maybe even authentically), given the ethnographic studies the author consults, view- Book Review: Film as a Cultural Artifact | 137www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1