Page - 138 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/01

ers today are critical, maybe unjustly so, of the implications of the film regarding the situation of women and the role of religion in India then and now. While the author acknowledges a multifaceted reception that distinguishes between the film and what it says about “India then” and “India now” and affirms the possi- bility of different readings, there seems to be an implied “correct” reading that acknowledges that the representation is “authentic” (an expectation that the author had problematized in earlier chapters about ethnographic research) and has a critical relevance for the social context of India today. The author points out, rightly so, that both the filmmaker’s intent and audiences’ responses are tinted by ideological presuppositions; perhaps it would also have been fair to add that the scholar’s analysis, too, is not perfectly objective. In the concluding chapter, the author focuses on a religious analysis of the film, its treatment of the multireligious context of India (and Pakistan) with all its tensions, its references to different schools of Hinduism and its universal message about the relationship of “faith” (or institutionalized religion with spe- cific traditions, practices and regulations) and conscience, with the individual conscience as the place where the value of traditions will be decided. The volume concludes with three appendices (ethnographic films; Christ fig- ures; film analysis of narrative, image and sound) whose relevance for the pre- vious study is not entirely clear. The author’s combined ethnographic and theological approach does justice to film and religion as narratives of meaning- and world-making, and thus as cultural processes. The understanding of entering a film’s world as an activity of virtual participant observation (and the anthropological analysis of the data derived from this observation) and ethnographic methods in the analysis of re- ception provide particularly interesting contributions to the field of film and the- ology. Overall, however, the study only scratches the surface and would benefit from more in-depth reflections on issues like, in no particular order, the scholar’s own presuppositions and potential biases in the work of analysis; the presence of divergent views in the reception of the film; the post- and decolonial theoret- ical underpinnings of the project; the comparative theological project of the en- counter of Hinduism and Christianity in the theological analysis; and the broader potential of world cinema for theological analysis from a Christian perspective. Nevertheless, the volume provides interesting reading both for those interest- ed in the methodological and theoretical development of research in film and theology and for those interested more specifically in Mehta’s Elements trilogy. FILMOGRAPHY Water (Deepa Mehta, CA/IN 2005). 138 | Stefanie Knauss www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1