Page - 152 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/01

also investigates the fine line between violence and irony in the Western. This film represents variations on the motif of violence as a fundamental dimension of the human condition. Against the background of the conquest of the West, the human search for wealth and domination regulates everything; greed and hunger for power are represented in ironical ways, in landscapes where humans are more likely to be destitute than successful (fig. 5). The film re-enacts six short stories from an old book, and this premise confers a fictional and nostalgic character on the whole work that in fact represents a sharp and very realis- tic criticism of human society. Although there is an eternal struggle for violent domination and hierarchies of power, at the very end humanity is composed of equals: the film concludes with a carriage transporting a very diverse group of people beyond the door that leads to death. AND THE ROLE OF RELIGION? The cinema production of 2018 presented in Venice offers a rich cinematograph- ic encyclopaedia of many facets of violence in diverse narratives, styles and gen- res. Violence is scrutinised in various ways – as social criticism, in the form of detached descriptions, irony and satire or through alienation. Religion is not always directly linked to the motif of violence; it can appear in the background or foreground and be associated with isolated religious symbols, with aspects of the narrative or with stylistic features. When it plays a central role, religion appears as an identity marker more than a whole symbol system. In the por- traits of the scattered existence of protagonists in a violent scene, religion ap- pears in a fragmented way. It is not an obligatory cause of violence nor is it an antidote to it. If we consider all those films as a contemporary artistic discourse on violence and power relations, the link to religion can be reconstructed by considering the human condition in a world where humans are represented as the perpetrators and victims of violence. In this sense, the festival can be seen as a laboratory in which viewers can engage with representations of violence as an inevitable dimension of societal coexistence. The audience becomes a fun- damental part of this filmic experiment: it has to assume responsibility as an active interpreter of filmic fictions who seeks to cross the boundaries between invention, creativity and a sharp, critical audio-visual insight into the contempo- rary world. 152 | Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1