Page - 165 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

The 31 chapters are written from different disciplinary and methodological per- spectives; they vary widely in style and film selection. For instance, readers will find an analysis of a blockbuster like The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, US 2004) alongside a study of the experimental arthouse Passion film Su re (Giovanni Colum- bu, IT 2013), filmed in a Sardinian dialect. The openness to the multiplicity of approaches to both the Bible and biblical stud- ies as well as to films drawing on biblical symbols, narratives and concepts makes it challenging to summarise the richness of this volume in a few sentences. The broad range of approaches and topics makes it impossible to include them within a con- sistent theoretical paradigm. The editor, Richard Walsh, resists the idea of a general theory. In his introduction, he interprets the manifold thinking about religion and film as an expression of dynamism and explicitly addresses developments in this broad research field in the last decades. Particularly, he highlights the undeniable and enriching contributions that the study of the Bible and film has made on the one hand to reception history and on the other to awareness of the relevance of semiotics and cultural studies approaches. Walsh then discusses two main questions. The first relates to how to define a film as “biblical”. He does not try to funnel diversity into a rigid concept of “bibli- cal”, seeing the definition as a matter of negotiation between film production and interpretation. The reference to the Bible might be explicit, located for example in quotations of narratives, characters or topics, or it might be assumed as a working hypothesis in the hermeneutical procedure. This second approach, even if it seems more fragile in term of argumentation, is likely to produce “new insights, previous- ly hidden by theological/biblical/political certainties” (4). According to the editor, the relationship between film and Bible must be understood as reciprocal. Both the biblical tradition and film (not just the “biblical film”) can illuminate relevant dimen- sions of religious interpretation: the Bible and film are understood as hermeneutical frames rather than defined in any essential way. To cope with the complexity of approaches, categories like Bible on film (when an epic narrative is represented in film), Bible in film (when a film includes allusions to biblical symbolism) and film on Bible (when a film is used to understand biblical aspects, narratives or concepts) are discussed. The second question is why Bible and film? Walsh recapitulates the interconnec- tions of the history of Bible reception and the history of audio-visual media. At the beginning, the Bible provided legitimation for the new technology of moving imag- es in the form of well-known stories audiences could easily recognise. Today many biblical narratives (the Passion is no exception!) still offer possibilities for expansion because they are not consistent or hold curiosities and puzzling constellations that film art can explore. The Bible has a peculiar power, derived from normative read- 164 | Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 163–165