The New Filmgoer's Guide to God

This intriguing guide to religion and film from Tim Cawkwell is a new and improved edition of The Filmgoer’s Guide to God, originally published in 2004. With substantial and significant revisions, including the addition of images and plenty of new material on more recent films, this book will both educate and illuminate readers and cinema-goers.

Author Tim Cawkwell was inspired in many ways before writing this book. “The catalyst was the millennium exhibition at the National Gallery in 2000, ‘Seeing Salvation’, which explored the relationship between painting and Christianity over two millennia which prompted me to think that something similar could be done about Christianity and film in the 20th century,” he explains. Following a lifelong interest in the work of the Catholic director Robert Bresson, the introduction of VHS tapes and DVDs which allowed him to see a film more than once, and finally a strong interest in theology and philosophy, Tim was drawn into trying to understand the range of cultural and religious expressions available in the history of cinema.

The aim of this book is both to explore the way religious narrative has produced a number of masterpieces from major film-makers, while also reflecting on the way that the core ideas of Christianity such as salvation, atonement, martyrdom and redemption continue to surface in films. Tim also explores the way that a cultural shift towards doubt about the value of religion and even hostility towards Christianity itself has revealed itself in films.

Tim describes the way the different denominational contexts of Christianity such as Catholicism, Lutheranism and Orthodoxy differentiate films coming out of those contexts and considerably enrich the whole picture. The book pays particular attention to the way films are conceived and created with a view to illuminating their virtues as a visual medium. Written in a sinewy, non-academic style it commends itself to anyone interested in the history of the cinema and in cultural changes since the Second World War.