The Disappearing Christ : : Secularism in the Silent Era / / Phil Maciak.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2019
• VerfasserIn: Maciak, Phil,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource :; 37 b&w illustrations
• Other title: Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; Introduction. The Disappearing Christ and Other Stories --; The Historical Jesus in Broad Daylight --; Unseen Somethings: American Studies and Postsecular Critique --; Things Normally Unseen: Film Studies and Postsecular Critique --; Outline of the Book --; 1. A Rare and Wonderful Sight: Ben-Hur's Historicism --; 2. Looking Sideways: Media Theories of Jesus Christ --; 3. Tricks and Actualities: The Passion Play Film and the Cinema of Attractions --; 4. The Double Life of Superimposition: W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Christ Cycle --; Coda. Resurrectionists: Toward a Post-Cinematic Postsecular --; The Resurrection is in Technicolor: Cecil B. DeMille --; The Resurrection is CGI: Mel Gibson --; Post-Cinematic/Postsecular --; The Resurrection is Straight to Video: Abbas Kiarostami --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index
• Format: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9780231547000; 9783110651959; 9783110737769; 9783110605785; 9783110610017; 9783110610765; 9783110664232
• DOI: 10.7312/maci18708
• Access: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Phil Maciak.

At the turn of the twentieth century, American popular culture was booming with opportunities to see Jesus Christ. From the modernized eyewitness gospel of Ben-Hur to the widely circulated passion play films of Edison, Lumière, and Pathé; from D. W. Griffith's conjuration of a spectral white savior in Birth of a Nation to W. E. B. Du Bois's "Black Christ" story cycle, Jesus was constantly and inventively visualized across media, and especially in the new medium of film. Why, in an era traditionally defined by the triumph of secular ideologies and institutions, were so many artists rushing to film Christ's miracles and use his story and image to contextualize their experiences of modernity?In The Disappearing Christ, Phillip Maciak examines filmic depictions of Jesus to argue that cinema developed as a model technology of secularism, training viewers for belief in a secular age. Negotiating between the magic trick and the documentary image, the conflicting impulses of faith and skepticism, the emerging aesthetic of film in this period visualized the fraught process of secularization. Cinematic depictions of an appearing and disappearing Christ became a powerful vehicle for Americans to navigate a rapidly modernizing society. Studying these films alongside a multimedia, interdisciplinary archive of novels, photographs, illustrations, and works of theology, travel writing, and historiography, The Disappearing Christ offers a new narrative of American cultural history at the intersection of cinema studies and religious studies.