The Hidden God

Film and Faith

By Martin Scorsese, Michael Wood, Phillip Lopate, and more

2003

First Published

3.78

Average Rating

312

Number of Pages

9H32M

Audio Length

The subject of God has often been touched on in the movies. European directors like Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Luis Bunuel, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roberto Rossellini and many others have dealt directly with the theme throughout their careers, and Hollywood too has told stories based on the Bible, the lives of the saints and the martyrdoms of ordinary people. The Hidden God, which accompanies a film series of the same name organized by The Museum of Modern Art and screening in October and November of 2003, explores the ways in which a sense of God may appear in films, whether or not it is understood as such or is visible to the eye. This book contains over 50 essays by a wide range of writers, who find God encoded not only in explicitly religious subjects but in westerns, horror movies, comedies and many other genres, and in films from all over the world. In the times, places and societies these filmmakers explore, God may be lost, found, absent entirely or seen by only a few, whether saint or sinner.

Avg Rating

3.78

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

33%

4 STARS

22%

3 STARS

33%

2 STARS

11%

1 STARS

goodreads

Authors

Martin Scorsese

Author · 10 books

Martin Marcantonio Luciano Scorsese is an American Academy Award-winning film director, writer, and producer. Also affectionately known as "Marty", he is the founder of the World Cinema Foundation and a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema and has won awards from the Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Directors Guild of America. Scorsese is president of the Film Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation and the prevention of the decaying of motion picture film stock. Scorsese's body of work addresses such themes as Italian American identity, Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption, machismo, and the violence endemic in American society. Scorsese is widely considered to be one of the most significant and influential American filmmakers of his era.[3] He earned an MFA in film directing from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.

Michael Wood

Author · 8 books

Librarian Note: There's more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. Michael David Wood is an English historian & broadcaster. He's presented numerous tv documentary series. Library of Congress lists him as Michael Wood. Wood was born in Moston, Manchester, & educated at Manchester Grammar School & Oriel College, Oxford. His special interest was Anglo-Saxon history. In the 70s Wood worked for the BBC in Manchester. He was 1st a reporter, then an assistant producer on current affairs programmes, before returning to his love of history with his 1981 series In Search of the Dark Ages for BBC2. This explored the lives of leaders of the period, including Boadicea, King Arthur, Offa, Alfred the Great, Athelstan, Eric Bloodaxe & William the Conquerer (& gave rise to his 1st book, based upon the series).

Phillip Lopate

Author · 25 books

Phillip Lopate is the author of three personal essay collections, two novels, two poetry collections, a memoir of his teaching experiences, and a collection of his movie criticism. He has edited the following anthologies, and his essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, The Paris Review, Harper's, Vogue, Esquire, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, and New York University. He currently holds the John Cranford Adams Chair at Hofstra University, and also teaches in the MFA graduate programs at Columbia, the New School and Bennington.

Most famous for his 1962 essay "Notes on the Auteur theory" which popularized this film criticism technique in America. He wrote for the Village Voice criticing films and literature before bringing the Auteur theory from France to America and employing it in analysis of Hitchcock's film Psycho. He wrote for The New York Observer until 2009 and was a professor at his alma mater, Columbia University where he taught courses on Internationl Film, Hitchcock, and American Cinema. Trivia: The evil overlord from Galaxy Quest was named after him!