"A Protestant Imagination in Film"
Hanna Rothmund, Freiburg
My PhD project assumes that cultural life in Scandinavia is influenced by Protestant ideas, and that such influence has continued in spite of secularization. I aim to explore this in film, examining whether there is a specific film aesthetics that can be traced back to a Scandinavian, Protestant imagination. To do so I will investigate selected films from a religious perspective. Paying particular attention to the more or less hid-den impact of Protestant ideas on such films' styles, I want to put their visual language – characterized by clarity, simplicity, slowness and intensity – in conversation with religious themes. In this context the ques-tion of how people perceive the world from a Protestant point of view and how this appears in film plays an important role.
To outline the elements of a Protestant film aesthetics, Lutheran teaching will serve as the starting point for my reflections on a Protestant imagination.
Besuch von der norwegischen Schriftstellerin Trude Teige