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This book offers a new methodology for examining the ethico-political dimensions of religion and film which foregrounds film´s social power both to shape subjectivity and to image contemporary social contradictions and analyses three specific films: Kurosawa´s Dersu Uzala ; Kiarostami´s Taste of Cherry ; and the Coens´ The Man Who Wasn´t There .

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Introduction: Interpreting Religion and Film PART I: FILM STUDY Akira Kurosawa: ´What is a Thing?´: Posing the Religious in Dersu Uzala (1975) Kiarostami: The Face of Modernity Alienation and Transcendence in Taste of Cherry (1997) Joel and Ethan Coen: Searching for a Way Out Alienation and Intimacy in The Man Who Wasn´t There (2001) PART II: THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS Religious Realism

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GAIL HAMNER Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University, USA.

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