I am hoping to write my dissertation on cinematic skepticism—i.e. the various ways that film (and related media) have presented challenges to religious orthodoxy. The works of Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, Monty Python, and Martin Scorsese are of particular interest to me in this regard.

I began by doing a Google search of “premediation grusin religion,” but I found the results to be rather limited. (I was often linked to the issue of Criticism in which the “Premediation” article appeared, since that journal issue also featured an article by Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti called “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies.”) Most of the results had, at best, a very tenuous relationship to my academic interests. I tried similar searches (“premediation grusin blasphemy,” “premediation grusin heresy,” etc.), but these did not yield any results.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=premediation+grusin+religion&start=0&sa=N

Searches using the term “remediation” proved to be a bit more fruitful. For example, there were over a thousand hits for “remediation grusin religion” and about 100 for “remediation grusin blasphemy.” By far, the article I found most germane to my interests was a piece by Birgit Meyer from a 2005 issue of Postscripts entitled “Religious Remediations: Pentecostal Views in Ghanian Video-Movies.”

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=remediation+grusin+religion&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=remediation+grusin+blasphemy&btnG=Search
http://www.equinoxjournals.com/ojs/index.php/post/article/view/673/338

Meyer explores fundamentalist cinema in Ghana and the way it remediates Biblical stories, particularly stories of evil spirits, demonic possessions, and so on. She sees these films as embracing a kind of “techno-religious realism,” one which undermines simplistic dichotomies that see “technology and belief” as diametrically opposed. In Ghana, technology is often used to reinforce local beliefs in ghosts, demons, and other supernatural forces.

While Meyer’s analysis of the way Bible stories are remediated in cinematic form is adroit and engaging, she does not point out that these are actually remediations of remediations. In other words, it is often forgotten that Biblical texts themselves are not “original” mediations (which may be a meaningless term), but are actually the remediated form of more ancient oral traditions, legends, etc. In fact, a McLuhanesque consideration of how a remediated religious text conveys a different (and more authoritative and definitive) message from its oral counterpart would be an interesting line of inquiry.

One example of the powerful role that remediation can play involves accounts of demonic visitations. Many fundamentalist Christian groups, for example, exchange stories of supposed encounters with evil spirits. And yet, many of these same groups warn against seeing films (like The Exorcist) which tell very similar stories. Such films are denounced as demonic in and of themselves. Clearly, “the medium is the message” here—something about a direct cinematic portrayal of a demonic encounter (as opposed to an oral tradition) causes it to seem more nefarious, a strange distinction that would be worth exploring.

A problem that I had with this search (and it’s a problem that I have in general when trying to do research on heresy in film) is that a great deal of academic ink seems to be spilled on theorizing film either as as a supplement to religious experience or as a form of religious experience. Finding research on film’s power to undermine religious belief is often a challenging task.