A Poetic History: Islamic and Japanese Parallels in Film

(Hardback)

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This book uses the medium of film to explore poetic history as a subtle form of psychology expressed within Islamic and Japanese civilizations. It develops this poetic history as a nuanced alternative logic for understanding, and, more importantly, metabolizing the past through juxtaposed images, rather than linear cause-and-effect narrative.

History can be hegemonic, or it can be poetic. We are conditioned to accept a linear view of history, despite its repression of real but unrepresented experience. Thus, many lives, souls and stories remain latent and uncelebrated in contemporary societies. This book explores films capacity to be a medium, like dreams, and like poetic and spiritual lineages, for a lively and empathetic vision of the past. Because of its capacities to dip beneath the surface of the actual, or in Deleuzian terms to leave the bounds of the frame, film provides us with unplanned access to wellsprings of the psyche in its relationship to the whole.

The book guides the reader through a tapestry of film experiences from within the Islamic and Japanese cultural and religious worlds. We explore films that are connected beneath the surface and share poetic, psychological and religious depths. As the book unfolds, we can see film after film weaving for us accumulated realities of collective psychology: child abandonment, ecological destruction, apocalyptic warfare, and generational trauma. An archetypal image of the human wanderer appears again and again within both poetry and film, an image that helps chart dangers of the collective journey as well as un-looked for potentials for love, healing, and renewal.

Reviews

David Sander has shown the remarkable ability to analyze both Japanese and Muslim cinema, and to discover hidden connections in the ways they present visions of healing and compassion amidst suffering and loss. Like poetry, films create an alternative to the violence of history through offering images of hope and promise, defying selfishness and death by revealing the potential for new life and meaning. * John C. Lyden, Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, University of Nebraska Omaha, USA, and Editor of the Journal of Religion & Film, and Author of Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals (2003) *

Author Bio

David Sander is Associate Professor of History at Stonehill College, USA.