Description: "In this volume, Crystal Downing explores how to approach film from an explicitly Christian perspective as informed by the work of Dorothy L. Sayers. Downing draws on Sayers's writing on the relationship between creativity and Christianity to call for a discerning Christian engagement with film. She also points to Sayers's own (often overlooked, even by some of her best biographers) interactions with cinema. This wide-ranging study combines theological engagement with film and a historical analysis of the development of film, along with the story of Sayers's own life and work. Sayers was passionate about artistic integrity and expressing truth in good art, and her insights can inform how Christians today appreciate works both old and new. Downing challenges Christian authors who, showing little to no interest in film history, art, and theory, have written books reducing film to a content-delivery system"--
Brief description:
Crystal L. Downing (PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara), an award-winning author, has published five books, including Subversive: Christ, Culture, and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers, which received a Publishers Weekly starred review, and Salvation from Cinema: The Medium Is the Message.
Review Quotes:
"If, as Dorothy Sayers quipped, the 'only Christian work is good work, well done, ' then Crystal Downing has scripted a magnificent Christian work on a fascinating and wonderfully unruly Christian saint whose thoughts on art, beauty, goodness, and cinema reshape the ways in which we might watch films. Downing is no 'hoity-toity film buff' but a creative mind that remakes the experience of filmgoing a religious renaissance of a mystery play."
Terry Lindvall, C. S. Lewis Endowed Chair of Communication and Christian Thought at Virginia Wesleyan University and author of God on the Big Screen and Animated Parables