Librería Samer Atenea
Librería Aciertas (Toledo)
Kálamo Books
Librería Perelló (Valencia)
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Donde los libros
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
This book is an ambitious attempt to produce an interdisciplinaryreading of a set of relatively recent Hollywood films that appear tomake references to the biblical genre of apocalyptic andassociated ideas of Christian martyrdom and eschatology: End ofDays, Armageddon, Alien3, The Rapture, The Seventh Sign.It is a ’preposterous’ reading (Mieke Bal’s term), reversing acommon-sense impulse to view what comes first chronologically(the biblical text) as an unproblematic template rather than as itselfthe consequence of subsequent, contextualized readings. Thecinematic reworkings Copier describes shift our understanding ofboth texts (biblical and cinematic) and genre. Within this process,the apocalyptic subject-the martyr-adopts variable poses thatreflect the effects of this disorienting reversal: across the five filmsanalysed, the martyr moves from identifiably Christianmotivations to the representation of patriotic Americanmasculinity, or even to something that, in a contrary sense,powerfully challenges the conventional masculinity of anymartyrdom that counts as significant.To achieve a genuine interdisciplinarity, Copier not only avoidsreading each film as if it were simply the visual counterpart to a(biblical) narrative, but also analyses in the case of each filmwhat the ’shot list’ of a key sequence reveals about the semioticsat work within its construction. Unlike most encounters betweenreligion and film, her film analysis goes far beyond theidentification of themes and motifs. Here the author engageswith the larger field of film studies, and especially with film asa visual medium.
