Dudley Andrew is professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University where he also co-chairs the Film Studies Program. His books Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film and Film in the Aura of Art, together with his lifetime engagement with the works of Andre Bazin have led him to a current fascination with recent French cinema and its philosophic and religious implications.

Nathaniel Dorsky has been making films for more than thirty-five years. His short films Ayala, Triste, Variations, and Arbor Vitae have been shown at the New York Film Festival in recent years. This April the Museum of Modern Art will present a retrospective of his work. He is also the famous "editing doctor" of San Francisco; he has edited Night Watz: the Music of Paul Bowles, Tashi John: A Tibetan Community in Exile, What Happened to Kerouac, and many other films. For more on Dorsky, click here.

William R. LaFleur is Professor of Japanese Studies and the Joseph B. Glossberg Term Professor of Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches two courses on film. Among his books are The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan, a study of ritual practices relating to abortion in Japan entitled Liquid Life, and Buddhism: A Cultural Perspective. His talk on Sunday morning will pertain to Buddhism in film, and will discuss Hirokazu Koreeda's film, Maborosi, which will be screened on Saturday evening.

Christine Marran teaches Japanese literature and film in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Her recent writing on director Oshima Nagisa can be found in the journals Asian Cinema and Persimmon: Asian Literature, Arts and Culture.

Tony Pipolo teaches in the Film Certificate program at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, is co-editor of Millennium Film Journal, and is completing a book on the films of Robert Bresson. His talk will concentrate on a number of Hollywood filmmakers (e.g., Frank Borzage, Douglas Sirk) from the silent period through the 1950s who developed--through the artful manipulation of lighting, music, camerawork, and acting--what can be called a `spiritual' style, even in films with no overt religious subject matter.

Sally Shafto is a Resarch Associate at Princeton University. She recently completed an interdisciplinary dissertation on the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. Author of the booklet, "The Zanzibar Films and the Dandies of May 1968," she is also the curator of a retrospective of the Zanzibar Films. Her research on the Zanzibar films overlaps with the talk she will present at the Religion and Cinema Conference at Princeton.

P. Adams Sitney is Professor of Visual Arts at Princeton University. He is the author of Visionary Film: the American Avant-Garde, Modernist Montage, and Vital Crises in Italian Cinema. He contributed the article on Cinema to The Encyclopedia of Religion.

Jeffrey Stout is Professor of Religion at Princeton. He is the author of The Flight from Authority and Ethics after Babel (the second edition of which was recently released by Princeton University Press). With P. Adams Sitney, he is the co-director of the "Religion and Cinema" project, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion. His next book is tentatively entitled, "The Ethical Life of Democracy."

Judith Weisenfeld is Associate Professor of Religion at Vassar, where she teaches a course on Religion and American Film. She is the author of African American Women and Christian Activism and the co-editor of This Far by Faith: Readings in African-American Women's Religious Biography. Her forthcoming book is Through a Glass Darkly: On Religion, Race, and American Film, 1929-1950. Professor Weisenfeld will be responding to Tony Pipolo's lecture on Saturday afternoon.

Religion Department | Center for the Study of Religion | Visual Arts Department
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