Myths are sacred stories; stories which embody a culture’s most significant ideas. As a ‘mythic vision,’ these ideas are demarcated in the cinematic text as moments of discernible difference. Moments which demand we stop and contemplate the sacred’s imposition in the continuity of the film. This chapter explores Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) in terms of its mythic vision, a big-budget mainstream Hollywood biblical epic retelling of Genesis 6–9. But this chapter will also consider Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), a film which, rather than a ‘mythic’ vision, tries to recontextualise the story of the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt into a desacralised retelling, a film which denies the mythology inherent in the narrative. By discussing Scott’s Exodus, Aronofsky’s mythic vision in Noah is highlighted in relief.
In this edited volume we combine a historical examination of citizenship and migration between the UK, Europe and the Commonwealth with an analysis of policies and the experiences of the different groups impacted by Brexit. We present interdisciplinary (sociology, law, anthropology and political science) analyses of the impact of Brexit on policies and legislation, the rights of British, EU27 and third-country nationals, and the experiences of the groups impacted by Brexit. The book discusses Brexit within the larger history and dynamics of British and EU citizenship and migration, including the changes in British citizenship policies since 1948, and the extension and (since 2008) retrenchment of EU citizenship. The book is organised in two part, respectively on ‘History and policy’ and on ‘Experiences’. The chapters in Part I compare Brexit with the loss of citizenship rights among Commonwealth citizens, the position of Turkish citizens after Brexit, and the links between Brexit and British denaturalisation policies. The chapters of Part II look at the experiences of Brexit in terms of experience of naturalisation, the fears of the groups impacted, and larger issues of belonging, marginalisation, definitions of membership, mobility and political orientations and mobilisations that cross legal status, nationality, ethnicity, race, class and locality.
If the concept of using credibility as a marker of quality is often true for the depiction of the past wherein even the slightest incongruity can be fatal, it is especially true for the biblical film. Alongside the development of special effects there have also arisen tropes and conventions which have become hallmarks of the epic and which are here used to support a biblical epic aesthetic. This chapter builds on ideas about effects in the epic film as an expression of verisimilitude, but here I propose instead to discuss effects not as guarantor of verisimilitude, but as ‘part of an overall process in which cinema displays itself and its powers’ (Neale 1980: 35) and how effects act as a function of spectacle, becoming part of an industrial selling point driving audiences to the cinema.
The heroes of films such as Ben-Hur (1959), Quo Vadis (1951) and The Robe (1953) all undergo narrative arcs in which they convert to Christianity or experience life-changing encounters with Christ. In this action, they symbolically reject totalitarian powers in favour of domesticity and faith. By contrast, the majority of recent epics feature atheistic or pagan heroes who remain so throughout their respective narratives. However, with the arrival of Noah (2014), Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), Risen (2016) and Ben-Hur (2016), the biblical epic has now returned and with it the motif of the religious conversion narrative. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the modern biblical epic, how it differs from its immediate predecessors and how it connects to its generic forebears. By contrasting the films Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) and Risen (2016), I also discuss the different ways in which conversion narratives have been used in the modern biblical epic, and in so doing I show how the modern epic is continuing to evolve while remaining inextricably linked to the epics of the 1950s–60s.
Reiterations and quasi-repetitions of words play dangerously close to dull redundancy; they are potential ‘dead ends’. This chapter’s four sections, the first on repeating figures and the latter three on tautologies, look at the expressions of language’s limitations in Hill’s poetry, focusing particularly on The Triumph of Love (1998), The Orchards of Syon (2002), and The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin (2019). With the help of a Chestertonian allusion to Aristotle’s sense of meson, or balance, the first section argues that repeating figures can present discrete rebalances of language, which aim to transcend the corrupt histories of words. The next three sections are devoted to tautologies, in which a superficial balance of words is already evident. After a preliminary investigation of the link between tautology, infancy, and speechlessness, with reference to Tennyson, the second section claims that tautologies, for Hill especially, are the closest thing in language to expressions of ‘mute desire’. The third section examines the ‘evenness’ of tautologies, understood as necessary for the potential transcendence of their expression; and the fourth section, following this logic of tautologies to its intended end, considers Hill’s tautology as a childlike plea to God for reconciliation.
The introduction lays out the social, political and cultural landscape that led to and fostered the wave of biblical epics released in the new millennium. Providing a discussion of the theoretical approaches addressed, the introduction gives an overview of the chapters in this volume and defines the purpose of the book.
Lastly, there are two short ‘Endnotes’, which constitute a last reflection on the book’s intentions; and on the ends of Hill’s poetry taken as a whole.
The fifth and final chapter is on the forms of Hill’s poems: do they arrive at ends; and if so what are they? The chapter’s introductory section attends to the notion of the ‘ideal’ in Hill’s thought. Quoting at length from remarks Hill made in 2008 and in 2016 at his last public reading, it relates the ideal shaping of the poem to what Hill calls its ‘necessary closure’. The chapter goes on to examine four of Hill’s forms: unrhymed sonnets; versets; clavics; and sapphics. The first two of these appear in Hill’s early work (1968–1971), the latter two in his late work (2007–2012). Hill’s use of each is distinctive; together, they illustrate Hill’s resourceful and attentive handling of various forms to reach, or deflect from, a sense of closure. There is a closing discussion of the thought of ‘yearning’, which is taken as fundamental to Hill’s end-directed language and forms. What F. H. Bradley calls ‘the idea of perfection’ is deemed an essential stimulus not only of the sapphic’s short final line but of Hill’s poetry as a whole. The chapter ends with a summary of the nature of forms in Hill’s early and late work, including the pointedly unbounded end of his posthumous collection, The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin.