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Visiting Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald will present the first film in the spring 2013 F.I.L.M. (Forum on Image and Language in Motion) series on Sunday, Feb. 10, at 2 p.m., in the Bradford Auditorium. The Eye of the Day (2001) is part one of filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich’s Indonesian Trilogy. The screening is free and open to the public.

Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate says, “This year's Oscar line-up is once again rife with religious references, and the entertainment industry may be overtaking religious institutions as the prime mythmakers and ritual producers in a society where the 'nones' are on the rise.”

“Knots in the Head: Interview with Michael Glawogger” by Visiting Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald was published in the current issue of Film Quarterly.

Visiting Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald provided the catalog essay for the Criterion DVD/BluRay release of filmmaker Godfrey Reggio’s The Qatsi Trilogy.

Independent French filmmaker Armel Hostiou will screen his latest production, Rives (“Day” in English), on Thursday, Oct. 25, at 7:30 p.m., in the Red Pit. The film is spoken in Bosnian, French and Urdu with English subtitles and runs approximately 75 minutes; Hostiou will answer questions after the showing.

Saving Face, the first of three films  in the fall 2012 F.I.L.M. (Forum on Image and Language in Motion) series will be screened on Wednesday, Oct. 17, at 4:15 p.m.  All screenings will take place in the Bradford Auditorium, KJ, and are free and open to the public.

In a Religious Dispatches essay, “‘Cult’ Cinema Comes of Age,” Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate examined recent films that focus on cults including The Master, the latest in the group. In the Oct. 7 article, Plate described The Master as “emblematic of a new, more nuanced treatment of cults in the movies,” and “more or less … the story of L. Ron Hubbard and the birth of Scientology.”

“The Ecocinema Experience” by Visiting Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald was published as the lead essay in Ecocinema Theory and Practice, a new collection edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt.

Visiting Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald was the opening speaker at the new OpenDocLab, a salon for filmmakers, film scholars and other cineastes interested in documentary filmmaking, sponsored by the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT.

An article on The Washington Post website titled “Atheists find a new venue for the godless: on film,” and released by the Religion News Service, quoted Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate.  “An independent faith film festival will create film fests for similar reasons — to be with other, like-minded people, to laugh together and cry together and think together,” Plate said in the article that focused on the San Francisco-based, annual Atheist Film Festival. Published on Aug. 17, the article also appeared on the The Times-Picayune site.