Gideon Burton's Blog

Mormon Cinema: Fit for the Kingdom

Documentary films by and about Mormons have mostly been an institutional thing. But Church films are constrained by a corporate public relations model and come out of and feed into an established official Mormon film aesthetic. That's the subject for another day. But Dean Duncan and Ben Unguren have inaugurated a series of short documentary films about everyday Latter-day Saints which is phenomenal with respect to sheer authenticity.

Academic Social Networking: Pronetos, Humanities Social Network (HRN)

Social networking sites for scholars are emerging, I was pleased to discover in reading the Nov 9 issue of The Wired Campus in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I am absolutely certain that what for many remains only a curiosity for now will be the mainstay of scholarly communication and collaboration in the future. I checked out Pronetos: Professor's Network, which advertises itself as a home to communities of scholars of every academic discipline.

Mormon Literary Studies: The Relief Society Magazine

This image is the cover of the Relief Society Magazine, which was published by and for Mormon women from 1915-70. Over the decades Mormon women published literally thousands of short stories, poems, and plays in this periodical, not to mention the hundreds of Relief Society Lessons on literary topics that introduced Mormon women to the best British and American authors. I have uploaded a PowerPoint sample of one issue from 1923 to give a flavor of this rich source of Mormon culture and literature. This is just one of the many primary texts available for serious students of Mormonism. Those seriously interested in this may wish to contact Connie Lamb ([email protected]), a librarian at BYU who has put together this index to the Relief Society Magazine.

Mormon Literary Studies: Introduction

The field of Mormon literary studies is so young that I am constantly made aware of various authors, works, and themes that have yet to be seriously addressed by students, critics, and scholars. So I think I'll keep track of those ideas here, urging any interested to take up the baton and carry these ideas forward.

I'm especially eager to help provide some starting points for those wanting to know about the field generally. For an overview, see Eugene England's "Mormon Literature: Progress and Prospects," a bibliographic essay that sets out four periods of Mormon literary writing. I'll take various genres in turn within future posts and discuss highlights, bibliographic sources, etc. Long ago I created the Mormon Literature Website to help beginners in the field. This site needs updating--and in many ways has been subsumed within my larger project, the Mormon Literature & Creative Arts database--but it still contains some basic works of Mormon literary criticism and an online anthology or sampler.

Mormon film directors series at BYU

This news story in the Daily Universe explains a forum being organized at BYU by Professors Dennis Packard and Travis Anderson. In this "Director's Cut" series students can ask questions and give feedback to LDS filmmakers about the artistry of their films.

Mormon missionary documentary, "Returning With Honor"

One of the best documentary films to screen at the 2007 LDS Film Festival in Orem, Utah was Samuel Adams' Returning With Honor (not to be confused with a recent theatrical release of a similar name, Return With Honor).

This hour-long film is the director's first film and his own story. He came home early from his mission to the Philippines with an undiagnosed illness (later it turned out to be a rare form of malaria). Everybody said it was all in his head, and it took two years before the right diagnosis could be found. During that time Sam was pretty much hung out to dry, and it was very hard on him. He decided to go on a faith journey, bicycling from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco. This documents his ride.

Graduate Course in Cinematic Rhetoric

I will be teaching a course in cinematic rhetoric in Spring 2008 at Brigham Young University. The preliminary syllabus follows. Feedback is welcome:

Overview
This course will focus not on rhetoric or discourse about film, but the rhetoric of film–the structure and function of cinematic form and its aesthetic and social influence. Using both historical and contemporary theoretical models for interpreting both static and moving images (see list of texts and contexts), students will be invited to explore and apply the rhetoric of cinema in its various contexts. This will include examining film as a persuasive medium that plays ideological, commercial, and normative acculturating roles; looking at films as rhetorical texts with their own structure and complex multimedia grammar (language, iconography, narrative); and examining the peculiar and evolving phenomenology of film as movies are now multipurposed and more diversely experienced through the digital media. Along the way we will look at comparisons between the pragmatic methods of composing texts and making films; film as translation (the rhetoric of adaptation), and film as spiritual rhetoric (rhetorical methods for representing or invoking the sacred).