Images of the Afterlife in Cinema

Description

These texts were written to accompany the screenings of the Images of the Afterlife in Cinema film season held at the Swedenborg Society during the Autumn of 2010 and have subsequently appeared in issues of The Swedenborg Review. They seek out parallels and congruencies between the life and thought of the Swedish visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688- 1772), who famously claimed to have travelled into the afterlife, and portrayals of life after death in a variety of cinematic genres.

The volume includes essays on Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder (1990); Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s After Life (1998); Marc Forster’s Stay (2005); Goran Dukic’s Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006); Peter Hewitt’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991); and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life & Death (1946).

JAMES WILSON is the author of two volumes of prose poems, All the Colours Fade and The Song Remains the Same (both The Hippocrene Society, 2012) and the novel, Three Bridges (Neverland Publishing, 2014). James is also the translator of two volumes of the French writer Guy de Maupassant: To the Sun and The Foreign Soul & The Angelus and his prose fiction has appeared in the journals The Use of English and Snow. He lives in London where he works as an editor and former librarian of the Swedenborg Society.

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