Alexander Hart

Alexander Hart focuses on the intersection of art history, theology, and film, in the hope of developing a theological aesthetics of the cinematic artform, informed by the history of religious art. He is therefore particularly interested in the ways in which filmmakers have adopted and transformed painterly aesthetics into their own medium; and he seeks to understand how films can both perform theology and inspire religious feeling.

Arriving at Yale via an unconventional academic trajectory, he completed a BSc in Mathematics at the University of Leeds, before moving to the University of Cambridge to study an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies. He has published two articles in Studies in European Cinema, one focusing on apophasis, abstraction, and Christological figuration in La double vie de Véronique (1991), and another on the expressive capacity of the mystic’s gestures in two films by Carl Theodor Dreyer. He has also published an article in the Journal of Religion & Film that explores the influence of Giotto and Andrei Rublev’s iconography on Roberto Rossellini’s Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966), respectively.