Cinema divinite religion, theology and the Bible in film 2. Kısım

animation. Because several levels of celluloid can be superimposed on to each other, the repeated drawing of background scenery became unnecessary, thus quickening the production of a cartoon.

• Pioneers of animation include the American Winsor McCay whose Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) was a landmark in the history of animation and whose Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) is generally regarded to be the first animated feature film.

• For McCay, animation was the task of a single artist drawing all the scenes, sometimes taking up to a year to produce a single film. Soon, animation studios emerged with groups of artists all working on the same film. The result was the emergence of cartoon series with popular characters, Felix the Cat (1919) being an early example.

• Sound was first added to animated films by Walt Disney in Steamboat Willie (1928). It was Disney, too, who produced the first full-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

• Technological advances have meant that computer enhanced graphics and special effects are now common in all genres of film, such as the recent Matrix and Lord of the Rings trilogies.

• The first full-length computer animated film was Toy Story, produced in 1995 by Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios.

• This and further information can be found at www.digitalmediafix. com/Features/animationhistory.html and www.fi.edu/fellows/fellow5/ May99/History/history.html

was conveyed by the far more controversial, and less stylized cartoon, God, the Devil and Bob, where God seeks evidence that humankind is worth saving and allows the Devil to choose who, among the sons of men, is to be the saviour.16 The chosen one, Bob Alman (‘all men’, ‘everyman’?), ‘drinks, swears and downloads porn off the internet’. He is told that he knows what he must do in order to show humankind’s value but unwittingly ‘saves’ humanity by taking time to talk to his daughter. The message is by and large the same as in The Simpsons-, be good to each other. With no doctrine or devotion, and with a rather mechanical view of grace, this seems to be the sum of the religious life. South Park, on the other hand, plummets to the depths of cynicism in order to appeal in a postmodern age in which the lack of value is the only value worth upholding. Despite their unrealism - they are, after all, cartoons - all three clearly present a particular message and all three provoked a reaction in their audience, whether negative or favourable.

Like all films, animation works best when it tells a story and catches the imagination of the viewer. After seeing Beauty and the Beast (1991), the film critic Roger Ebert wrote: ‘Watching the movie, I found myself caught up in a direct and joyous way. I wasn’t reviewing an “animated film”, I was being told a story, I was hearing terrific music, and I was having fun.’17 It is in this way that ‘having fun’ relates to unrealism which allows meaning. In animation, realism does not matter. Its very non-realism (or even unrealism) is appealing because people cannot fail to realize that it really is not real, even when its characters are endearing and able to provoke an emotional response, that is, even when the audience cares about what is going to happen. It is in this juxtaposition of recognized unreality and being moved to care that meaning is conveyed, however subtly and subconsciously, by animated film. This can be seen, to some extent, in the following brief descriptions of five animated films: Chicken Run (2000), Toy Story (1995) and Toy Story 2 (1999), Antz (1998) and A Bug’s Life (1998).

Chicken Run

At all levels, this is a film about liberation. It is, in fact, a spoof prisoner- of-war film where captured allied soldiers are replaced with chickens but the barbed wire fences, rigid military regime and periods in the cooler for failed escapees are all present, as are several echoes of classic scenes from The Great Escape (1963). All this is given a contemporary twist with the heroine, a chicken called Ginger, exclaiming in exasperation, ‘It’s not the fences around the farm that keep us here; it’s the fences around your brains.’ The saviour comes in the figure of Rocky the Rhode Island Rooster who is catapulted into the chicken coop from the beyond giving the impression that he can fly. The chickens hope to learn to fly to freedom under Rocky’s tutelage, only to have their hopes dashed when he deserts the rest of the group. The climax is a bid for freedom through the construction of an aeroplane to fly out to reach the paradise beyond the fence.

This film can be interpreted on various levels. The idea of coming from beyond with the promise of redemption is a classic characteristic of the ‘Christ-figure’,18 though in this case hopes of redemption are dashed when Rocky proves to be something of a charlatan. This, of course, pushes the analogy further than it really ought to go if we are to regard an animated chicken as a ‘Christ-figure’: to push it thus would serve only to demonstrate either the banality of the category itself or the desperation of theologians to find connections with modern culture. Perhaps the film’s subliminal message is that liberation is accomplished by a state of mind. Freedom can be achieved when people are prepared to work for it, working out their own salvation as it were. The ‘Christ-figure’ (if indeed we are willing to associate it with a chicken) is seen to be a decoy, even if he comes good in the end. The main character, Ginger, shows a remarkable solidarity with the rest of the roost: she does not desert her fellows but shares with them her vision of the freedom available beyond the fence and by so doing encourages them all to share in it. She refuses her own liberation without the rest, and is even prepared on occasion to forgo her vision and to stay with the rest of the chickens if necessary.19

All this takes place in the context of unrealism. These are, after all, (admittedly stylized) chickens attempting to escape from their (admittedly stylized) chicken coop. Mr Tweedy, the chicken farmer, has his suspicions, but is dissuaded from them by his superbly overbearing and ambitious wife because it is all in his head. ‘The chickens are revolting,’ he exclaims. ‘Finally something we can agree on,’ she responds. Perhaps the unrealism of it all is underlined by Fowler, the camp rooster who continually harps on about his RAF days, in which, it turns out, he was a mascot and not a fighter pilot. This continuous harping leads Ginger to pin her hopes on Fowler to fly the aeroplane to freedom, and his admission, right at the end of the film, that he cannot fly it because he is a chicken, is a moment of comic genius. We have been persuaded by then that chickens really can do anything, only to be derided and chided for our stupidity by the rooster himself.

Chickens cannot work for their liberation, but humans can. They are driven towards freedom by the vision of a future paradise and must not be distracted by the invasion of the outsider. The film shows the broadening of horizons for the chickens which, with perseverance, they can achieve. Ultimately, even the recognition that they are helpless chickens does not hinder them from achieving their goal.

Toy Story and Toy Story 2

The original Toy Story film was a story of belonging and of growing up. All the toys belong to Andy, though his favourite is Woody, a sheriff doll. While this situation prevails, Woody, as the favoured toy, is prepared to declare that it does not matter how much they are played with: they must simply ‘be there’ when Andy needs them. Such is life, until the arrival of a new toy. Apparently the latest word in sophistication, the arrival of Buzz Lightyear, a space ranger, causes jealousy and rivalry to foment between him and Woody. The story sees the toys ‘grow up’ as Buzz Lightyear learns that he is not a space ranger on a mission to save the universe from the evil Emperor Zurg, but a toy. The revelation is devastating and it comes while he is trapped, with Woody, next door in Sid’s bedroom - Sid being a boy who delights in deforming toys and thus represents the forces of evil! Buzz has to come through the angst he feels at this discovery in order to co-operate with Woody to find their way back to Andy’s bedroom before Andy moves house.

This is not a film about toys as such but about children. They have to work out their relationships, to learn how to get on with one another, and find eventually that they come to need and even like each other. The message has to do with growing up and maturing, of giving people a chance and of working at relationships. It is Woody who has to reach the point of realizing that he cannot get back to Andy’s room without Buzz, even if Buzz is just a toy and not a space ranger. It is a story that recognizes that growing up means leaving fantasies behind in order to cope with the real world. But its message is also that the real world requires people to get on with one another, to help each other and even to grow to like each other. Even when devoid of fantasy, it suggests that such a real world would not be such a bad place after all.

Toy Story 2 takes the story further, showing that the toys have, to an extent, ‘grown up’. When on a mission to save a discarded toy from a yard sale, Woody, by accident, gets picked up by a collector. He then discovers that his character was the star in a children’s television series. The toy collector has all the other merchandise and, with Woody, his set is now complete. His intention is to sell the collection to a Japanese museum. The other toys set out to rescue Woody and we see themes such as loyalty on the part of the other toys; the challenge to Woody’s fidelity (he is Andy’s toy but is willing to go to Japan now he knows he was a television star); the selfish toy - Stinky Pete the Prospector - who cares not for the others but will do his utmost to ensure that they all go to Japan together; and a spoof of Star Wars’s identification of Darth Vader as father of Luke Skywalker when Buzz Lightyear is seen to be the son of Zurg, his archenemy. There is a moment of pathos when Woody discovers that his show was axed before reaching its allotted end. On enquiring why, Stinky Pete responds ‘Two words: Spur Nik. Once the astronauts went up children only wanted to play with space toys.’ ‘I know how that feels,’ replies Woody.

The film’s story is that toys do not last for ever. The temptation is to try for some kind of immortality in a glass case in a museum. But selfpreservation must not be chosen over and above living life to the full. Jesse, the cowgirl, outlines it well, saying that when a child plays with a toy ‘even though you’re not moving, it feels like you’re alive’. We are reminded that they are toys even if they display the highest of human virtues: fidelity, devotion and even love, and, perhaps, it draws on themes of immortality and usefulness and the problems raised when those things are craved or left unfulfilled.

Antz

Antz is the story of a neurotic ant intent on breaking out of the restrictions placed on his lot in life in the colony. The voice is supplied by Woody Allen, ‘the biggest neurotic in the world’, and the opening scene is full of ironic humour as the ant, lying on a therapist’s leaf, complains about his anxious childhood.20 The ants are separated at birth into workers and fighters with an accompanying value judgement made regarding the two classes. The main character is a worker who falls in love with the princess. His story is one in which he forges an identity as an individual, inspires others to do likewise and assists in foiling a plot by the evil General Mandible who is intent on a quasi-eugenic scheme to be rid of the lower orders and thereby ensure the creation of a superior race of ants.

Throughout the film the main character is reminded that he counts for nothing as one ant: all that matters is the colony where each ant has his or her place. He dreams of a better place, suggested to him by an old drunk in a bar as ‘Insectopia’, which turns out to be a rubbish bin in a city park. He is encouraged by a dying fighter ant, ‘Don’t make my mistake, don’t follow orders your whole life. Think for yourself.’21 Finally, as the only one to return from a battle into which he was mistakenly drawn, the vitality of his individualism is acclaimed by the princess when she greets him with the words: ‘You were a worker, now you are a war hero.’

The film promotes the need for individualism beyond oppressive structuralism and classism. It provokes the sense of individual value and thinking for the self. But it concludes that individuals also need others to make things work. Ultimately, the main character finds that he belongs exactly where he is, but the appropriateness of his place is discovered because he has chosen it.

Ants, of course, do not talk and plot in the way presented: they are shown as though they were human beings. Their posture, for example, is anthropomorphic. Interestingly, when they go into battle against the termites, the termites are portrayed as ferocious, beast-like, incoherent and, unlike the stylized ants, definitely subhuman.

As such, the film’s main purpose appears to be the affirmation of individuality, the oppression of the system and the need to rise against it, even if that finally secures one’s place within it, which in a somewhat ironic way seems to suggest the need for adolescent rebellion and searching, providing the individual concerned comes round in the end to seeing the vitality of the status quo.

A Bug’s Life

This, too, is a story of liberation from oppression and finding value in the individual. This time the main character is a mad-cap inventor whose attempts to help end up in failure and indeed appear to make matters worse. In the world in which he lives, there is a set order to things that is not to be broken: the sun grows the food, the ants pick the food, the grasshoppers eat the food. He resolves to go beyond the ants’ island colony to find some warrior bugs who will help drive the grasshoppers away for ever.

At the heart of the story is the way in which one individual discovers ‘the non-necessity of oppression’22 and decides to strike a blow ‘for the colony and for oppressed ants everywhere’. At first the others do not follow, but they come round in the end. However, rather than a group of powerful vigilantes, it is circus bugs that he mistakenly employs and they turn out to be shallow, self-indulgent thespians whose weakness and worthlessness is also transformed as they too come good in the end.

This is a story intended to show the reappropriation of hope and dignity in oppressed life. It is in some ways a parable of liberation theology. Liberation theology’s major contribution was the recognition that oppression belonged to history in which human beings worked out God’s salvific will. It may have depended more on Marx than the Gospels, identifying human beings as the agents of historical change, but in doing so it supplied the hope that things do not have to be as they are. This consciousness-raising was the first step in liberation: recognizing that suffering and oppression are the results of human sin and not God’s will. A Bug’s Life shows this step in liberation as the ants stand up to the grasshoppers. Though the context would have obvious parallels, for children, with the bully in the playground who uses his superior size and strength to play on the fears of those smaller than himself, the message can be seen in wider terms. The oppressive minority are not secure, for they know, as the grasshoppers know, that the oppressed majority outnumber them significantly. They have to play on their fears. Once those fears are removed, and oppression is seen to be the contingent illusion that it really is, then the first step is taken on the road to liberation.

3. Conclusion

There can be little doubt that these films are entertaining. Chicken Run and Antz in particular will appeal to an adult audience because of their sophisticated animation, use of popular actors to provide the voices and using those actors in a familiar way. Their appeal is increased by the deliberate echoing of scenes from other films. But are they really anything more than entertainment, and are they really anything more than entertainment for children?

If they are to do anything more than entertain, it is important to recognize that these films are about us: they are about human beings, our relationships, our hopes and aspirations, our virtues and our vices. They are particularly about ‘growing up’ and maturing experiences. They take the characters from a lowly position, usually of oppression by the system, and they present life and the gaining of meaning in terms of finding an individual identity which, if it does not beat the system, at least finds a place within the system in which its own identity can be maintained. And they suggest that to do so the individual does not have to claim a more significant place than the group. All this has parallels with non-realist thinking, for it demonstrates the projection of what are unavoidably human values into archetypal myths in order to provide purpose, meaning and boundaries for human life. However, these points relate to the story, the narrative being conveyed, rather than to the form of animated film.

In some ways, the discovery of meaning in animation must be related back to the opening quotation from Don Cupitt that Donald Duck has no existence beyond his own iconography. In other words, there is meaning to be gained for Donald Duck only from within certain ground rules. In some ways this is how non-realism works, too. It has certain ground rules that, when accepted, allow meaning to be gained that is not pejorative. It is not, in theory, a denial of God’s existence, but it does say that God’s existence is not the most important point, partly because if God exists then that existence is beyond our experience and therefore beyond analogy and beyond any kind of meaningful expression. As a result, God’s existence per se is unimportant, or at least not a matter for concern. Rather we have to find ways of living meaningfully which may be promoted by using ‘God’ as a sign.

Similarly, animated film, like any other film, can express theological meaning from within a certain epistemological framework. The truth is that all films will convey meaning, but we may not want to convey some meanings as those we ought to discuss and emulate. Alongside conveying meaning, if we further accept that film works primarily by appealing to rhe imagination, then animation may appeal more to this than any other genre. And if we also see with Tillich and Richard Niebuhr that culture is vital for our understanding of ultimate reality then film and animation, as aspects of our culture and of human creativity, are of some significance. There would then be little doubt that animated films, despite their unreality, are as able to convey meaning and value as any other film, particularly when they evoke a response in the viewer: one where they empathize with the main character and care what is going to happen. Indeed, it could be their very unrealism which helps convey meaning by ensuring that the story is followed rather than any secondary factor. As such, they may be important texts for children (and adults) as they develop and mature into citizens because it is the things we watch on film and television that appear now to have greatest effect on our psyche, either for the benefit or detriment of civil society. They, like other films and like other aspects of culture, may help instruct us or provide us with raw material or imbue values and principles into our characters; in so doing, they may possibly help us in the business of living.

But if, on the other hand, we begin in a different place, such as that of traditional Christian thought, then our answer will be very different. If we are to begin with a sense of God’s realism, and with convictions about how that realism has been conveyed in history, that God ‘was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’ (1 Cor. 5.19; Col. 1.20), then a different perspective is put on the whole study. These films may be human ‘mythoi’ that enable people to experience, discuss and even define meaning and value in a new way, but they do not do so in any particular sense; they support a general morality, they affirm the vitality of the human spirit and they appeal to vague notions of a civic religion but they do not specifically promote Christianity or, for that matter, any other organized religion They may help people to live life by providing principles and values, though this may not in fact be the sum total of the ‘religious requirement’. The trouble is that the interpretation of film can be so arbitrary and nothing is guaranteed. Films, including animated ones, may, or may not, inspire people to contemplate issues and events and move people to extremes of emotion. They may, or may not, offer the kind of information traditionally offered by religion such as the why or wherefore of the universe, the meaning and purpose of life, forgiveness of sin and salvation. It may be that tried and tested stories convey these best, and for those we would have to turn to different ‘mythoi’.

Notes

1. Don Cupitt, After God: The Future of Religion, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997, p. 25.

2. Joel W. Martin and Conrad E. Ostwalt Jnr (cds), Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth and Ideology in Popular American Film, Oxford: Westview Press, 1997, p. 6.

3. See Christopher Deacy, Screen Christologies: Redemption and the Medium of Film Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001, p. 2. Cf. Joseph Marty, ‘Toward a theological interpretation and reading of film: incarnation of the Word of God - relation, image, word’, in John R. May (ed.), New Image of Religious Film, Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1997, pp. i4iff.

4. See, for example, Robert K. Johnston, Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000, p. 59; Clive Marsh, ‘Films and Theologies of Culture’, in Clive Marsh and Gaye Ortiz (eds), Explorations in Theology and Film, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, pp. 24-7.

5. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, London: Faber and Faber, 1952.

6. Richard Niebuhr, with his Calvinist background, probably favoured the ‘Christ as transformer of culture’ model and, therefore, possibly would not have approved of the contemporary use of his categorization to justify the dialogue between theology and film. Cf. Johnston, Reel Spirituality, p. 59.

7. St Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 3.

8. Whether a good or bad thing, it is worth noting in passing that this, of course, falls far short of anything that the Christian gospel (for example) would demand in terms of conversion and commitment to God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. (1 Cor. 5.19; Col. 1.20).

9. It has been estimated, for example, that approximately 1,500 people leave the churches every week in Britain. See Philip Richter and Leslie J. Francis, Gone But Not Forgotten, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1998, introduction, pp. xi, xii.

10. The case is forcibly put in Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, London: Methuen, 1985.

11. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959, p. 205, quoted in Martin and Ostwalt, Screening the Sacred, p. 9.

12. Michael Northcott, ‘Spirituality in the Media Context’, in Derek C. Weber (ed.), Discerning Images: The Media and Theological Education, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1991, p. 105.

13. Johnston, Reel Spirituality, p. 17.

14. Martin and Ostwalt, Screening the Sacred, p. 16; see also Wesley Kort, Narrative Elements and Religious Meaning, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975, pp. 86-7.

15. Despite the fact that religion is portrayed positively on The Simpsons, it is very much a civic religion of morality with no sense of ‘following Jesus’, a point noted by Mark I. Pinsky, The Gospel according to the Simpsons: The Spiritual Life of the World’s Most Animated Family, Louisville; Westminster John Knox, 2001.

16. Seewww.godthedevilandbob.com

17. Johnston, Reel Spirituality, p. 27.

18. As Peter Malone notes, ‘The story of the stranger who comes into a community and transforms their lives, sometimes with challenge and pain, a sign of contradiction which is often misunderstood - and who then disappears is an archetypal story.’ Malone, ‘Edward Scissorhands: Christology from a Suburban Fairy-tale’, in Marsh and Ortiz (eds), Explorations in Theology in Film, p. 81. In Shane, the main character descends into the world of the homesteaders from the hills ‘above’, in Jon Tuska’s words, ‘like a messiah’. Tuska, The Filming of the West, Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1976, p. 530, quoted in Lloyd Baugh (ed.), Imaging the Divine: Jesus and Christ Figures in Films, Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1997, p. 170.

19. See Susie Saunders’s comments at www.textweek.com/movies/chicken- run.htm

20. See the entry for Antz at www.us.imdb.com

21. Seewww.textweek.com/antz.htm

22. See Eleazar S. Fernandez, Towards a Theology of Struggle, Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994, p. 19.

2. Clint Eastwood Westerns:

Promised Land and Real Men

PETER FRANCIS

1. Theological Conversation

Why should a practical theologian bother with Westerns or, indeed, any popular film? It is certainly not from any desire to ‘baptize’ films or give Christian readings of secular stories. It is not to dole out an imprimatur to films that are morally uplifting, nor is it to utter condemnation of particular movies that are deemed morally dubious.

Practical theology is ‘the discipline within the theological curriculum whose task is to describe, analyse and interpret the contemporary situation in order to identify the problems to which the Christian Church must make a strategic response’.1 Film is one of the tools that can help theology achieve that task. Films not only arise out of a particular cultural context, they even help to define that context. Films give the viewer an understanding of the values and assumptions, public issues and private issues of society. Films, as Margaret Miles has pointed out, ‘articulate a range of values, fleshing out these values in characters, and narrating the conflicts that arise’.^[1] These conflicts can be intimate and private or they can be public and societal. Films offer comment, illustration and a narrative on their social moment. ‘They are cultural products deeply informed by the perspectives, values, and aspirations of their makers.’^[2] They address the anxieties and interests of their situation. If film is one of the voices of a broader ‘social conversation’, it is a conversation in which practical theology is involved.

The Westerns that this chapter will consider tell us very little about the actual history of the west but they will tell us something about the public and private values, assumptions of the film-maker and the society that watched them.

quality that has yet to be captured in any other genre in contemporary cinema. Part of this is geographical setting, part blatant neglect of historical facts, partly also the Western’s ease of mutation and a persistent riff on masculinity (see Text Box 11.1, The Western Genre).

1. The Western Genre: Ten Landmark Westerns

1. Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)

John Wayne plays the Ringo Kid, a ‘cocky’ outlaw seeking revenge for his father and brother, who becomes the selfless hero. The film culminates in an Indian attack on the stagecoach. The promised land of the west is painted in sharp contrast to the civilization of the east as represented by the stagecoach passengers. It has been called the basic Western template. John Ford uses Monument Valley, which thereafter epitomized the west.

2. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford, 1949)

Wayne is now a kindly father figure about to retire from the US Cavalry in the aftermath of Custer’s defeat. Wayne embodies old-fashioned virtues and the film is formed around a series of ritual incidents. Ford again uses Monument Valley as the backdrop.

3. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)

Wayne plays a psychologically complex character, Ethan Edwards. Ethan is an outsider on an obsessive and pathological racist quest. Character takes over from action and heroics, although the setting, Monument Valley, remains the same. These three films show the evolution of the genre.

4. Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman, 1943)

This film dramatizes the horror of mob violence. Three innocent drifters are murdered by a lynch mob. The liberal credentials of this film are cited as proof of how the genre can adapt and dramatize contemporary themes.

5. High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)

A dark night of the soul for Gary Cooper as he has to decide whether to buckle on his gun to confront a killer or to renounce violence as his Quaker bride wishes. Focusing on ‘character’ and ‘cause’, John Wayne famously called it ‘the most un-American thing I have seen in my life’. Written by the ‘black-listed’ Carl Foreman.

6. Shane (George Stevens, 1953)

Stevens’s self-consciously mythic film offers us, in Alan Ladd’s deadpan performance, ‘everyman’. Shane tells the boy who idolizes him as a gunfighter, ‘a man has to be what he is Joey - he can’t break the mould’. Like High Noon the dilemma of strapping on the six-gun or settling for a life as a homesteader is central. Action in both films is confined to the final climax.

7. The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, i960)

A remake of Kurosowa’s Seven Samurai (1954), it marked a return to action rather than the ponderous dilemmas of the classic Westerns of the fifties. ‘Character’ is not sacrificed to heroics as the seven fill the screen with memorable set pieces.

8. Once Upon A Time in The West (Sergio Leone, 1968)

After the success of Clint Eastwood’s Spaghetti Westerns, Leone filmed this grand operatic Western in Monument Valley. Fantastic set pieces and, like the Wild Bunch, it offers a vision of the death of the west.

9. Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)

Set in 1913, this is about the end of an era, when armies and their generals take over from cowboys. The heroes are bad men, but Peckinpah gives us the passing of the west from their point of view. They die defeated by an army equipped with cars and machine guns.

10. Dances With Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990)

This film reinvigorated the Western genre following a spate of end-of-the- era films. It is full of 1990 sensibilities. Costner’s wounded soldier finds his true self among the native American Sioux Indians. Historically authentic, it shows the Sioux’s love of the land. Its ecological message is accompanied by fantastic panoramas.

The promise of the west has strong resonance with the Hebrew Bible’s understanding of salvation. The rediscovery of the Hebrew root meaning of the word ‘salvation’ had a strong influence on the World Council of Churches, thinking in the 1970s and was a key word in the vocabulary of liberation theologies. Philip Potter, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches throughout the 1970s, emphasizes the importance of the theme.

The Hebrew verb yasha, to save - from which the name Jesus, ‘he who saves’, is derived - was a thoroughly this worldly word. It meant, ‘to be wide, to be spacious’. Its opposite was sara, ‘to be narrow - whether physically, intellectually or spiritually’.7

Salvation has to do with having or getting space in which to move, breathing space, which gives the possibility of choice, of growth and development. It is the condition where crops flourish and peace prevails. A fellow WCC officer, the Presbyterian theologian Ian Fraser, spells out the contrast more explicitly. Fraser’s understanding parallels the contrast between the urbanized American east and the mythic American west.

Sara . . . gives the impression of being hemmed in, imprisoned, cornered, suffocated . . . Those who are unfree, cramped without room to manoeuvre or liberty to shape their lives for themselves . .. Salvation is related to the provision of a door of escape and through it ground on which they can walk as people free to participate in making their own future.8

It is worth noting that although this parallel conjures up images of freedom for those trekking west, the consequence was almost exactly the opposite for the native Americans whose land was being usurped. Just as in the days of Moses and the patriarchs the biblical trek towards the Promised Land spelt defeat for the indigenous tribes. The Promised Land is won at the expense of those already dwelling in these fertile lands.

History

The west, like all utopias, never existed. The real Wild West was very different.

Cowboys, cattle towns, and long drives north formed a minor chapter in western history; range wars were simply labour strikes on horse back, and ‘the lone gunman’ a rare psychopath, regarded as such and with contempt. It is not unfair to say that few Americans attached more than passing significance to Indian wars, railroad extensions, mining and lumber operations - certainly vis-a-vis more pressing eastern considerations.9

Lee Clark Mitchell believes that the great Western set pieces (Pat Garrett’s capture of Billy the Kid, Custer’s Last Stand, Tombstone’s OK Corral) were all quite prosaic events and have taken on a mythic dimension because Americans find the real history of these times and events so inconsequential. There are parallels with the Hebrew Bible. The wanderings of nomadic tribes, and their internal conflicts and significant events are also exaggerated into formative myths.

Films like Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch (1969), which purports to offer a more realistic look at the Wild West, are really only more realistic in that the violence is more graphic and that there are no real heroes anymore. The end of an era that Peckinpah’s film purports to be about is really only the end of an era of Western films, the end of the age of heroes, the days of clearly defined goodies and baddies. The real story of the decline of the Wild West would make fairly boring viewing just as the real story of, say, Jacob and Joseph (if we could ever reconstruct it) would hardly excite.

Westerns maintain the myth of the west. Similarly, we don’t want realism in the retelling of the Hebrew Bible’s stories of patriarchs, prophets and kings. It is books with titles like Archaeology Proves the Bible Is True that give a bogus historicity to the biblical myths (fish bones on Ararat and fossilized trumpets outside Jericho). Depressingly, it is these books that sell rather than the scholarly deconstruction offered by contemporary biblical scholars.

The similarity between the Hebrew Bible’s stylized narratives and the stylized conventions of Western film-making is striking. It is surprising that the Hebrew narratives haven’t been plundered as source material for contemporary Westerns; maybe the fear of offending religious sensibilities has counselled caution. It does help to explain the attraction of the highly stylized Japanese films of Kurosawa to Western film-makers, the Seven Samurai (1954) remade as The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, i960) and Yojimbo (1961) remade as A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964).

A Hungry Cuckoo of a Genre

If geography and the opportunities for historical ‘freedom’ help to form the Western then the easy assimilation of contemporary themes is also an important factor. The British film critic Philip French expresses this ease of mutation. ‘The Western is a great grab bag, a hungry cuckoo of a genre, a voracious bastard of a form, open equally to visionaries and opportunists, ready to seize anything that’s in the air from juvenile delinquency co ecology.’10 Martin Scorsese11 notes how the Western allows writers and film-makers to explore contemporary themes. The clear-cut morality of the Westerns of the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s (although some of these are clearly anti-Nazi or anti-Communist) gives way to the complicated anti-hero of Arthur Penn’s Left Handed Gun (1958) where the young Paul Newman plays Billy the Kid as a rebel without a cause at a time when society was confused by youth problems. As Clint Eastwood has observed in a BFI interview: ‘In a Western you can get across things that concern you sociologically today. Look at Wellman’s The Oxbow Incident (William Wellman, 1943), which analysed mob violence: it was not successful commercially, but it was a tremendously important film.’12 It is possible to credit a Western like Broken Arrow (Delmer Daves, 1950) for helping to transform attitudes to the native American at a time when the USA was in the midst of civil rights disturbances. More recently we have witnessed feminist Westerns, black Westerns, ecological Westerns and pro-native American films.

The Western genre gives film-makers the freedom to explore current issues and societal confusions on a wide-open canvas. Henry Nash Smith observed that the Western is ‘our fullest objectified mass dream ... we need then to acknowledge how fluently that dream has always mutated’.13

Real Men

Westerns are about masculinity. They resonate with the desire for men to be real men, and for ‘a man to do what a man’s gotta do’. They are haunted by this flawed idea of masculinity. There is a recurring image of the Western hero beaten to a pulp and yet overcoming physical wounds to defeat the bad. In a survey of over 100 years of Western writing and filmmaking Jane Tompkins claims that the Western answers the domestic novel.

Westerns invariably depict the same man - a man in flight from the domestic constraints of Victorian culture, afraid of losing mastery, at the centre of an endlessly repeated drama of death, inarticulateness, emotional numbness in a genre whose pattern of violence never varies.14

It is an argument that finds support in Gary Wills’s reflections on why John Wayne remained the most popular movie star for years after his death.

The archetypal American is a displaced person - arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, on the move, fearless himself, feared by others, killing but cleansing the world of things that ‘need killing,’ loving but not bound by love, rootless but carrying the Center in himself, a gyroscopic direction-setter, a travelling norm.15

The traits of flawed masculinity are all evident in the heroes of the Western genre. The hero is his own man, seeking support and help from no one, autonomous rather than dependent. The real man is active rather than passive, never tired or in need of sleep and with a miraculous ability to recover or shrug off injury or illness. Health concerns are not for him, a man will smoke, eat steaks and drink. The male Western hero is not emotional but rather coldly rational and logical, relationships are a bind to be avoided, his sexual responses are depersonalized, his gun and penis are both tools. A real man is in control and seeks to triumph, there is no compromise. A real man is resolutely unafraid, preferring death to being labelled a coward.

It would be easy to illustrate each of these points with any number of scenes from Western movies. The Western hero is unlikely to allow his feminine side to bring him towards growth and wholeness. In religion the male power images of God warp our understanding of the divine. There is something in Westerns that panders to this powerful masculine side, however self-destructive we know it to be. No matter how ‘new’ we men claim to be or how in touch we are with our feminine side there is always a part of us that longs to be Clint Eastwood, The Man With No Name riding into town, silent, strong, blowing away the bad and the ugly.

3. Clint Eastwood Westerns

Clint Eastwood has made 57 films. He has directed 25 of these films. It is hard to think of a contemporary director or actor who has had such a long run of commercial success. His commercial success has recently been matched by critical acclaim. Unforgiven (1992) won four Oscars, including best director for Eastwood himself. Eastwood was the subject of a retrospective at the Venice Film Festival 2000, and chairman of the jury at Cannes in 1998.

His wide-ranging films encompass the Dirty Harry movies, redneck comedies, police thrillers, musicals, romantic comedies, love stories, science fiction - nevertheless it is as a Western anti-hero that he is best known, for as Christopher Frayling has remarked,16 from the moment The Man With No Name rode into the town, chewing cigars, sweeping back his poncho, narrowing his eyes, the Western was never going to be the same again.

Only 15 of the 57 have been Westerns. Of these 15, he has directed four - High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider and Unforgiven - and it is these that I want to explore. The two mentors for

his Western films are undoubtedly Sergio Leone and Don Siegel. From the former he absorbed the operatic quality of film-making and from Siegel, he learnt the director’s craft.        '

High Plains Drifter (1973)

High Plains Drifter is an unpleasant and violent film. Derek Malcolm, reviewing the film in the Guardian, sums up this impressive but unlikeable film.

The scene is stunningly set, the characters well-observed in one dimensional terms. And Eastwood plays the avenger as if born to it, a Dirty Harry unshackled by silly liberal laws. It all works well which is why one resents it so much.17

Clint Eastwood sets his first Western in beautiful open country, part of the wide open promised land, which is being terrorized by a lawless gang. The town of Lago nestles beside a tranquil lake. The Stranger rides into town and borrows every cliche he can from his Sergio Leone films, including an operatic approach. Like The Man With No Name in Leone’s films, Clint chews cigars, gives us close-ups of his narrow focused eyes, uses the cliche of the bathtub and barber’s chair shootings, and flashbacks of a violent beating that have driven him on towards vengeance. Within the first ten minutes Clint has shot three men and raped a woman.

We learn the reason for his violent revenge. He is an avenger, perhaps even a supernatural avenger. The suggestion is that he is the good lawman who was horsewhipped to death, as the townsfolk and his girlfriend looked on mute and compliant. He exacts his revenge. He renames the town ‘Hell’. The conclusion, the final shoot-out, of the film is played out amidst the fires of Hell, before the Stranger vanishes as mysteriously as he arrives.

Is the Stranger Christ? It’s certainly not very Christ-like behaviour. However, the Stranger is empowering to the community, he gets them to stand up for themselves. He empowers the most downtrodden and smallest member of the community, the midget Mordecai, and makes him sheriff and mayor. That’s the good news. The film doesn’t provide an answer, we never know who the Stranger is, but the supernatural quality pervades the atmosphere from the start.

If the supernatural and the divine are in some sense equated - and the film certainly presents a convincing judgement day - then the image of the divine/avenging angel is disturbing. The mixing of the strong masculine stereotype that Clint portrays with the things of God gives a very cockeyed (sic) view of God.

The view of God that is here portrayed is of a God of judgement; someday, in some way, God will make you pay for your sins, exact a price for your guilty secret. John Wayne strongly disliked the film and wrote to Clint claiming it was the antithesis of what the American frontier - and the American people - represented. Clint Eastwood was ynphased.

It was just an allegory, it wasn’t meant to be about pioneers and covered wagons and conflict with Indians. It was a speculation about what happens when they go ahead and kill the sheriff and somebody comes back and calls the town’s conscience to bear. There’s always retribution for your deeds.18

For Eastwood, the director and star, it remains unclear who the Stranger is, but it is clear that it is a film about retribution and that retribution will be exacted by circumstance or even divine agency: a God of the eye for an eye variety, from whom there is no hiding and who will get you in the end.

Pale Rider (1985)

If High Plains Drifter shows Clint Eastwood borrowing the style and iconography of his mentor Sergio Leone, Pale Rider demonstrates a much more personal style, a very sure and languid directing style that has become one of his hallmarks. Pale Rider is almost a remake of High Plains Drifter. In Pale Rider the religious symbolism is much more overt. The pale rider looks identical (same hat, coat and horse) to the mysterious stranger in High Plains Drifter. This time he comes not to exact revenge on the community but in answer to a prayer by the young girl Megan Wheeler to save the mining community. Megan is reading from Revelation: ‘And behold a pale horse . . .’ And there framed by the window is Clint Eastwood, the mysterious stranger sitting on a pale horse. Of course, for those longing for a good shoot-up we are heartened to read on in Revelation: ‘Its rider was named Death, and Hell was following close behind him’ (Rev. 6.8; NRSV).

We don’t learn the pale rider’s name; we see from his dog collar that he is a preacher. His actions are miraculous. He helps the miners, panhandlers who have gone west to find a home and prosperity. He helps them to find gold, single-handedly defeats six men bullying the kindly but ineffectual miner Hull. He rescues Megan from rape, fells a giant and resists temptations - a bribe of building a church and financial reward from villain La Hood and the sexual overtures of Megan and her mother Sarah, both of whom have fallen in love with him.

In Christ-like manner he sides with the impoverished miners against big business represented by the mining company of La Hood, who sweeps all aside in his greed — murdering and bullying people and destroying the environment, washing away the hillside in his lust for gold. Clint is setting a deliberate environmental and topical sub-plot to his conventional tale of revenge, a good example of the ease of mutation of the Western. Eastwood uses the film to attack the greed of big business and to defend the individual trying to scrape together a living. This is very much a film of the 1980s, of the time of Gecko’s creed that ‘greed is good’ as epitomized in the 1987 film Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987).

Big business is not only indifferent to the environment but has a corrupt legal system on its side. A new corrupt sheriff, Stockburn, is appointed to support La Hood’s business ventures. Clint rides off alone to fight Stockburn and his six deputies. There is a certain salvific quality in siding with the poor against the oppressors. In Western terms it is defending the freedom of the frontier against the urbanizing oppression of the east. It should be noted that Stockburn and his deputies come from the urban east to oppress those seeking room to be people.

Stockburn and the Preacher have clashed previously. Stockburn thought he had killed him years before (earlier the Preacher is seen taking his shirt off and revealing five wounds/bullet scars on his back - five wounds of Christ?). Is this, as Andrew Greeley seems to think, a clash between the Devil and the Christ-like pale rider? The Preacher kills Stockburn and his six deputies as well as La Hood himself. When he kills Stockburn, Stockburn calls out ‘You! You!’ Greeley believes ‘that he recognizes the face of the pale rider as perhaps the face of God, Christ, or an avenging angel, as he now at the moment of his death, sees his judge and executioner’.19

In his study of Pale Rider, Greeley points out Eastwood’s skill as a director. The pale rider is always on higher ground looking down on the small mining community - or the corrupt town - on those being judged, only coming down to their level to perform a miracle or to judge decisively.

Pale Rider is more explicitly about God and God’s judgement than High Plains Drifter. The concerns remain. If God and Christ are like this then God help us. God conforms to all the stereotypes of flawed masculinity. It is a God created from the masculine power language of hymns and worship (King - Almighty - Judge - Father - Lord - Protector). It is a God who is remote and only descends to dole out judgement or to flex his miraculous muscles. This is a God who remains aloof, unknown and unnamed. Forgiveness and repentance are unknown qualities to this God.

As in High Plains Drifter, the Preacher/Stranger is good news for those who need empowerment. The miners - the panhandlers - receive hope from his intervention in the impossible battle against (the Wild West’s equivalent of) the multi-national corporation. But how empowering is this supernatural help? The Preacher does it all for them, they are not participants in the struggle for freedom.

The American Monomyth

Those who are given to seeing Christ-types in contemporary films often cite High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider as two examples. One has to acknowledge that Clint Eastwood is deliberately playing with biblical imagery but I want to support John Shelton Lawrence and'Robert Jewett’s argument in The Myth of the American Superhero that sees not a Christ- figure but one of many examples of an American take on the hero or monomyth. Lawrence and Jewett have noted how film-makers have been influenced by the work of Joseph Campbell in identifying a monomyth that is common to all cultures and all eras.20 This has developed into a particular American version that dominates any number of Hollywood plotlines.

A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then recedes into obscurity.21

This form of the monomyth certainly has echoes of the Christ-figure, the suffering, selfless servant who impassively gives his life for others even if Christ is hardly the zealous crusader who destroys evil. But these aren’t Christ-types are they? They have certainly jettisoned the inconvenience of the Sermon on the Mount and all that namby-pamby stuff. These heroes who save communities and even the world are almost without exception white males and almost without exception the story is anti-democratic, and anti community institutions - local, national or international. The law, the authorities, the government are invariably seen to be failing, weakened by liberal values (all that ‘love your enemies’ nonsense) and therefore justice requires that the gun be placed in the right private hands. (This you might note is not far from George W. Bush’s reading of the war against Iraq or Ronald Reagan’s alleged remark that the Oliver North story would make ‘one heck of a movie someday’.)

The American monomyth explains why so many of the heroes that people identify as Christ-types, like the avengers in Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (1985) or High Plains Drifter (1972), cannot be seen as Christ- figures. The redemptive violence of the American Superhero negates any such identification even when the film-maker is eager to offer us a distinct Christ-imagery.

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

The Outlaw Josey Wales was made between the two previous Westerns. Its theme is very different. Eastwood sees the film as trying to take the Western back to its roots. It shows a confident manner and its slow ‘languid’ pace is typical of Eastwood’s developing style. This style takes time to relish the landscape and makes the sudden outburst of violence all the more telling.

The film starts in paradise. Despite civil war engulfing the country Josey Wales and his family have found their patch of land and are happily engaged in tilling the soil. This is the big country, the promised land of peace and honest labour, where you can find yourself and be yourself. A gang of Union redlegs loot and burn his smallholding, killing his wife and son. Josey retrieves his gun from the charred remains and prepares for retribution. Joining the Confederate cause he and his band are betrayed, he flees and is chased by the Union redleg gang responsible for the destruction of his wife, son and home and by the betrayer of his confederate band.

Despite his attempt to remain alone, on his journey he gathers a whole community. First, he befriends an Indian Chief - betrayed by the government’s promises - and an Indian woman, betrayed by her own people. Later in his journeying he meets a spirited old woman, looking for her son’s old smallholding. Her son, a member of a redleg gang, had died in the war. The rest of her family except her daughter (who inevitably falls for Clint) have been killed by comancheros on the journey west. This mixed group, all of whom have reason to hate each other, form a community and live together on the smallholding. They have learnt forgiveness and have been able to move on.

Josey Wales, the Union redleg Tyrill and Fletcher (who betrayed Josey and his confederate band) are the ones fighting the war long after the peace has been declared. They can’t forgive and move on. In the final sequence, when Fletcher and Josey confront each other, there is no final shoot-out, no retribution - there is forgiveness and both are able to move on: Josey to live on the smallholding and start a new life and Fletcher to ride away to a new beginning in Mexico.

The film ends as it begins, in paradise. The state of salvation has been achieved. The community forged by forgiveness can grow and develop. It is not a conventional end to a Western and in that sense it is a revisionist Western. Josey Wales still embodies the masculinity of the standard Western hero but this is forced on him by circumstance rather than choice. Fundamentally he is compassionate and altruistic, a well-armed shepherd who tends the weak.

Josey Wales is a man who found happiness, had it ripped away from him but regains happiness in the wide-open spaces of the Wild West. In the book he marries Laura Lee - Clint however did not want to be domesticated and in that sense he remains a standard Western hero, unbound by love. This happiness is possible because of the forgiveness that allows him to bury the past and his diffuse community, who have all in some sense had to come to terms with past hatred and prejudices in order to settle down peacefully. This state of well-being is only possible because of the word of honour treaty between Ten Bears, the Comanche leader, and Josey Wales. Ten Bears and all the Indians in the film are depicted in a sympathetic manner. All are honourable and intelligent.

It is a film that honours the Western conventions but gently subverts them. The good news is that forgiveness and community (people need people) prove greater than violence and the lone gunman hell bent on revenge. Some have seen this film as an allegory for post-Vietnam USA: the need to embrace the ideal of a multi-faith, multicultural society where past hatreds have been forgiven and we learn to live together in peace. It certainly is an allegory for a more racially inclusive USA that has learnt to live together and move on from a bitter past; in many ways a deeply spiritual and hopeful film.

Unforgiven (1992)

Unforgiven begins with this text on the screen and Clint Eastwood’s haunting (self-composed but uncredited) ‘Claudia’s theme’ on the soundtrack:

She was a comely young woman and not without prospects. Therefore it was heartbreaking to her mother that she would enter into marriage with William Munny, a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition. When she died, it was not at his hands as her mother might have expected but of smallpox.22

The film is about William Munny, a former murderer transformed by the love of a good woman, who gave up a life of killing to raise a family and try his hand at pig-farming. His wife is the significant absence that pervades the whole film, just as surely as her theme dominates the soundtrack.

With his wife dead, and swine fever killing off his pigs, Munny is lured back into his old ways by the Schofield Kid, an aspiring gunfighter who brings the older man word of a bounty being offered in the town of Big Whisky. The bounty is offered by the town whores for the murder of two cowboys, one of whom has cut the face of Delilah, one of the whores. Munny, after initially refusing the Kid’s offer, teams up with his old partner Ned Logan and sets off to join the Kid.

Eastwood himself claims that he made the film out of concern about violence and gunplay in society. ‘When you are a perpetrator of violence, and when you get involved in that sort of thing, you rob your soul as well as the person you are committing a violent act against.’23 Gene Hackman, who plays the sheriff (and won an Oscar), initially turned the part down because he felt he had made too many violent films, but reconsidered when he realized its strong anti-violent message. The film is not just another violent film purporting to be preaching anti-violence, it is a film that undermines the whole warped view of masculinity that struts through so many Westerns.

The film is driven by flawed masculinity. It is an insult to the manhood of one of the cowboys in the brothel that unleashes such terrible violence. ‘Alls she done, when she seen he has a teensy little pecker, is give a giggle. That’s all.’24 The victim, Delilah, isn’t enthusiastic about exacting revenge and even seems inclined to accept the ‘innocent’ cowboy’s gift by way of apology. It is the head of the brothel, Alice, who is anxious to use the incident to exact some retribution for their continual abuse at the hands of the cowboys, ‘who ride us like horses’. It is Alice who makes the girls pool their resources to provide the bounty. The whores of Big Whisky aren’t innocent in the film, they are desperate for a bloody revenge. They want to pay for two killings, even though one of the cowboys tried to constrain his partner. Theirs is not the noblest of causes. Even in the eye for eye, death for death mentality that pervades Western and American culture, this is revenge out of kilter.

The bounty hunters are all flawed human beings. Richard Harris plays English Bob, whose finest hour seems to have been the drunken shooting of another drunken cowboy. This cowardly killing is being rewritten as a mythic tale of the Wild West, and English Bob is written up as the Duke of Death, by an accompanying journalist. Little Bill, the sheriff, debunks the myth. The inflated past of masculine valour is deflated. The Duke of Death becomes the Duck of Death, as Little Bill deliberately misreads the biographer’s title.

Even the three ‘heroes’, Munny, Ned Logan and the Schofield Kid are no shining white knights. Munny was a murderer, ‘You’d be William Munny out of Missouri, killer of women and children.’ Munny replies ‘I’ve killed just about anything that walked or crawled.’25 Neither is the Schofield Kid a hero; he has a fantasy name he has chosen for himself as he becomes an enthusiastic recruit to the gunslinging world. The film underlines his foolishness by making the boy short-sighted. When the boy does kill one of the errant cowboys it is when the cowboy was unarmed, pants round his ankles, having a shit. The death of the other cowboy is also unglorious. It is bungled by Ned’s poor shooting, thereby debunking the myth of his famed ability with the rifle. The wounded cowboy takes a horribly long time dying: ‘Give him some water, god dammit’, yells Munny to the cowboy’s companions.

Clint Eastwood’s Munny exacts a terrible revenge, killing five men. But even this final shoot-out is messy and inglorious; nobody dies with a first shot. He is no hero and never was.

The film successfully debunks the myth of a heroic past, beginning with the unglamorous scene of the gunfighter turned farmer William Munny, scrambling in a muddy pen to separate healthy from sick hogs.

Thereafter, Munny is represented as a man whose body repeatedly fails him, who consistently has trouble mounting his horse, who suffers from debilitating fever chills and horrifying memories of a wayward youth.26

Eastwood’s portrait of Munny combined with Ned’s, lack of stomach for killing, the Schofield Kid’s horror at killing, Little Bill’s horrific killing and torturing of Ned, the beating of English Bob, not to mention the slur on the cowboy’s manhood that starts it all off leaves the masculine stereotype in tatters. There is no riding tall in this film, no noble cause and William Munny returns with the bounty money, not forgiven and redeemed but unforgiven.

What is so startling about the film is that William Munny is really the Stranger, the Preacher, Josey Wales and the Man With No Name all rolled into one. This is what happens to those characters after they ride off into the sunset at the end of all those other Westerns. In those Westerns we are frequently left feeling that the hero is at peace with himself and is retiring to the wide open spaces - saved. Unforgiven offers a dose of reality. The salvation project can go wrong; it can be lost through death and disease and the hauntings of the past life.

The film debunks the myths of the west; it is not yet another take on the American monomyth. Its setting is also fascinating. As in other films the landscape is wide open and beautiful as Munny and his companions ride through it, but as they near their goal the gloom descends, the rain falls. The town of Big Whisky is a rain-drenched dark place and Eastwood keeps the film resolutely dark, never to return to the light wide-open spaces. David Webb Peoples’s screenplay allows for no soft options; even the possibility of romance between Delilah and Munny is rejected.

In this film there is no promised land, no wide-open space which offers peace and hope. Munny has found love and set up home only to have his dream, which was also his redemption, shattered by the death of his wife and the economic death of his farm through swine fever. Redemption has proved temporary and elusive. Munny is almost forced to ply another trade by circumstances. Munny’s story is paralleled in this respect by Little Bill’s story, the sheriff of Big Whisky. He has tried to escape his past, which was spent among the drunken cowboys like Munny and English Bob, by becoming a lawman, trading on his past reputation. But his paradise is far from perfect and epitomized in the film by the building of his house. He wants a place to sit, drink and admire the scenery. In reality his house is a lopsided bodged job and leaks in any rainstorm.

As in most Westerns, Munny’s journey has brought him west to find a new life with his wife and children. This is the conventional trek from the cities of the east to the open spaces of the west. By the end of the film the hero escapes to the city, to the urban life to start a new life for his family where it was rumoured he prospered in dry goods. It is worth observing that his new lite is in San Francisco - the urban west, as far west as you can physically go, the very end of the dream. This is the end of the west. We can only speculate whether he found redemption in San Francisco. We can say that in the film he never finds redemption. The constantly recurring Claudia’s theme expresses Munny’s longing to End again the forgiveness he felt with his wife.

Some commentators read the film differently, most notably Robert Jewett. He sees Unforgiven as a dangerous film: ‘It invites the public to solve its problems by shooting down its sheriff and placing truck bombs in front of its federal buildings.’27 He sees it as encouraging violent zeal against a corrupt regime ‘that tolerates the mutilation of women and the torturing and shaming of prisoners’.281 suppose it is a subject for debate but it fails to take account of the searing hellishness of killing in this Western, the debunking of the ideal of the promised land, the demythologizing of the mythic west and flawed masculinity.

In High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider we are offered theological themes and characters but they deliver a bogus view of God: a vengeful unpleasant God. The films are firmly within the conventions of the mythic Wild West. Both films offer a version of the American monomyth. In both The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven the Western conventions are subverted. In The Outlaw Josey Wales we are presented with a tale of salvation that is about forgiveness and the building of community. In Unforgiven we have a devastating tale of redemption and damnation that takes us through the promised land back to the city. Like Munny’s trek, Eastwood seems to be saying that the Western has nowhere else to go.

These four Western films offer a fascinating insight into the values, assumptions, anxieties and interests of contemporary USA. They say something about how Americans view the world through the pervasive influence of the American monomyth in contemporary culture. These films capture something of our persistent need to have utopias of freedom that give us some hope in our present, allowing us to dream beyond our confines. The Outlaw Josey Wales in particular helps us to understand how to build an inclusive community and leave behind old hatreds. Unforgiven wrestles with our struggle to redeem a violent past. It also debunks the macho image and gives a fascinating insight into masculinity. All of this adds image, colour and insight into the social conversation of which theology is part. Of course, the main thing these films have in common is that historically the Wild West wasn’t like any one of them.

Notes

1. Statement about practical theology from Center for Congregational Research and Development, School of Theology, Boston University, http://www.bu.edu/ ccrd/about/practical.

2. Margaret R. Miles, Seeing and Believing, Boston: Beacon Press, 1996, p. xv.

3. Miles, Seeing, p. 193.

4. John Saunders, The Western Genre, London: Wallflower, 2001.

5. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, New York: Dover, 1996.

6. Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns - Making the Man 'in Fiction and Film, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 5.

7. Philip Potter, Life in All Its Fullness, Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1981, p. 1.

8. Ian Fraser, Study Encounter No 39, Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1975, p. 6.

9. Mitchell, Westerns, p. 5.

10. Philip French, Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre, London: Seeker and Warburg, 1973, P-

11. Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, London: Faber and Faber, 1997, pp. 35-44-

12. Clint Eastwood in Scorsese and Wilson, Personal Journey, pp. 42.-3.

13. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950, pp. 91-2.

14. Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.. p. 39.

15. Gary Wills, John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997, p. 302.

16. Christopher Frayling, Sergio Leone, London: Faber and Faber, 2000, pp. 245-6.

17. Derek Malcolm quoted in Christopher Tookey, The Critics Film Guide, London: Boxtree, 1994, p. 360.

18. Patrick McGilliagan, Clint-The Life and Legend, London: Harper Collins, 1999, p. 268.

19. Albert J. Bergesen and Andrew M. Greeley, God in the Movies, London: Transaction, 2000, p. 78.

20. Joseph S. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, New York: Meridian, 1956.

21. John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003, p. 6.

22. David Webb Peoples, Unforgiven - Screenplay, www.man-with-no- name.com, p. 1.

23. Scorsese and Wilson, Personal Journey, p. 43.

24. Peoples, Unforgiven, p. 2.

25. Peoples, Unforgiven, p. 57.

26. Mitchell, Westerns, p. 260.

27. Robert Jewett, St Paul Returns To The Movies, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999, p. 149.

28. Lawrence and Jewett, Myth, p. 151.

12. A Fistful of Shekels:

Ehud the Judge (Judges 3.12-30) and
the Spaghetti Western

ERIC S. CHRISTIANSON

As critics of American culture inform us, the American west and the American Western are different creatures. There is a point at which most historical narratives of the ‘Wild West’ were inflated into historicized romance. As Greg Garrett puts it, ‘the use of the violent legends of the wild, wild West makes for a more dramatic story for film-makers than the often dreary reality’.^[3] The Western as a genre says more, according to Garrett, about its producers than its subjects, for ‘the Western, like many film genres, seems to reflect American attitudes towards society and order’.^[4] As for scholars of the biblical ‘Wild West’ of the Ehud narrative (Judg. 3.13-30), the case seems less clear. Robert Alter and Baruch Halpern, for example, represent two very different approaches to the genre and rationale of the Hebrew Bible’s ‘violent legends’ (‘fictionalized history’ akin to prose fiction and historical narrative respectively).^[5] It is at least clear to most that the Ehud story makes ample use of rhetorical devices in order to establish a character for whom violence is a tool with which to deliver the word of God (see Text Box 12,1, ‘What is a Judge?’). The Western genre also presents us with some ambiguously virtuous violent heroes. It is with reference to such figures that I will reflect on the machinations of and rationale for Ehud’s violence, as well as the rhetoric of entertainment that it shares with the Western.

1. What is a ‘Judge’?

The judges (Hebrew, shophet) of the Old Testament appear mainly in the book that bears that name, but also in the material from Exodus through to the books of Samuel (Samuel himself is the ‘last judge’).

Judges were generally unlike what we consider today to be a judge. Their prototype was Moses, who embodied charismatic leadership, teaching and judging (see Exod. 18, where Moses sets up a system in which judges hear the many cases of Israelite complaint). By the time we get to the book of Judges, however, a ‘judge’ has become much more than those who sit in judgement (though compare the book’s only female judge, Deborah, in Judg. 4). Chapter 2 fleshes out the judges’ role: ‘Then the Israelites did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and worshiped the Baals... and they provoked the Lord to anger . . . Then the Lord raised up judges, who delivered them out of the power of those who plundered them . . . Whenever the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge, and he delivered them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge’ (2.11-18). In the book of Judges, judges deliver Israel at the national level. They are socio-political saviours who through their deliverance bring the promise of national spiritual renewal. The book of Judges itself, however, is highly sceptical of whether the judges actually achieve it.

We track the Man’s back as he walks into town. The camera is gradually raised from a close-up of the Man’s holster to an overhead perspective of the town, its name and a slight horizon visible. Rain pours excessively. The Man pauses. A full 20-second shot pans up the length of his body, emphasizing the iconography: hands at side (a leather gunfighter’s brace strapped to his right forearm), poncho, hat tipped towards camera, then cigar and face, capturing a deliberate and steady lighting up of his cheroot. Towards the end of this shot, jaunty piano music is heard from the distance.

The Man enters a 'classic’ saloon. The camera scans, from the Man’s view, a jovial scene; music is churned out on a cabinet piano and almost everyone is busy drinking and cavorting. ‘Goodtime ladies’ lean over the banister. Already the Man is apart from the crowd; true to typical Western form, he embodies the plains, the outsider. The Man approaches the local sheriff.

The Man: Light?

The sheriff lights the Man’s cheroot with his own cigar.

The Man: You know B. B. Cavanaugh?

No response. The Man studies him with an intense stare.

The Man: Now tell me, you know where I can find ’im? The sheriff looks over to his left; the Man’s eyes follow.

Sheriff: There, at that table. He’s got ’is back to ya.

Cavanaugh sits at a table with four other men. They are playing poker. The Man: Thanks.

The Man slowly walks to the table, which is up a small flight of stairs. The Man sets his hand on the deck of cards at the centre and begins to deal five cards to Cavanaugh and himself, inviting a game. Close-ups on the faces around the table follow, showing the indignation of the Man’s opponents. Cavanaugh goes along with the challenge, exchanging two cards with ‘the dealer’. We share Cavanaugh’s view of his final hand, three kings. The Man puts down his hand, three aces.

Cavanaugh: Didn’t hear what the bet was.

The Man slowly looks aside and casually spits.

The Man: Your life.

Cavanaugh rises quickly from the table and a fight ensues. Midway through the fight the saloon music stops and the only sound is now of the Man landing blows and deflecting Cavanaugh’s, and of rain outside. We cut to a man at a barber shop getting a shave (probably Cavanaugh’s brother). The sheriff appears at the window and motions for him to come. He leaves. Cut hack to the saloon and, using only his left hand (his right is ‘bound’ by his gunfighter brace), the Man knocks Cavanaugh around until they are both at the bar, the Man with his back to the entrance, grasping Cavanaugh’s collar.

The Man: Alive or dead. It’s your choice.

As the Man says this, three men appear at the door behind him, their guns drawn. The barber shop customer is in the centre. The Man studies them in the mirror behind the bar.

Barber shop customer: Let Brett go.

A pause while the camera closes on each determined face of the men at the door. The Man spins around and lets off three shots (now firing with his right hand), killing all three men. Cavanaugh moves to pick up his gun. As soon as he does, the Man, without looking at him, shoots him dead (again with his righthand). The camera closes in on his killing hand as he twirls his gun into his holster.

The next scene has the Man collecting his money at the sheriff’s office. An over-the-shoulder shot from behind the sheriff shows the Man flanked by a row of rifles.

Sheriff: Two-thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money. Takes me three years to earn it.

The Man: Tell me, isn’t the sheriff supposed to be courageous, loyal and above all honest?

Sheriff: Yeah, that he is.

The Man pulls the sheriff’s star off of his vest and studies it. He goes outside to where a few local men are standing. He throws the star down into the dirt (probably a homage to High Noon/

The Man: You people need a new sheriff.

As the Man mounts his steed and rides off into the horizon, music signifies the Man’s success: bars from the opening title scene, the same signature ‘whistle’ tune as earlier, now build with the gradual accompaniment of cracking whips, church bells, strumming guitars and boisterous yells.

Eastwood and Leone’s laconic creation appealed (eventually) to a huge international audience. Cinema-goers obviously enjoyed the bold, violent and subversive wit, present in abundance in the above sequence. The spare tough talk, the confident solitary figure (no responsibilities, no social ties, transgressing sociological norms), the possession of tricksterlike fighting skills in the face of aggrandized intimidation - all contribute to the appeal of the product.

My main reason for focusing on this particular sequence is that, as Christopher Frayling points out, in this Leone film there are elements of parody in his treatment of ‘classical’ Western motifs (e.g. saloon scenes, poker games, riding off into the sunset/distance),6 and this sequence pretty well has them all. Another factor is that, like the Ehud story, it is a selfcontained unit, and the consequences are not felt in the motion of the storyline but function instead to notify the audience of the Man’s extraordinary skills and heroic character. What follows, then, is a developed analysis of this sequence and of the Ehud narrative, in order to illuminate shared rhetorical features. I will then move on to reflect on the relationship of both to their social contexts (particularly in terms of the possibility of social commentary in both).

Proleptic Potency

This is our first sight of the Man, and by all accounts we are meant to be impressed. Having been provided minimal characterization, during this sequence we come to realize that he is possessed with superhuman ability, an invincible gunfighter. We are enabled to infer from his solitary arrival and extraordinary autonomy (in the end he ‘takes on’ eight baddies) that he does not have (nor will he have) any real social or familial ties or responsibilities. This is easy to infer because we already know this stock gunfighter from countless Westerns. This use of stock characters who provide for the ‘reader’ a relatively reliable expectation is one of the more interesting shared rhetorical features of the Western and the Judges narrative. Indeed, Philip French recognizes in the Westerns from the 1940s through to the early 1970s a relatively short list of actors who consistently embody heroes, villains, ‘[r]anchers, sheriffs, deputies, sidekicks, assorted citizenry’.7 This allowed directors to ‘work’ actors into new patterns and mine them for new meanings. Rhetorically this is precisely what happens in Judges. The Judges narrative provides a pattern of expectation in the first description of the ‘apostasy cycle’ (2.11-19). The pattern that readers subsequently expect is generally followed closely throughout, and it is mined for new meanings through subtle variations in and deviation from it.

As the Man pauses to light up, the camera tells us that he is full of confidence (even the way he retrieves the cheroot, lifting his poncho in the dark rain, suggests the access of some secret strength). Such flourishes are where viewers locate meaning in the Spaghetti Western.

The heroes and villains of Spaghetti Westerns are almost invariably obsessed by ‘style’, ‘image’, ‘ritual’, and their confrontations or interactions are, typically, symbolic ones ... and the hero figures are usually identifiable by a collection of external gestures, mannerisms, ‘stylish’ articles of clothing, or even motifs on the soundtrack, rather than by anything remotely to do with the ‘inner man’.8

Potency and future success are here established by the Man’s preparatory and manneristic ritual. The poker game that he so provocatively forces upon his opponents is a potent symbol suggesting that he is in some way charmed for success. ‘Poker in the Western is at once a deeply serious activity and a marginal one. Success is defined more by character than by skill, and personalities are determined by their attitude to the game and the way they play it.’9 In other words, that the Man finds himself with three aces over three kings is a signifier; we are never given room to doubt his success, and we may enjoy the anticipation of its execution. Such signification is not unlike those attributes of Ehud that set him off as ‘professional’. He was no ordinary warrior. Later in Judges we read, ‘Of all this force [the Benjaminites], there were seven hundred picked men who were left-handed; every one could sling a stone at a hair, and not miss’ (20.16; cf. 1 Chron. 12.2). These were specially trained warriors. As Baruch Halpern observes concerning Ehud’s binding of the right hand (3.15), Ehud

was one of a breed of men schooled in the use of the left hand for war . . . Ehud conveyed Israel’s tribute to Eglon, guarding it against local bandits and kings. He was charged with this mission because he was the closest thing to a professional soldier that the Israel of his period produced. He was a seasoned samurai, or, to use a modern caricature, a sort of James Bond. Bred for combat, schooled to feats of sinister valor, Ehud was precisely the man to execute the operation that Judges 3 describes.10

Like Eastwood throughout the trilogy (if not all of his ‘gun-oriented’ films, such as the Dirty Harry franchise), Ehud can hit the mark several times in the same place. Indeed, structurally, the Western film genre consistently evidences the revelation of the protagonist’s ‘special ability’.11 Deceit can be a part of this skill factor (more on which below).

Ehud’s manufacturing a roughly 18-inch long dagger and concealing it under his clothes (3.16) not only provides necessary information but also establishes his heroic potency by foreshadowing his success. Meir Sternberg recognizes this pivotal moment as a proleptic projection of victory:

a left-handed hero about to confront the oppressor of his people with a miniature sword hidden where nobody would suspect it equals a story of assassination. Everything so falls into place, therefore, that Eglon is already as good as dead even before he grants the ambassador a private audience.12

Dangerous Deception

Ehud is to ‘carry’ to Eglon a tribute, a material gift of some kind,13 a token of homage and submission. In the Deuteronomistic History (Deuteronomy—Kings), failure to present the tribute is equivalent to a refusal of loyalty, and in such contexts the weaker party is coerced through military superiority with the threat of destruction.14 But this symbol turns out merely to be a ruse in order to gain entry into Eglon’s presence. In Judges the sense of political tribute occurs only in this passage (and that four times), which suggests the degree to which the oppression was politically entrenched, thereby underlining the enormity of Ehud’s achievement. As a symbol of the oppressor’s authority, Ehud renders the tribute meaningless and empty by his deceitful deliverance.

Ehud is a loner, a trait recognized by commentators.15 After delivering his tribute, he slips away from the crowd, suggesting that he must do the business alone. While there may be good strategic and political reasons for his solitary action,16 there remains a certain heroic toughness about his task - he is a James Bond, a Dirty Harry - he is the law. The fact that he works alone is indicative of his status as God’s deliverer and even hints at his special, deceptive, abilities.17 Like the Man, Ehud has no qualms about winning the ‘shoot-out’ with deceit. Indeed, there is little that Ehud does in the story that does not involve some deception.18

Subversive Wit and Laconic Tough Talk

The Ehud narrative displays its subversive wit in a number of ways.19 And as Marc Brettler has shown (here citing F. Rosenthal), the use of scatology and the violation of royal rule by a single commoner suggest a ‘momentary lifting of one of the many restrictions which the . . . social environ-

ment imposes upon man [szc]’.20 Such sociological upheaval creates a moment of escape, of palpable relief - of laughter. The audience is of course meant to laugh at the Moabites and clearly not with them. As J. L. McKenzie puts it, ‘The story of the assassination is full of earthy details which bring out the cleverness of the Israelite and the crass stupidity of the Moabites.’21 As John Kutsko suggests, ‘Even the description of the confused guards in vv 24-25 borders on slapstick, were it not for the sobering discovery on the other side of the door.’22 Ehud’s wit and wordplay not only frame the tale memorably but function to establish him as a potent and unified heroic symbol.

Ehud’s wit is conveyed in strikingly minimalist form. Not only is there an ironic use of wordplay in his ‘secret message’, but the economy of words suggests a linguistic toughness. Ehud speaks twice in the assassination scene proper; first five words (v. 19) and then four (v. 20). More importantly, in the Hebrew, he uses a total of six words, repeating three of them twice. First, Thave-a secret word for-you, O-king’, and then, when he and the king are alone, Thave-a word of-God for-you’. Ehud’s words are choice, ironic and as sharp as his sword (the secret word [or ‘thing’] turns out to be God’s word, which turns out to be Ehud’s double- edged dagger [thing]). Significantly, the first address (v. 19) acknowledges the servant-master relationship by addressing Eglon as king. By dropping the decorous title the second time, when they are alone (v. 20), Ehud dangerously withers the king’s status while inflating his own. The daring content of his dialogue is matched by the manner in which he delivers it: sparsely.

Again, Ehud’s behaviour finds a strange bedfellow in Westerns. Jane Tompkins offers relevant insight into (male) Western words:

Western literary and film heroes, almost to a man, use language grudgingly . . . The rank understatement, the clipping off of the indefinite article, are the kind of minimalist language heroes speak, a kind of desperate shorthand, comic, almost, in its attempt to communicate without using words . . . The string of commands John Wayne issues in [Red River, 1948] ... - ‘Tie ’em up short’, ‘Get up on the seat’, ‘Let’s go’, ‘Keep ’em movin’ - are typical. Heroes give abrupt orders in monosyllables.23

Similarly, Lee Clark Mitchell suggests that in the Western,

the visual busyness of . . . [the hero’s] demeanor is balanced by vocal inactivity, sonic stillness that regularly offers a nearly physical pause in the narrative line ... So entirely self-contained is the later Western hero that he seems to exist beyond the everyday commonplaces of talk and explanation, of persuasion, argument, indeed beyond conversation altogether.24

In Ehud’s case, his provocative words demand an argument to back them up, and that argument is made, quite literally, by his ‘doublemouthed’ sword. Ehud thereby entrenches himself as a virile man of few words, a particularly masculine ideal; a man who lets his sword do the talking. Indeed, words in both stories serve to provoke. Like the Man’s words, Ehud’s verbal showdown seems also to wound the pride of its target; that is, the ‘fat thug’ Eglon appears to have been provoked into an angry response of ‘silence!’ (his only dialogue), scattering his servants (v. 19). Through his spare and provocative words, Ehud is established as a hermetically sealed hero.25 Most of the judges ‘judged’ within their given tribal borders.26 While Israel remained divided, characters like Ehud provided a potent unifying symbol. In effect, this story’s entertainment value comes through the image of Ehud as a quiet monolith who controls his own environment through language and self-reliance, remaining ‘hermetic’ and, in slow-motion,27 punching Eglon so full of holes that his enemy is robbed of his own physical integrity.28

Personal Justice

Because Leone’s Spaghetti trilogy is steeped in the rhetoric of stock Hollywood Western typologies, the films evidence (an ironic?) nostalgia. While they are beginning to scrutinize the Hollywood myths, they also tentatively cling to them. The Man is still a good guy and does not shoot down an unarmed man, and he even helps families in need. Indeed, his character is tinged with positive mythical references. In Leone’s own summation he was ‘an incarnation of the Angel Gabriel’.29 The Man does not operate in a moral vacuum.30 His own ‘justice’ is personal, and yet disinterested. He is certainly not interested in acquisition of property, and his desire for money is without motivation. The taking of the sheriff’s badge suggests that the Man’s individual brand of justice is able to occupy the higher moral ground and to pass judgement on the corrupt corporate ‘justice’ that the sheriff represents.

Ehud’s violence likewise is rooted in personal accountability; that is, his action is autonomous and the divine cause is only insinuated by his own speech (‘a word of God for you ...’, v. 20; cf. v. 28, in which God’s action is again only insinuated by Ehud’s speech: ‘the Lord has delivered ...’). His individual violence does, however, lead to the corporate violence of Israel: ‘At that time they killed about ten thousand of the Moabites, all strong, able-bodied men; no one escaped’ (v. 29). Yet even the corporate violence of the story is to be understood as under Ehud’s control. His success against Eglon presumably gives confidence; he ‘sounds the trumpet’ and leads a ‘cavalry charge’. While this violence is for the benefit of the nation, it is couched in Ehud’s terms only. He was before them (v. 27). His call to the Israelites was “‘Follow after me” . . . and they went after him’ (v. 28). It is his rhetoric that leads to victory.

2. Entertaining Violence in Social Context

Understanding the cultural forces behind the legend-making processes of the Western film might suggest avenues of exploration regarding the rationale of the production of Israel’s own violent ‘cowboys’.

Violence is embedded in both of the world-views on show here. As for the Western, Stephen Prince suggests that it

is the only genre which, by its nature, creates a dialogue about violence, about what violence is, who may use it, and when. Similarly, the Western is the only genre which inherently talks about the land, about access to the prairies and the mountains and, therefore, about ownership and, implicitly, about the economic and political evolution of the United States.31

The Western offers ‘a serious orientation to the problem of violence such as can be found almost nowhere else in ... [American] culture’.32 Violence in the Western becomes a means not so much to a higher moral end but to a demonstration of masculinity. And yet there is a certain impotence implied by the Western’s attempt. ‘The Western as a form appears incapable of coping with social problems it is asked to resolve, and one of its central premises - that violence is legitimate in certain circumstances, when all else fails - is gradually undone [in the genre] through its own excess.’33 And as John Cawelti points out, the notion of legitimized violence has its base in fantasy: ‘where some values place a great emphasis on individual aggressiveness and others emphasize social responsibility and conformity, the fantasy of the hero who reluctantly, but nobly aids the cause of social order by acts of individual violence probably corresponds to a widespread fantasy of legitimated aggression’.34

Later Westerns have continued to scrutinize the traditional mythology, particularly Eastwood’s 1992 film, Unforgiven (itself dedicated to Leone). Unforgiven undermines, as Koosed and Linafelt point out, ‘the notion that the violence practised by the good guys is qualitatively different from the violence practised by the bad guys, and that the community can in fact host this “limited” violence within it for the sake of maintaining its essentially “peaceful” nature.’35 What makes Judges remarkable in this regard is that it is not the violence of the bad guys that is showcased, but, as in the case of Eastwood’s earlier Westerns, that of the good guys.

Although there is little in the Ehud story to aid the reader in morally assessing its violence, it may be that the story inherently provokes reflection on such issues, particularly that it ‘creates a dialogue about

2. Screen Violence: New or Old?

There is a general misconception that brutal violence in cinema is a relatively recent phenomenon, a product even of postmodernity. In his book, Classical Film Violence (London: Rutgers University Press; 2003), Stephen Prince insightfully plots two axes: ‘The referential component of violence - the behavior that is depicted - is the x-axis, while its cinematic treatment - the stylistic design - is the y-axis’ (p. 35). Intriguingly, the x-axis, the actual acts of violence in cinema, has always been high. What has undergone much greater change is the y-axis, the stylistic representation of violence. In other words, cinema has never shied from acts of violence, even brutal violence. From the earliest films, people have been murdered and abused in all manner of morbidly inventive ways. But film-makers, particularly those of the heavily regulated era of the early 1930s through to the mid 1960s, did shy from its depiction, and opted for often ingenious means of presentation (silhouettes, explicit use of sound, violence just off screen and so on). Indeed, the x-axis of violent acts changed very little from the beginning of cinema right up to the ‘golden age of violence’, inaugurated by the release in 1968 of such violent films as Bonnie and Clyde and Once Upon a Time in the West. Since then, both axes have grown considerably (and the y-axis quickly caught up with the x), and there is little now in the spectrum of world cinema that is off limits in terms both of violent acts and their stylistic representation.

violence’. The story may at least provide the canvas for such questions to be raised; that is, it can be seen to invite reflection on the values it is seemingly endorsing. In some respects the Ehud story shares the moral ambiguity of Unforgiven. Ehud may be constructed as ‘good’ partly because God has raised him up, but he is raised out of nowhere. And God’s role is no guarantor of Ehud’s ‘goodness’. Apart from the brief descriptor, son of Gera, a Benjaminite (3.15b), we have no indication of why he is a judge, whether he is good or trustworthy (or whether that matters), or of what events brought him to this crisis. We are never told he is good and we must make assumptions to construct him and his actions as positive. God ‘raises’ him analeptically but he is linked by his lineage to the house of Saul. He is sneaky, deceitful and, when his violence is read at face value, his actions are generally offensive to our modern sensibilities. Whereas the spirit of Yahweh falls upon most other major judges at least once (Othniel, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson), here it is absent. While Lillian Klein goes as far as to suggest that Yahweh’s absence in most of the narrative evidences his displeasure with Ehud,36 we are at a loss in terms of the narrator’s lack of judgement, both on this particular event and on the attitude towards the kind of leadership that legitimizes Ehud’s violence in Judges as a whole.37

3. The Possibility of Social Commentary

Seeking ways in which to place the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s in their social context, Frayling considers several approaches that understand the films with reference to class division (between northern (‘intelligentsia’ upper class) and southern (petit-bourgeoisie) Italy - Leone was from the South) and political conscience. Film critic Lino Micciche, for example, identifies a series of questions:

The Italian Western is in its own way a typical by-product of mid-6os Italian society, and reflects, more or less unconsciously, some of the sociological data, some of the hidden history of those years. It especially betrays the ideological and moral confusion of that period, as well as the difficulty, which seemed to exist in a broad section of petty- bourgeois public opinion, of distinguishing ‘who was guilty?, ‘who was responsible?’, ‘who were the good guys?’38

Audiences hence identified with a man whose only option was violence and who was not a hero, but a ‘cynic in despair’. Frayling further speculates that the popularity of Westerns among Italian audiences reflected a desire to escape from society, and the hostility to codified law and centralized government, occasionally enshrined in Hollywood Westerns, became a central theme in the Italian Western. He finds a parallel in the hostilities of ‘Southern Italian society’.39

Others also recognize the political edge to the Western’s rhetoric. John Lenihan locates Westerns of the late 1960s and early 1970s in an increasingly anti-establishment tradition, decrying the

inequalities and dehumanization of postwar urban industrial development . . . Movies in general and Westerns in particular became more critical in their vision of society, more pessimistic about reform, and more accepting of personal violence as an alternative, rather than a solution, to social vapidity.40

As Lenihan remarks of the style of satire that Leone’s films embodied, ‘The premise of these satirical stabs at the classical Western is that frontier society is basically violent, greedy, and hypocritical, which in turn renders the hero’s deviousness a perfectly logical response.’41

The Western’s vision in the 1960s and 1970s was at least in part a form of social commentary, even satire, on modern America, an America that Leone held simultaneously in esteem and derision. Might the Ehud narrative also be understood as social commentary, even satire? I have already noted the moral ambiguity of the story. That is, while it does work on the same lines as the mythology of the Man of the late 1960s, the seeds of its deconstruction are present as well. If there is satire, several scholars (notably Brettler and Handy) clarify the fact that the Moabites are the obvious target. But perhaps they are not the real target. In Judges, apart from the recounting of a previous battle with Moab in chapter n, Moab or the Moabites only feature in the Ehud story. Given their caricatured nature (e.g. fat, thick), the Moabites might best be regarded as rather empty ciphers for a ‘foreign power’. In other words, it does not seem to be that important in this story that Eglon is a Moabite. Moab is one nation among many from whom the major judges will achieve a limited deliverance. Indeed, the story as a whole, while achieving an 8o-year peace, demonstrates the failure of violent ‘justice’ to achieve a lasting solution to the turmoil of Israel’s foreign relations. And even though the land has ‘rest’, there is nothing to suggest that this achievement is politically desirable. It cannot stop the cycle of apostasy. In fact, Ehud is among the first in a string of successively less successful judges.42 Like the Man, change can only be affected at the micro level. To go beyond that would be to destroy the efficacy of the myth.43

While I am not denying that the Ehud story is satirizing something, we simply cannot be as precise about its target as we can with the Western. Having said that, based on the above analysis I would like to suggest some possibilities about the social comment that might be at work in the Ehud story. Perhaps similar social forces were at work on the Judges storytellers. Perhaps their environment was one in which the only real human virtues were physical strength, fighting skills, wit and even subversion. Perhaps the Ehud story is the by-product of a society awash with ideological and moral confusion (does not Judges ultimately ask, ‘Who are the good guys?’). Perhaps audiences did identify with an individual man whose only viable option was violence, and who was not a clearly defined hero. Perhaps the Ehud story does embody the desire to escape from society and reflects a turbulent relationship with any form of centralized government. Perhaps it is significant that an exilic, defeated society might produce a hero who lives on his wits and prefers fantasized acts of violence to social responsibility. Perhaps the premise of Judges is that the ‘frontier’ society of ancient Israel was basically violent, greedy and hypocritical, which rendered Ehud’s deviousness a logical response. And just as the Westerns use all kinds of‘baddies’ to satirize identifiable social forces, perhaps the production of this satire was driven by social inequalities and disempowerment. Finally, and most whimsically, perhaps as Ehud became saturated with the violence of ‘frontier’ life, he might have agreed with the haggard conclusion of Unforgiven’s William Munny (Eastwood), who, while destroying his enemy as well as any hope of redemption, declared, ‘Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.’44

Notes

1. G. Garrett, ‘The American West and the American Western: Printing the Legend’, Journal of American Culture 14 (1991): 99—105 (102).

2. Garrett, ‘The American West’, p. 102.

3. R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981, pp. 37-41; B. Halpern, The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996 (orig. pub. 1988), pp. 39-75. For an insightful analysis of both studies, see Marc Brettler, ‘Never the Twain Shall Meet? The Ehud Story as History and Literature’, HUCA 42 (1991): 285-304.

4. The first of Leone’s trilogy, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), sparked off a flood of imitations. The third of the trilogy was The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The term ‘Spaghetti Western’, originally used pejoratively of what critics perceived to be inferior Westerns, has come simply to refer to Spanish-Italian productions of Westerns (see the discussion of the term in Christopher Frayling’s influential study, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, London: LB. Tauris, rev. edn, 2000 (1981), pp. ix-x, xix).

5. At a broad cultural level (and in film criticism) his character is understood as ‘The Man With No Name’ or simply ‘the Man’ (see Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, p. 187).

6. Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, p. 49.

7. Philip French, Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre, London: Seeker and Warburg/BFI, 1973, pp. 57-8.

8. Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, p. 61 (my emphasis).

9. French, Westerns, p. 129.

10. Halpern, The First Historians, pp. 41, 43.

11. So Will Wright, Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975, pp. 66-7 et passim.

12. Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature

and the Drama of Reading, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 333"4-        .        .

13. Only rarely are the details of what the ‘tribute’ consists described. 1 Kgs 10.25 (NRSV) offers an insight from the description of ‘tribute’ given to Solomon from the ‘kings of the earth’: ‘objects of silver and gold, garments, weaponry, spices, horses, and mules, so much year by year’ (cf. 2 Kgs 8.9).

14. See the discussion in H.-J. Fabry and M. Weinfeld, ‘nnpo minha\ TDOT, VIII, pp. 407-21 (414-17).

15. See, for example, R. Bolin, Judges: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB, 6A; New York: Doubleday, 1975, p. 85; E. J. Hamlin, Judges: At Risk in the Promised Land, ITC; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990, P- 73

16. E. G. Kraeling suggests a number of such reasons; e.g. the first encounter was ‘as ill suited as possible for an attempt to assassinate the oppressor’ (‘Difficulties in the Story of Ehud’, JBL 54 (193 5): 205-10 (206)).

17. Similarly, see Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 119.

18. A feature widely recognized by commentators; e.g. Lillian R. Klein, The Triumph of Irony in the Book of Judges, JSOTSup, 68; Sheffield: Almond Press, 1988, p. 37; Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible, pp. 106, 117-18; J. L. McKenzie, The World of the Judges, London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1967, p. 123.

19. Numerous commentators highlight the story’s wit: so J. A. Soggin, Judges: A Commentary, OTL; London: SCM Press, 2nd edn, 1987, p. 49; Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, p. 39; Tom A. Jull, ‘mpo in Judges' 3: A Scatological Reading’, JSOT 81 (1998): 63-75 (p. 71); Yairah Amit, The Book of Judges: The Art of Editing, BIS, 38; Leiden: Brill, 1999, pp. 197-8.

20. Brettler, ‘Never the Twain Shall Meet?’, p. 298 (citing F. Rosenthal).

21. McKenzie, The World of the Judges, p. 123.

22. J. Kutsko, ‘Eglon’, in ABD (CD-ROM edn).

23. J. Tompkins, ‘Language and Landscape: An Ontology for the Western’, Art Forum 28 (1990): 94-9 (96).

24. Lee Clark Mitchell, ‘Violence in the Film Western’, in J. David Slocum (ed.), Violence and American Cinema, AFI Film Readers; New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 176-91 (179). Note also John G. Cawelti: ‘the laconic style is commonly associated with the Western hero, particularly in the twentieth century, when movie stars like Gary Cooper, John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda have vied for the prize as the Western hero who can say the fewest words with the least expression . . . Like his gun, language is a weapon the hero rarely uses, but when he does it is with precise and powerful effectiveness’ (The Six-Gun Mystique, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1973, p. 61).

25. Compare Tompkins, ‘Language and Landscape’, p. 97.

26. Note the comments on the function of boundaries in Judges in Koosed and Linafelt, ‘How the West Was Not One: Delilah Deconstructs the Western’, in A. Bach (ed.), Biblical Glamour and Hollywood Glitz, Semeia, 74; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996, pp. 167-81 (179-80).

27. Two verses (21-22), 29 words in the Hebrew, are devoted to this single moment of violence.

28. Note Tompkins: ‘It is fitting that in the Western the ultimate loss of control takes place when one man puts holes in another man’s body’ (‘Language and Landscape’, p. 97).

29. Cited in Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, p. 183.

30. Frayling notes that ‘The Man With No Name has been consistently misinterpreted by critics as a brutal existentialist living in a moral vacuum’ (Spaghetti Westerns, p. 181). This misrepresentation continues with Mitchell’s recent assessment of the Spaghetti Westerns as ‘morally vacant’ (‘Violence in the Film Western’, p. 183).

31. S. Prince, ‘Tom Horn: Dialectics of Power and Violence in the Old West’, Journal of Popular Culture 22 (1988): 119-29 (120).

32. Robert Warshow, cited in Mitchell, ‘Violence in the Film Western’, p. 180.

33. Mitchell, ‘Violence in the Film Western’, p. 188.

34. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique, p. 84. He goes on to point out that the best Westerns always acknowledge a complexity and ambiguity inherent in this notion of legitimation (p. 85).

35. Koosed and Linafelt, ‘How the West Was Not One’, p. 172.

36. Klein, The Triumph of Irony, p. 38.

37. Cf. J. Cheryl Exum, who argues that God’s commitment to his judges and to Israel is either morally dubious (particularly in the cases of Jephthah, Samson and the Levite and his wife) or entirely absent (increasingly so towards the end of the book; ‘The Centre Cannot Hold: Thematic and Textual Instabilities in Judges’, CBQ 52.3 (1990): 410-31 (413)). Judges exhibits a ‘love-hate’ affair with the idea of kingship. People do what is ‘right in their own eyes’ while there is no king, but Abimelech, the first king, offers nothing that is politically desirable.

38. Frayling, citing L. Micciche, Spaghetti Westerns, p. 55.

39. Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, p. 58.

40. John H. Lenihan, Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1980, p. 160.

41. Lenihan, Showdown, p. 173.

42. So Richard G. Bowman, ‘Narrative Criticism: Human Purpose in Conflict with Divine Presence’, in Gale A. Yee, Judges and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995, pp. 17-44; and Exum, ‘The Centre Cannot Hold’, esp. pp. 426-31.

43. Frayling identifies the stock Italian Western hero with the Superman myth as examined by Umberto Eco. Like Superman, the Spaghetti hero acts at the local, micro level, that is, against identifiable ‘bad guys’ and does not necessarily defeat the structures of which they are a part (or sociological conditions such as unemployment). If he did, this would ‘draw the world, and Superman with it, towards final “consumption”’ (citing Eco, in Spaghetti Westerns, p. 78).

44. This essay appeared in a longer version as ‘A Fistful of Shekels: Scrutinizing Ehud’s Entertaining Violence (Judges 3:12-30)’, Biblical Interpretation 11.1 (2003): 53-78.

13. The Two Faces of Betrayal:

The Characterization of Peter and Judas in the
Biblical Epic or Christ Film

WILLIAM R. TELFORD

1. Introduction

The Aims of the Chapter

The title of this chapter is ‘The Two Faces of Betrayal: The Characterization of Peter and Judas in the Biblical Epic or Christ Film’. What history and tradition, and art, literature and film did with these two figures is the subject of this chapter, and how they are treated in the biblical epic or Christ film is our particular focus. Both Peter and Judas are shown in the New Testament to have been guilty of an act of disloyalty, treachery or denial with respect to their master, Jesus. Nevertheless, one came to be the great apostle, the other the great apostate. One is seen as the prototypical Christian, the other the stereotypical Jew. One has come to be the supreme example of Christian discipleship, the other the universal symbol of Jewish perfidy. The one became a Pope, the other a pariah. Peter was given the keys to the kingdom of heaven, Judas was sent to eternal damnation in hell. Judas had his place among the twelve disciples of Jesus taken by another, Matthias (Acts 1.15-26), Peter presided over the process that replaced him. The one, then, has become a sacred symbol for a universal Church, the other a subversive icon for an unbelieving world. One was rehabilitated after his denial of Jesus, the other vilified in consequence of his treachery. It is these two biblical characters, then, and the two faces of betrayal that they represent, that I want to examine.

The chapter is divided into four parts. In the first three parts, I shall set the context for the subject by discussing the characterization of Peter and Judas in the New Testament, in history and tradition, and in art, literature and film, and in the final part I shall comment on a select number of clips from six biblical epics or Christ films, which will demonstrate the various and interesting ways that film-makers have treated these two characters. The Notes will suggest further reading, listing some key works on the biblical epic or Christ film,1 and some principal works on Peter and Judas.2

Approaching the Subject Critically

Let me offer a brief word, first of all, on my methodological approach to the subject of this chapter. Films can be explored from a number of angles, as the first chapter in this book indicated. They can be examined in relation to their sources and with respect to the question of how these sources have been used or treated. They can be explored for their intertextual references, in other words. In this case, a major source for the biblical epic is, of course, the Bible, and where the Christ film is concerned, the New Testament Gospels, and so we shall look at how film-makers have altered or adapted these texts, as well as the traditions that have grown from them, in their filmic representations.

A growing emphasis in recent scholarly work on the cinema, as we saw in the first chapter, is the notion of the film itself as a text, and narrative criticism and theory, therefore, as applicable to it. Two key recent books in this regard are Jakob Lothe’s Narrative in Fiction and Film. An Introduction (2000) and Robert Stam’s Film Theory. An Introduction (2000), which devotes a chapter to this aspect. Films, in other words, like narrative texts, can be approached with respect to their plot, settings, and characterization. The key emphases and approach that I will be taking to the biblical epic and the Christ film in this chapter, therefore, will be on plot and characterization, intertextuality and the treatment of tradition.

2. Peter and Judas in the New Testament

Let us begin with a brief summary of the way Peter and Judas are treated in the New Testament. The New Testament, as a rule, furnishes little by way of sharp character definition of its key actors, far less an understanding of their motivations. To some extent, and to a limited degree, Peter and Judas buck this trend, especially Peter.

Peter in the New Testament

Peter is a prominent figure in the New Testament, especially in the Gospels (where he is mentioned by name 114 times) and the Acts of the Apostles (where he is mentioned 57 times).3 Our knowledge of him is derived principally from the Gospels and Acts, then, but also to an extent from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. The two letters ascribed to him in the New Testament, 1 and 2 Peter, are generally regarded as pseudonymous, but supply some clues as to how a later Christian community, possibly in Rome, viewed him at the end of the first century or in the first part of the second.

A classic historical evaluation of his life and career was undertaken by Oscar Cullmann, and the results of that enquiry would still command widespread support, with the exception perhaps of the data surrounding his death, which comes from outside the New Testament. Cullmann concluded his book as follows:        .

In summary of our entire historical section ... we must say that during the lifetime of Peter he held a pre-eminent position among the disciples; that after Christ’s death he presided over the church at Jerusalem in the first years; that he then became the leader of the Jewish Christian mission; that in this capacity, at a time which cannot be more closely determined but probably occurred at the end of his life, he came to Rome and there, after a very short work, died as a martyr under Nero.4

In their equally influential book, Peter in the New Testament (1973), Raymond Brown, Karl Donfried and John Reumann summarized the key images of Peter that are reflected in the New Testament: ‘missionary, fisherman, pastoral shepherd, martyr, recipient of special revelation, confessor to the true faith, magisterial protector, and repentant sinner’.5

Where characterization is concerned, one commentator sums up what is by now a popularly conceived profile:

The character of Peter is one of the most vividly drawn and charming in the NT. His sheer humanness has made him one of the most beloved and winsome members of the apostolic band. He was eager, impulsive, energetic, self-confident, aggressive, and daring, but also unstable, fickle, weak, and cowardly. He was guided more by quick impulse than logical reasoning, and he readily swayed from one extreme to the other. He was preeminently a man of action.6

One prominent element in the Gospel tradition about him is his alleged denial of Jesus. Mark, the earliest Gospel, is particularly scathing in his portrait of Peter, having him robustly swear allegiance to Jesus (14.29) but then deny him, not once but three times over (14.31, 66-72). Apart from a disputed hint in 16.7 (‘Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he goes before you to Galilee’), this denial is not later reversed, since the original version of Mark ended with no post-resurrection appearances, and hence no stated rehabilitation of Peter.

Matthew softens this treatment considerably. Apart from inserting the now famous investiture scene (‘You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church’, Mt. 16.18), he does supply post-resurrection appearances that give the disciples, including Peter, a post-Easter leadership role. ‘Matthew’s Gospel’, hence, in the words of R. P. Martin, ‘offers a picture of Peter modified by ecclesiastical developments.’7

Luke goes even further in effecting a bridge between the disciple who denied his Lord in the Gospel and the one who will lead the Church in the Acts of the Apostles. Mark’s harsh treatment is toned down, and Peter’s post-denial rehabilitation is announced: ‘I have prayed for you’, says the Lukan Jesus, ‘and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren’ (Lk. 22.32).

John’s Gospel crowns this developing trajectory. Despite the role given to the ‘Beloved Disciple’, Peter is credited in chapter 21 with a postresurrection appearance from Jesus, and in this he is not only given the opportunity to reverse his threefold denial of his Master with a threefold declaration of love, but is rewarded with a commission to ‘feed my [Christ’s] sheep’ (Jn 21.15-17). Thus the fisherman became the shepherd, and exchanged his net for a crook.

In sum, then, where Peter is concerned, rehabilitation after betrayal is the chief trajectory that one can discern in the New Testament tradition.

Judas in the New Testament

Where Judas is concerned, the story is very different. Where Peter is seen performing a variety of roles, Judas has little significance in the New Testament accounts other than as the one who betrayed Jesus. Our meagre knowledge of him comes solely from the Gospels and Acts. His name is still a puzzle to us, and G. W. Buchanan sums up the possibilities: ‘Many suggestions have been given to explain the name Iscariot. The most plausible are (1) “man of Kerioth” [in southern Judea], (2) “liar” or “man of the lie”, (3) “dyer” and (4) “dagger bearer” [or assassin, hence Zealot].’8

If the first is correct, then Judas was the only disciple, it appears, who came from Judaea, and was not a Galilean. Treasurer to the twelve, he betrayed Jesus, we are told, to the Jewish authorities for the legendary 30 pieces of silver, and suffered either an intentional death (suicide, by hanging, Mt. 27.3-5) or an accidental one (a fall which ruptured his intestines, Acts 1.16-20).

The dominant image associated with Judas, therefore, is of the betrayer of Jesus. To us today, he is an enigmatic figure, the most enigmatic in the gospel story. His motivations for betraying Jesus are ultimately unknown but this lacuna in biblical characterization has been filled with myriad speculations, and has been grist for the mill for countless theological, literary and filmic presentations. Was he merely a pawn in a divine game? Was he a good man turned by the influence of Satan (cf. Lk. 22.3; Jn 13.2, 27)? Did he betray Jesus out of greed or avarice, or personal jealousy? Was this deed a misguided attempt to force Jesus’s hand politically or to test his leadership? Was it the act of a disillusioned patriot? All have been suggested. When we examine the Gospel accounts, what is clear, as William Klassen points out, is that, just as Peter’s trajectory after betrayal is one of increasing rehabilitation, Judas’s trajectory is one of increasing vilification.

3. Peter and Judas in History and Tradition

If we turn to the treatment of Peter and Judas in tradition outside and beyond the New Testament, this becomes more and more obvious.

Peter in History and Tradition

In addition to his role in legitimizing the papacy, what is significant about Peter is the leading role he plays in the tradition of Christian piety. Peter, in Leslie Houlden’s words is ‘the man whose timid abandonment of Christ was transformed by grace into vigorous mission and ultimate martyrdom’.9 Taking its cue, perhaps, from the New Testament’s Petrine Letters, Peter’s powerful profile produced a panoply of writings all about him or ascribed falsely to him: The Apocalypse of Peter (Ethiopic, Greek, Coptic), The Acts of Peter, The Acts of Peter and Paul, The Gospel of Peter, The Doctrine of Peter, The Preaching of Peter, The Passion of Peter and Paul, The Martyrdom of Peter, The Epistle of Peter to fames, The Tetter of Peter to Philip and so on.

Three key traditions are associated with him. The first is that he not only had a wife, as indicated in the New Testament (1 Cor. 9.5) but also children, one of whom, a daughter, was said to be disabled. Tradition attached a name to her, Petronella, gave him a son as well, and invented a glorious martyrdom for his wife. The second tradition is the one advanced by the church father Papias, and others, that Mark had been a follower of Peter and that the Gospel that bears his name was essentially the reminiscences of the apostle. The third and most important tradition is that of his martyrdom, a fate that is only hinted at in the New Testament (cf. Jn 21.18-19). The traditions are either silent or divergent about the place and the time, but the popular aggregated view of ecclesiastical romantics is that Peter was crucified in Rome, upside down, on the Vatican Hill, within the emperor’s gardens, at the same time as Paul, at the time of Nero’s persecution of Christians (64-67 ad), and there he is now buried.

In connection with Peter’s martyrdom is the famous ‘Quo Vadis?’ legend. James Hall’s summary of the story is so succinct that it is worth quoting in full:

Domine, quo vadis? The earliest version of the story is found in the early Acts of Peter, a New Testament apocryphal work, and is retold in the Golden Legend. At the prompting of his fellow Christians, Peter departed from Rome at the height of the persecutions by Nero. On the Appian Way he met Christ in a vision. Peter exclaimed, ‘Lord, where goest thou?’, and received the reply, ‘I go to Rome to be crucified again.’ Peter interpreted this to mean that he was to return to Rome to prepare for his own martyrdom. Christ is shown carrying the cross, and addressing Peter.10

While fascinating in their inventiveness as well as their ghoulishness, the historical basis of these traditions is very difficult to determine. There is late second-century attestation for Peter’s association with Rome (and the tradition may be even earlier) but one looks in vain to the New Testament for corroborative evidence. ‘At any rate the question is still controversial’, Geddes MacGregor states, ‘as is also the nature of his primacy among the apostles.’11

What runs through all these traditions, however, is the image of a figure who, though betraying Jesus, has been powerfully rehabilitated by the Church and made into an ecclesiastical icon, an image of Christian piety. He has even been adopted by secular society in a somewhat ‘domesticated’ form, if we are to judge by the widespread popularity, for example, of the ‘St Peter joke’.12 There isn’t, to my knowledge, a genre of Judas jokes.

Judas in History and Tradition

Judas did not spawn a significant apocryphal literature like Peter, but we have knowledge of a unfortunately now lost Gospel of Judas, which was used by a Gnostic sect called the Cainites. What was significant about Judas in later tradition was the link between him and antisemitism, a subject touched upon by Klassen and treated in Maccoby’s book. Great play was made on his name (Judas) and its correspondence with the name associated with the Jewish people in general (Judah). Jerome makes the connection: ‘The Jews take their name, not from that Judah who was a holy man, but from the betrayer. From the former, we [i.e., Christians] are spiritual Jews; from the traitor come the carnal Jews.’13 Besserman notes that ‘[t]he association of the name and character of the avaricious and traitorous “Judas” with the name and qualities of the “Jew” is a medieval commonplace’.14 This can be observed particularly in the medieval Passion Plays where he was the principal Jewish character, and where he was depicted not only as a traitor but also as a usurer.15 One of Judas’s distinguishing marks in these plays (and this was not a normal Jewish stereotype) was his red hair, an idiosyncrasy he shared only with Herod.16

Judas, then, is the disciple who betrayed Jesus, the ultimate symbol for human treachery, a creature fit only for the lowest circle of hell, where Dante in fact places him.17 At the same time, however, there is a sense in which, by being anathema to the established and dominant religion, he is also a ‘subversive icon’, and this is a theme we shall pick up later in film. He was certainly such to the Gnostic Cainites who, in opposition to both Judaism and Christian orthodoxy, regarded him as a saipt and a hero like other Old Testament rebels such as Cain and Korah. It was Judas’s greater spiritual insight that had led him to precipitate Jesus’s death, and his superior knowledge that had reckoned on such an act leading to the defeat of the forces of darkness.18

4. Peter and Judas in Art, Literature and Film

To provide further elements of context for our biblical epic and Christ film excerpts, let me say a few things about these two figures in art, literature and film (in general).

Peter and Judas in Art

Of the depiction of Peter in art, D. H. Farmer writes:

Images of Peter [in art] are innumerable, but his portraiture (possibly an early tradition) remains curiously constant, of a man with a square face, a bald or tonsured head, and a short square, curly beard.... Sometimes he is dressed in a toga.19

The only apostle to carry a wand or staff, he can also be recognized by the carrying of keys (cf. Mt. 16.19), a distinguishing motif that goes back to the fifth century.20

In the main, dark hair, sometimes a dark complexion, a beard and an advanced age are characteristic of Judas’s image in art.21 He is described as small in stature, according to legend, with red hair and wearing a yellow robe.22 In medieval art, these elements combine with his image as the archetypal Jew to give an unflattering portrait: ‘red hair and beard, ruddy skin, yellow robe and money bag, large, hooked nose, big lips and bleary eyes’.23

Peter and Judas in Literature

Peter has been treated rather circumspectly in English literature, and it is only in the twentieth century that lively portrayals of him have been ventured. Examples include Thornton Wilder’s play Now the Servant’s Name was Malchus (1928), Henry Sienkewicz’s novel Quo Vadis? (1896), Morris West’s novel, The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963), Lloyd C. Douglas’s The Robe (1942) and The Big Fisherman (X948). What distinguishes the characterization of Judas in literature from the nineteenth century onwards, according to Besserman, is its sympathetic treatment of him:

In a variety of modern revisionist versions of the Gospel narrative - e.g., Anthony Burgess’s Jesus of Nazareth; George Moore’s The Brook Kerith; Robert Graves’s King Jesus; and Nicos Kazantzakis’ The Greek Passion and The Last Temptation of Christ - Judas is absolved of the guilt associated with Christ’s betrayal and passion, and accorded semiheroic status.24

Peter and Judas in Film

All these cultural currents have fed themselves, therefore, into the depiction of Peter and Judas in film. Novels such as Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis?, Lloyd C. Douglas’s The Robe and The Big Fisheman have formed the basis for a number of Roman-Christian epics featuring Peter, with actors such as Finlay Currie and Michael Rennie playing this esteemed role. I shall comment on an excerpt from one of these in a moment. Judas has been a dominant figure in the biblical epic or the Christ film from its very inception, given his dramatic potential for plot and character development. One of the earliest of these was The Kiss of Judas, an early French short released in 1909 that told of the events of the Last Supper up to the time of Judas’s suicide.

Judas continues to appear in various guises even in the most recent films. Some have seen a Jesus-Judas typology in Star Wars (1977), particularly with respect to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s death at the hands of the cosmic rebel, Darth Vader.25 An interesting example of the demonization of Judas in recent film is Patrick Lussier’s Dracula 2001, in which vampirism is wedded to the New Testament, and the Dracula figure, ‘the King of the Vampires’, ‘the first vampire in the world’, is revealed to be - Judas himself. The Judas legend is also used to good effect in Ridley Scott’s Hannibal (2001), the Florentine cop, Pazzi, being despatched by Hannibal Lector in a manner fiendishly modelled on the death of Judas, namely, by hanging and evisceration following defenestration. This ghoulish murder occurs after Hannibal has given his learned lecture to the trustees of the Florentine archive on the depiction of Judas in art.

Mention was made earlier of the various motivations that have been offered in both popular and academic literature for Judas’s betrayal of Jesus: divine destiny, satanic influence, worldly greed, personal jealousy, moral disillusionment, political ambition, misguided patriotism. Because of the relative silence of the New Testament on these matters, Judas’s great narrative pull is that directors have been free to explore these motivations in imaginative ways.

Some portraits of Judas have been hostile, as we shall see shortly in The King of Kings (1927). Others have been sympathetic, with Judas presented as Jesus’s ‘right-hand man’, as in Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), or as Jesus’s alter ego, as in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Judas’s anguish at his betrayal of Jesus is given special emphasis in films such as The King of Kings, King of Kings, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus Christ Superstar. In some films, a twist is introduced, in that Judas is himself betrayed, by the scribe Zerah, for example, in Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977), or supremely, as we shall see, in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). In D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), as a result of Jewish pressure, Judas’s betrayal was simply excised.26

5. The Two Faces of Betrayal: Peter and Judas in the Biblical Epic or Christ Film - Some Selected Clips

These observations, I trust, will have set the historical, traditional, artistic, literary and cinematic context for our examination of the characterization of Peter and Judas in the biblical epic or Christ film, and it is to six selected sequences from these films that we now turn. Text Box 13.1 offers some brief information on the films selected. Further reading is to be found in the Notes. I shall give a brief general introduction to each sequence (whose approximate time location in the film is given in square brackets at the end of each heading), and then make some comments on its characterization of Peter and Judas. When you yourself view the sequences, you may wish to note down your own observations and comments on them, and for this purpose a further text box (13.2) is provided.

1. Notes on the Films Selected

The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, 1927)

A major classic, this was the first full-length, silent Hollywood epic on the life of Jesus, as seen from the perspective of Mary Magdalene. It presents Mary as a rich courtesan with Judas as her lover. Its many memorable moments include Mary’s riding off in her chariot to rescue her Judas from the clutches of the carpenter of Nazareth (‘Harness my zebras - gift of the Nubian king!’), her subsequent exorcism by Jesus in a swirl of exiting demons, the moving giving of sight to a little blind girl and dramatic crucifixion and resurrection scenes.

Quo Vadis? (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951)

A Roman soldier, Marcus Vinicius (Robert Taylor) falls in love with a Christian slave girl, Lygia (Deborah Kerr) and seeks to save her from the lions and Peter Ustinov (Nero). Described by critics as ‘unusually intelligent’ (R. Kinnard and T. Davis, Divine Images. A History of Jesus on the Screen, New York: Citadel Press, 1992, p. 74), this major Roman- Christian epic made $25 million worldwide and paved the way for the biblical epics which followed. How could it fail with St Peter played by a Scotsman - and from Edinburgh too (Finlay Currie)!

King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961)

A remake of the DeMille version in name only, this Sixties’ Hollywood adaptation presents Judas and Barabbas as political revolutionaries, with Jesus as a reluctant pawn in their game. Criticized by the Catholic Legion of Decency as ‘theologically, historically, and scripturally inaccurate’ (Kinnard and Davis, Divine Images, p. 132), the film is now viewed in retrospect as better than its critics made it out to be.

The Gospel according to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)

A low-budget, black-and-white, European film made by the Marxist director, Pier Paolo Pasolini and dedicated to Pope John XXI11, this unconventional adaptation of Matthew’s Gospel in cinema verite style had more impact on audiences than the traditional, glossy Hollywood epic, The Greatest Story Ever Told, which was to follow it a year later.

Jesus Christ, Superstar (Norman Jewison, 1973)

Filmed in Israel, where young tourists re-enact episodes of the life of Christ, this vibrant movie, which was based on the successful rock opera by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber (with a screenplay by Norman Jewison and Melvyn Bragg, and musical direction by Andre Previn) mixes the historical and the contemporary to good effect.

The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988)

Based on Kazantzakis’s novel about ‘the dual substance of Christ’ and ‘the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh’, and directed by one of Hollywood’s most distinguished film-makers, this is one of the finest, most religious and yet most controversial Christ films ever made.

2. Comments on Films/Clips

The King of Kings (1927): The Two Faces of Betrayal - Peter and Judas at the Last Supper

Quo Vadis? (1951): Betrayal Redeemed - Peter’s Vision on the Appian Way

King of Kings (1961): The Two Sides of Betrayal - Judas and Barabbas as Collaborators

The Gospel according to St. Matthew (1964): The Anguish of Betrayal - Peter’s Denial

Jesus Christ Superstar (1973): Who’s betraying Whom? - Judas’s Warning

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988): The Betrayer betrayed-Jesus is Judas!

The King of Kings (1927): The Two Faces of Betrayal - Peter and Judas at the Last Supper [01.03.28-01.07.04]

Our first sequence, from Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 The King of Kings presents us with our two faces of betrayal. A major classic, this was the first full-length, silent Hollywood epic on the life of Jesus, as seen from the perspective of Mary Magdalene. It presents Mary as a rich courtesan with Judas as her lover. Its many memorable moments include Mary’s riding off in her chariot to rescue her Judas from the clutches of the carpenter of Nazareth (declaiming the immortal words ‘Harness my zebras-gift of the Nubian king!’), her subsequent exorcism by Jesus in a swirl of exiting demons, the moving giving of sight to a little blind girl and dramatic Last Supper, crucifixion and resurrection scenes.

In the Last Supper sequence under review, the disciples are seated at a table. Judas is on his left hand. He is dressed as a courtesan. Jesus has his overmantle on, as in an earlier scene with the children. The bread is passed solemnly to every disciple, followed by the cup, with each striking bathetic and reverential poses, except for Judas, who is uneasy and distracted. He refuses the cup. Jesus announces his betrayer. Judas slips out as the other disciples remonstrate. Jesus embraces his mother and takes his leave. A dove flutters over an illuminated chalice.

As you watch the sequence, observe the various aesthetic elements: its illustrated Bible story book ethos, the harmonizing use of biblical captions drawn from the Authorized Version of the Bible, the choral music and the use of traditional hymns (in the sonorized 1931 version), DeMille’s use of close-up, the stylized religious expressionism. These elements will be discussed further in chapters 16 and 17 (“‘His blood be upon us, and our children”: The Treatment of Jews and Judaism in the Christ Film’ and ‘Ritual Recast and Revisioned: Hollywood Remembers the First Passover and the Last Supper’). The actor chosen by DeMille to portray Jesus was the distinguished British actor, H. B. Warner. Judas is played by Joseph Schildkraut. Peter, the big fisherman, played by Ernest Torrance, is the one hugging the cup to his breast.

The first thing to observe is Peter’s appearance. He is depicted here very much as in traditional Christian art. The second thing that one notes is the intensely sympathetic treatment accorded to him. Peter lifts his face to Jesus; he clasps the cup to his breast; he falls to the table with anguish as Judas leaves. Here is Peter in the full traditional image of Christian piety.

Where Judas’s appearance is concerned, the contrast could not be greater. Judas is depicted in a way quite unlike his image in religious art. Here he is dandified, shifty, clean-shaven in contrast to the other disciples (as is Caiaphas, Jesus’s other arch-enemy in the film), black-haired, and dressed as a playboy or gigolo. One notes the hostile treatment accorded to him. Where Peter lifts his face to Jesus, Judas covers his own, and he treats the cup like a poisoned chalice. The minatory music (deep bass/ violin) announces Judas as the betrayer. There is much rolling of eyes. Judas is being presented as the archetype of evil.

Judas’s motivations, according to DeMille, are quite clear. In the intertitles so characteristic of these early films, Judas is described as ‘the Ambitious, who joined the Disciples in the belief that Jesus would be the nation’s King and reward him with honor and high office’. After the cleansing of the Temple, ‘ [t]hey [the crowd] try to crown him king’, we are told, ‘Judas himself producing a crown (Jn 6.15)’. Judas betrays Jesus to Caiaphas, we are informed, for 30 pieces of silver, ‘after hope of an earthly kingdom was gone’.

Where the intertextual dimension is concerned, DeMille has obviously invented the romantic relationship between Mary Magdalene and Judas. His treatment of later tradition, however, is generally conservative. The tradition of Peter’s connection with Mark’s Gospel is dramatized earlier on in the film by Peter’s rescue and subsequent caring for the young, homeless Mark who is cured of his lameness by Jesus.

One untraditional element, nevertheless, is his introduction of Peter to the audience as ‘the giant fisherman’. Where this idea comes from, is anybody’s guess. That it runs counter to the Catholic Church’s claim to have discovered the bones of Peter under the Vatican is clear, for, although I myself am sceptical of such a claim, I did check up on the Vatican reports and discovered that the (alleged) skeleton reveals him to have been five feet seven inches tall!27 One commentator suggests that ‘Peter is portrayed as the “Giant Disciple”, perhaps because of his reputation as a great fisherman, but more likely because he was recognized within the medieval church as a theological giant among the other disciples.’28

Quo Vadis? (1951): Betrayal Redeemed - Peter’s Vision on the Appian Way [01.57.24-01.59.43]

Our second excerpt is from Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis? (1951). Based on Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel (1896), it tells the story of a Roman soldier, Marcus Vinicius (Robert Taylor), who falls in love with a Christian slave girl, Lygia (Deborah Kerr), and seeks to save her both from the lions and Peter Ustinov (Nero). Described by critics as ‘unusually intelligent’,29 this major Roman-Christian epic made $25 million worldwide and paved the way for the biblical epics that followed. Four key scenes involve Peter: his speech at a nocturnal Christian meeting; the famous ‘Quo vadis?’ episode; Peter’s subsequent speech in the arena; and his crucifixion upside down on the Vatican Hill. Peter is played by Finlay Currie, a Scottish actor, and former organist and choirmaster, born, like Sean Connery, in Edinburgh, but very unlike this other man of action. Although he is best remembered for playing the convict Magwitch in David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), Currie was known for his impressive character roles, often as patriarchs or other men of authority.

The scene selected is Peter’s vision on the Appian Way. Peter is leaving Rome to avoid Nero’s persecution of Christians, sees a vision (‘Quo vadis, domine’/‘Whither goest thou, Lord?’) and returns to the capital to face his death. The first thing to notice is Peter’s conventional appearance: the patriarchal beard, the white robes, the carrying of the staff in the form of the shepherd’s crook. The apostle is depicted, then, as he is in traditional Christian art, although audiences, responding to his accent, might find Peter as a Scotsman (albeit with a pronounced Semitic nose), a somewhat anomalous element! Here we have the universal Peter, the model of true discipleship, the ecclesiastical patriarch, and no longer the original Jewish follower of Jesus. Here he is accompanied by a youthful companion, Nazarius, through whom Christ speaks. Nazarius is the Christian neophyte, the root of his very name (‘Nazar-’) conjuring up in our minds, the Nazarene. He is Christianity’s next generation, the future of Christianity, and when Marcus and Lygia leave Rome at the end of the film, Nazarius is with them when they see Peter’s staff sprouting leaves at the very spot where he had his vision.

Intertextually, the sequence carries little significance since it is not in the New Testament. Two passages, however, have resonances with this tradition, namely, the passage in the Fourth Gospel’s farewell discourse where Peter asks of Jesus, ‘Whither goest thou?’ and Jesus answers, ‘Where I am going you cannot follow me now; but you shall follow afterward’ (Jn 13.36). The other is the Johannine Jesus’s prediction in Jn 2.1.18: ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go.’ The legend may indeed be an imaginative embellishment of these selfsame passages.

The post-biblical tradition itself is altered by LeRoy in respect of the reasons that are given for Peter’s departure from Rome, that is, to escape Nero’s persecution. Peter departs from Rome in the original tradition because his preaching has made converts of the wives and concubines of the prominent men of Rome, and, as a result, they have given up sleeping with their husbands and lovers (apocryphal stories have a distinct antipathy to sex). These frustrated men plot to kill him, but he is forewarned and leaves in anticipation! The main point, nevertheless, is that the Quo Vadis? legend, and its filmic representation here, is another witness to the developing tradition of Peter’s rehabilitation after betrayal.

King of Kings (1961): The Two Sides of Betrayal -Judas and Barabbas as Collaborators [01.39.43-01.42.54]

Having looked at ‘betrayal redeemed - Peter’s vision on the Appian Way’, let us now turn to our third sequence, which I have entitled ‘the two sides of betrayal - Judas and Barabbas as collaborators’. Our selected sequence is from Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961). A remake of the DeMille version in name only, this Sixties’ Hollywood adaptation presents Judas and Barabbas as political revolutionaries, with Jesus as a reluctant pawn in their game. Criticized by the Catholic Legion of Decency as ‘theologically, historically, and scripturally inaccurate’,30 the film is now viewed in retrospect as better than its critics made it out to be.

The style is impressive, and it is distinguished for its aesthetic look, and its painterly quality. The costumes throughout are immaculate, and the colours striking, especially the solid blocks of blue, brown, white and blood-red. Giving the audience its emotional cue is the musical score by Miklos Rosza, the Hungarian composer whose music virtually epitomizes the biblical epic in the popular imagination nowadays.

The part of Jesus in the film was played by Jeffrey Hunter, an American actor popular in the 1950s, especially among teenagers. Where characterization is concerned, his adolescent Jesus offers a sharp contrast to H. B. Warner’s patriarchal Jesus in the 1927 version. Judas is played by Rip Torn and Barabbas by Harry Guardino. Our chosen excerpt, found just before the film’s first intermission, takes place in an underground Zealot cave, where Barabbas is supervising the manufacture of swords. Judas and Barabbas are discussing their strategy, with Judas urging that Jesus be given time to speak in the Temple to enlist the people’s support without bloodshed. Barabbas, however, plans a surprise attack on the Romans.

This film stands out for the way that it explores the motivations of Judas in betraying Jesus, and places these motivations within the context of the Jewish nationalist struggle. Two revolutionary strategies are represented by Barabbas and Jesus respectively, and Judas is the figure caught in the middle:

While Jesus and Barabbas (Harry Guardino) represent alternative methods of resistance, Judas (Rip Torn) is caught in the middle, turning towards one, then the other, trying but failing to bring them together. While one is, as the [earlier] voice-over puts it, the ‘Messiah of War’, the other is the ‘Messiah of Peace’.31

Judas himself believes in political messiahship, while Jesus promotes inner transformation. Later, in order to enlist Jesus’s support for Barabbas’s movement, Judas decides to force his hand. He hopes that Jesus will employ miracles on behalf of the people against the Romans. A unifying theme in the sequence is that of ‘fire’ and ‘water’ which is another metaphor for the difference between Jesus and Barabbas. The scene begins with the image of the sword and the water. Later, Barabbas criticizes Jesus in the same vein: ‘He speaks only of peace. I am fire, he is water. How can we ever meet?’ Another twist in the narrative is the notion of the ‘betrayer betrayed’. Barabbas promises Judas that he will stand by Jesus in the Temple and give him time to speak, but in reality he thinks that ‘Judas dreams, and all dreamers are fools’. The Zealots plan, in fact, to borrow Jesus’s audience, but storm the Temple while he speaks.

The Gospel according to St. Matthew (1964): The Anguish of Betrayal - Peter’s Denial [01.50.01—01.52.09]

Our fourth excerpt returns to Peter, and deals with another aspect of betrayal, the apostle’s denial of Jesus and the anguish resulting from it. One of the most powerful denial scenes in the Christ film is to be found in Pier Paulo Pasolini’s The Gospel according to St. Matthew, which was released in 1964. This was a low-budget, black-and-white, European film made by a Marxist director, and dedicated (somewhat ironically) to Pope John XXIII. Made with a cast of non-professionals, and filmed in Southern Italy, it was immensely popular, its unconventional adaptation of Matthew’s Gospel in cinema verite style having more impact on audiences than the traditional, glossy Hollywood epic, The Greatest Story Ever Told, which was to follow it a year later.32 The actor who played Jesus was likewise an unknown, a Spanish student, Enrique Irazoqui, who had never acted before. Peter was played by Settimo Di Porto, a young Jewish subproletarian (as Pasolini called him) from Rome.

The sequence begins after Jesus is taken bound to Caiaphas, with Peter following on. The text of Mt. 26.57-75 is the source. There is silence. The trial is staged with the camera set from Peter’s perspective at the back of the crowd. The questioning of Jesus is heard from a distance, the audience catching the muted but raised voices of his questioners. Peter denies knowing Jesus and then breaks down and weeps in the empty street outside. Violin music plays.

One should observe, in particular, the camerawork here, and listen out for the effective use of music to lend pathos to the scene. Pasolini makes very effective use of the hand-held camera. One should look out, in addition, for the use of distance shots (of the trial at the beginning) to establish the scene and close-ups thereafter (of Peter; the first woman; the first man; the second woman). The peasant faces as well as the southern Italian settings are also to be noted.

What Pasolini’s camerawork does is increase the sense of participation on the part of the spectator by virtue of the camera angle selected. We begin with a distance shot from the back of the crowd, and catch Peter’s view of the proceedings. The eye of the camera is Peter’s eye, and it is also ours. We then follow Peter out of the trial scene. We, like him, are challenged by the various interlocutors. We follow him into the open space of the city, into the light, after the confined spaces where his denial has been reiterated three times. We follow immediately behind him, as the violin music invokes his reflective and penitent mood. Then we see his face, and his tears. The camera then backs away from him and leaves him in his anguish, and we are left with a final distance shot. This is brilliant filmmaking.

Jesus Christ Superstar (1973): Who’s betraying Whom?-Judas’s Warning [00.06.42-00.10.02]

Because space is limited, I shall leave further comment on Pasolini’s The Gospel according to St. Matthew (1964) to chapter 16 (‘“His blood be upon us, and our children”: The Treatment of Jews and Judaism in the Christ Film’), and move on to our next film, Jesus Christ Superstar (1973). Filmed in Israel, where young tourists re-enact episodes of the life of Christ, this vibrant movie, which was based on the successful rock opera by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber (with a screenplay by Norman Jewison and Melvyn Bragg, and musical direction by Andre Previn) mixes the historical and the contemporary to good effect. The figure of Jesus, traditionally dressed in white, is played by Ted Neeley, while that of Judas is played by the black actor/singer, Carl Anderson.

I have called this excerpt, ‘Who’s betraying Whom? - Judas’s Warning’ for reasons that will become apparent. The scene occurs fairly early on in the film. On a pinnacle, dressed in an open-necked red and black trouser- suit, sits Judas who sings the opening song, ‘Heaven on Their Minds’. He asks Jesus to listen to him and to remember the oppression under which the people live.

The first thing to comment on is Judas’s appearance. Here again we have the familiar colour red associated with Judas. At the end of the movie, and perhaps hinting at his ultimate redemption, Judas descends from heaven in a dazzling white Elvis Presley-like trouser-suit. The fact that Carl Anderson’s Judas is also black is a bold, provocative and possible symbolic piece of casting, and all the more so against Ted Neely’s golden-haired Jesus.

Jewison’s Judas is, therefore, one of the most complex Judases in the Christ film repertoire, and vital to this film. He, not Peter, is Jesus’s ‘righthand man’. At one point, Judas declares:

Listen, Jesus, do you care for your race?

Don’t you see we must keep in our place?

We are occupied.

Have you forgotten how put down we are?

I am frightened by the crowd,

For we are getting much too loud,

And they’ll crush us if we go too far.

Because Judas is black, and this film was released in the aftermath of the black civil rights movement, we are tempted to see in him the voice of black rather than Jewish oppression. On the other hand, by urging restraint on Jesus’s revolutionary activism, he seems to express the voice of social conservatism. As with other Christ films, the movie explores Judas’s motivations but in a distinctive way. Judas is neither a pawn in God’s divine game (as scriptural writers imply), nor a well-meaning but misguided zealot (as some modern directors have tended to see him), but someone who wishes to puncture Jesus’s divine pretensions, and their consequences.

As Stern, Jefford and Debona point out:

Judas will betray Jesus in order to force him to admit publicly that the people have deluded themselves about who Jesus is as the Messiah (a cosmic savior from God), and thus draw them away from any direct, self-destructive conflict with Roman power.33

Judas is concerned about the distinction between the myth and the man. By criticizing Jesus, and hence Christianity, for allowing the worship of the man to replace an emphasis on his teaching we have an almost postmodern note. Who’s betraying whom, here?

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988): The Betrayer betrayed -

Jesus is Judas! [02.26.06-02.29.22]

This leads us conveniently to our last sequence, which I have entitled ‘The Betrayer betrayed - Jesus is Judas!’ You will see why in a moment. This sequence is taken from Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

Based on Kazantzakis’s novel about ‘the dual substance of Christ’ and ‘the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh’, and directed by one of Hollywood’s most distinguished film-makers, this is one of the finest, most religious and yet most controversial Christ films ever made. Judas is again the central character, and this time he is Jesus’s alter ego. The film takes seriously Judas’s predestined role as Jesus’s betrayer, but this time shows Jesus and Judas in collusion over the divine plan. Initially under contract from the Zealots to kill Jesus but now a follower, Judas is instructed by Jesus to aid him in his task of saving the world by dying on the cross for his people’s sins. The film explores the consequences for the world if the human Jesus had, in fact, failed to carry out his divine mission, and if he had succumbed to the temptation of living a normal life, with domestic concerns - a temptation mediated by the devil in the form of a young girl. It carries out this theological exploration, in the most imaginative way, by presenting a series of dream sequences that occur when Jesus is on the cross, and in which this alternative scenario takes place.

The sequence I have chosen is one of these dream sequences. The movie has moved forward to 70 AD. Jesus is on his deathbed, and the Romans are sacking Jerusalem. The disciples are visiting him, and among them is Judas. The part of Jesus is played by Willem Dafoe, and that of Judas by Harvey Keitel.

W. Barnes Tatum comments on the film as follows:

And during the fantasy sequence, which includes the burning of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E., Judas upbraids Jesus for not having kept their bargain by Jesus’ having forsaken the cross. Judas says: ‘He was going to be the new covenant; now there’s no more Israel. . . .’ Therefore, the film ironically anticipates the time when Judaism and Christianity go their separate ways.34

The first thing to note is Judas’ pre-eminence over Peter. He is the last figure to appear, and, this time, he is the one carrying the staff. Second, one observes again the traditional colour of red associated with Judas. He has red hair (particularly prominent in the opening sequence of the film), and this association is augmented with the blood that stains his hands.

This is the most complex Judas we have yet seen in film, as well as the most complex Jesus. This is an angry Judas who has played his part in the drama of salvation, only to find that he, himself, has been betrayed by Jesus. This is a sympathetic Judas, with whose passion, strength and emotional intimacy audiences can identify. This is the only Judas who doesn’t in the end hang himself. Instead, he fulfils his role in the divine plan by persuading Jesus to return to the cross, and so secures humanity’s salvation. In giving this ultimate twist to the concept of betrayal, in exploring the dualisms of spirituality and social activism, humanity and divinity, the spirit and the body, sin and redemption, and, finally, in illuminating the nature of religious martyrdom (a theme touched upon more than once in the St Deiniol’s conferences), this film ranks as one of the most challenging Christ films ever to have been made, and is a fitting one with which to end.

6. Conclusion

I began this chapter with the two faces of betrayal, those of Peter and Judas. I have attempted to show how, in the case of Peter, a pattern of betrayal followed by rehabilitation is a feature of his treatment in the New Testament and in subsequent history and tradition, art, literature and film. In the case of Judas, the pattern has been one of betrayal followed by vilification. It is nice to report, therefore, that Judas is the apostle who has come in from the cold, or in his case, the heat, and has finally been rehabilitated or redeemed, at least in film.

Notes

1. See, for example, B. Babington and P. W. Evans, Biblical Epics. Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993; R. Kinnard and T. Davis, Divine Images. A History of Jesus on the Screen, New York: Citadel Press, 1992; R. C. Stern, C. N. Jefford and G. Debona, Savior on the Silver Screen, NY and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1999; W. B. Tatum, Jesus at the Movies: A Guide to the First Hundred Years, Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 1997.

2. See, for example, R. E. Brown, K. P. Donfried and J. Reumann, Peter in the New Testament, London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1973; O. Cullmann, Peter. Disciple, Apostle, Martyr. A Historical and Theological Study, The Library of History and Doctrine, London: SCM Press, 1953; W. Fenske and B. Martin, Brauchte Gott der Verrater? Die Gestalt des Judas in Theologie. Unterricht und Gottesdienst, Dienst am Wort, 85, Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000; L. Besserman, ‘Judas Iscariot’ and D. L. Jeffrey, ‘Peter’, in D. L. Jeffrey (ed.), A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992, pp. 418-20, 603-8 resp.; W. Klassen, Judas. Betrayer or Friend of Jesus?, London: SCM Press, 1996; H. Maccoby, Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil, New York: Free Press, 1992; P. Perkins, Peter. Apostle for the Whole Church, Studies on Personalities of the New Testament, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000.

3. M. Walsh, An Illustrated History of the Popes. Saint Peter to John Paul II, London: Marshall Cavendish, 1980, p. n.

4. Cullmann, Peter, p. 157.

5. Brown, Donfried and Reumann, Peter, p. 166.

6. D. E. Hiebert, ‘Peter’ in J. D. Douglas and M. C. Tenney (eds), The New International Dictionary of the Bible. Pictorial Edition, Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering, 1987, p. 773.

7. R. P. Martin, ‘Peter, Apostle’, in W. Gentz (ed.), The Dictionary of Bible and Religion, Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1986, p. 803.

8. G. W. Buchanan, ‘Judas Iscariot’, in G. W. Bromiley (ed.), The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982, p. 1151.

9. J. L. Houlden, ‘Peter’, in R. J. Coggins and J. L. Houlden (eds), A Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, London: SCM and Philadelphia, PA: Trinity Press International, 1990, p. 534.

10. J. Hall (ed.), Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, London: John Murray, 1996, p. 243. ‘The small church of S. Maria delle Piante on the Appian Way, commonly called Domine Quo Vadis, which was rebuilt early in the 17th cent., commemorates the incident’ (F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Oxford: Oxford University Press, i?97, P- 1359)-

11. G. MacGregor (ed.), The Everyman Dictionary of Religion and Philosophy, London: Dent, 1990, p. 479.

12. Cf. e.g. ‘Up in heaven, the pastor was shown his eternal reward. To his disappointment, he was only given a small shack. Down the street he saw a taxi driver being shown a lovely estate with gardens and pools. “I don’t understand it,” the pastor moaned. “I dedicated my whole life to serving God and this is all I get, yet a cabbie is awarded a mansion?” “It’s quite simple,” Saint Peter explained. “Our system is based on performance. When you preached people slept; when he drove, people prayed.”’ (J. Bergman, ‘Laughter, the Best Medicine (St Peter joke)’, Reader’s Digest (April 2002), p. 92.

13. Homily on Ps. 108, cited in Besserman, ‘Judas Iscariot’, p. 418.

14. Besserman, ‘Judas Iscariot’, p. 418.

15. See H. Fisch, The Dual Image. The Figure of the Jew in English and American Literature, London: World Jewish Library, 1971, p. 15.

16. See Maccoby, Judas, pp. 108-9. Maccoby speculates that their mutual association with blood may account for this, Judas for accepting blood money (Mt. 26.14-16 and parallels) with which he purchased the ‘field of blood’ (Acts 1.18-19) and Herod for his massacre of the innocents (Mt. 2.16-18).

17. See MacGregor, Dictionary of Religion and Philosophy, p. 360.

18. See T. S. Kepler, ‘Judas Iscariot’, in F. C. Grant and H. H. Rowley (eds), Dictionary of the Bible, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1965, p. 536.

19. D. H. Farmer (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 346.

20. N. Georges, ‘Peter’, in C. B. Pallen and J. J. Wynne (eds), The New Catholic Dictionary, New York: Universal Knowledge Foundation, 1929, p. 750.

21. Hall, Subjects and Symbols, p. 179.

22. J. C. J. Metford (ed.), Dictionary of Christian Lore and Legend, London: Thames & Hudson, 1983, p. 149.

23. Besserman, ‘Judas Iscariot’, p. 419.

24. Besserman, ‘Judas Iscariot’, p. 420.

25. See N. P. Hurley, ‘Cinematic Transformations of Jesus’, in J. R. May and M. S. Bird (eds), Religion in Film, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982, p. 7 6; gratia C. Deacy, Screen Christologies. Redemption and the Medium of Film, Religion, Culture and Society, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001, pp. 79-80 and 173.

26. One might also consider this comment from I. Butler: ‘In the first of the four parts of Carl Dreyer’s Leaves from Satan’s Book (1922) the Devil disguises himself as the Pharisee who leads Judas to betray Christ, a curious example of the transference of guilt. The whole film has a similar form to Griffith’s Intolerance, but with betrayal as the recurring theme. Halvard Hoff appears as Jesus’ (I. Butler, Religion in the Cinema, The International Film Guide Series, New York: Barnes, 1969, P- 37)-

27. See J. Walsh, The Bones of St. Peter. The Fascinating Account of the Search for the Apostle’s Body, London: Victor Gollancz, 1983, pp. 1-2, 59-60, 107.

28. See Stern, Jefford and Debona, Savior, p. 38.

29. Kinnard and Davis, Divine Images, p. 74.

30. Kinnard and Davis, Divine Images, p. 132.

31. Babington and Evans, Biblical Epics, p. 129.

32. See, for example, Kinnard and Davis, Divine Images, pp. 15-16, 162-6 or O. Stack (ed.), Pasolini on Pasolini: Interviews with Oswald Stack, The Cinema One Series 11, London: Thames & Hudson, 1969, chap. 6.

33. Stern, Jefford and Debona, Savior, p. 170.

34. Tatum, Jesus at the Movies, p. 170.

Part 4

Religion in Film

14. Re-membering the American Radical
    Reformation in The Apostle and
    O Brother Where Art Thou?

JEFFREY F. KEUSS

1. Introduction: (Re)forming the Theological Frame through History and Imagination

This chapter is essentially an extended reflection on the question of film, theological poetics, and the ‘Radical Reformation’ in the American Church in the early nineteenth century. By way of operational definitions, I will be looking at the nature of film as a poetic frame that re-calls, reframes and re-members aspects of popular culture that are often overlooked in high-minded cultural and theological reflection. In terms of film as a poetic framing, I will be using the notion of ‘poetics’ as that which cultural theorist Mieke Bal terms as ‘a declaration of principle with regard to the ideas about literature [and film] that have been embodied in the events of a given text’.1 Another way of saying this is to see poetics as those cultural products of intention, like works of art, music, or an unintentional by-product of cultural activity (responses to the disaster of September nth) that exhibit a declaration of principle regarding lived practice and belief in common human experience. With this in mind, my discussion will seek the following: what declarations of principle(s) are being framed within the space and shape of a film such as The Apostle and O Brother Where Art Thou? given its relation to American Church history and, second, what released or veiled meaning - that is, what ‘open secret’ - are the viewers and film-makers sharing together? Often, the two lenses through which individuals frame meaning are those of history and imagination. As I will propose, the renewed interest in the rural commonplace Christianity of the American South in such films as The Apostle and O Brother Where Art Thou? demonstrates a re-membering through the lens of history and imagination - a calling back together of members through an act of poesis - to some of the founding tenets of American Church history at the turn of the early nineteenth century that are germane to contemporary reflections on Christianity in the West.

To speak about film as poetics is to speak also about what a film as poetics is framing.1 To make a declaration of principle is a means of delimiting what is important through controlling the gaze^[6] [7] (what Lacan termed le regard) of the individual so as to focus attention as an act of both framing out and framing in meaning. One way to address this is to look at a film as a composite of what Paul Tillich dispusses in relation to religious and cultural products as bound in the dimensions of content, form and import.^[8]

According to Tillich, a cultural formation such as a film in which form predominates over content and form is autonomous in meaning - shape that is not attached to the source of its shaping - while a cultural formation in which import predominates over form and content is heteronomous - something that has deep meaning yet cannot be grasped due to lack of definition such as a river without riverbanks. A film that strikes a synergistic balance of form, content and import is theonomous. Theonomous cultural forms are, for Tillich, explicitly open to and disclosive of the unconditioned depth of ultimate meaning. Here, the Gadamerian fusing of horizons allows for the eruption of meaning that is unfettered yet remains approachable - good but not tame - and known through knowing. Import as deep and abiding meaning cascades as overflowing abundance that continually shattering static form meant to contain it. 5 For Tillich, this overflowing and shattering of form by import is itself the pre-eminent aspect of religiously charged cultural products.6 The Eucharist, A child’s Easter poem, the Apostles’ Creed, C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, and the rose window in York Minster are all possible theonomous forms. In our current cultural milieu, few genres succeed in this overflowing of import as the genre of film. The import in question in this discussion is that of American religious identity. In the wake of rapid expansion for nearly zoo years and the recent extreme downturn of numbers in mainline American denominations, there is a signalling to some that Christianity has lost its place altogether in the marketplace of American ideas. As these films and others continue to demonstrate, it is not the downturn of interest and import found in the Christian faith that is the question, rather the predominant form of the faith presumed to be efficacious. While some would view films like The Apostle and O Brother Where Art Thou? as characterizations of extreme factions within the American Christian tapestry, demographic responsiveness to these films and similar ones of the genre of films set in the American South show that what some critics view as fringe may in fact be the strong current of tradition that has been running strong albeit off the mainline churches’ radar screen.

14- Re-membering the American Radical Reformation 241 dom to realize faith apart from the inherited traditions of the European Church came in the form of the Radical Reformers. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his classic 1835 reflections upon life in the early days of the USA entitled Democracy in America, wrote the following:

Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there the more did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which I was unaccustomed. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same the country . . .

Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but nevertheless it must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions. Indeed, it is in this same point of view that the inhabitants of the United States themselves look upon religious belief. I do not know whether all the Americans have a sincere faith in their religion, for who can search the human heart? But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizen or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation, and to every rank of society.7

Alexis de Tocqueville’s assessment is representative of the incredible ferment of religious activity that took place just after the American Revolution amidst what I will term the ‘American Radical Reformation’ and has also been called the Second Great Evangelical Awakening - from 1799 to 1840. The Radical Reformation was a radicalizing of the Scottish and English Reformation impulse where new independent ‘free churches’ left the ranks of the first-generation mainline churches. This period of what American Church historian Sydney Ahlstrom called ‘the revival of revivalism’ was a rich period, with figures such as Francis Asbury, born in Birmingham, trained by John Wesley, and considered the father of American Methodism, and Peter Cartwright from Kentucky who along with other circuit riders travelled on horseback trails of 500-mile circuits through mining towns, logging camps and mountain outposts voicing a message to the religious affections of the frontier calling for a revival of deep faith. This was also the period of the Camp Meeting Movement founded by a Presbyterian minister named James McGready from Pennsylvania. In July 1800, McGready and his associates at Gasper River Church in Logan County, Kentucky devised ‘a religious service of several days’ length, held outdoors, for a group that was obliged to take shelter on the spot because of the distance from home’.8 This camp meeting movement saw its zenith in the Cane Ridge Meetings of 6 August 1801 where Barton Warren Stone, another Presbyterian minister who founded the Disciples of Christ, drew between 10,000 and 25,000 clergy and laity to his revival meetings in Cane Ridge, Kentucky that lasted seven days. According to Stone, ‘Many things transpired there, which were so much like miracles on infidels and unbelievers; for many of them by these were convinced that Jesus was the Christ, and bowed in submission to him.’9

Thomas Campbell, an Irish Presbyterian whose son Alexander trained in Divinity at Glasgow University and also became a key figure during this period, wrote the following regarding this period of revivalism and Radical Reformation in America:

From the series of events which have taken place in the churches for many years past, especially in this Western country, as well as from what we know in general of the present state of things in the Christian world; we are persuaded that it is high time for us not only to think, but also to act for ourselves; to see with our own eyes, and to take all our measures directly and immediately from the Divine Standard ... We are also persuaded that as no man can be judged for his brother, so no man can judge for his brother: but that every man must be allowed to judge for himself, as every man must bear his own judgement.. . We are also of opinion that as the divine word is equally binding upon all so all lie under an equal obligation to be bound by it, and it alone.10

In short, as documents such as Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address display, the Radical Reformation was a period where the assumptions about the nature and form of the Church and the authority by which reformation continued to reform was challenged in colloquial language and affections.

3. Self Evident Faith - The Individual Set Apart from the Tradition as the Tradition

One of the key features of this period is the stress placed on the individual’s right to think and act for himself or herself and to determine by way of one’s own reading of Scripture that which is binding for the individual Christian. Often argued as a distinctive of the postmodern, tolerance for the individual’s ‘self-evident’ right to interpret the Scriptures and their Christian faith was a hallmark of the Radical Reformation. The functions formerly relegated to the institutional Church and to its priests, bishops and theologians, became for Thomas Campbell, his son Alexander, and a number of his contemporary reformers, a responsibility of the laity. This

14- Re-membering the American Radical Reformation 243 was not so much an anti-clerical stance as some have argued, rather a re-empowering of the laity to become deeply concerned for their state before God. Theology is in line with politics in this regard as the emphasis on the equality of each individual as the basis for right of private judgement closely mirrors that of the Declaration of Independence: the ‘self- evident’ truth that all men are created equal and have a God-given right individually to seek truth and liberty for themselves.

4. ‘You can’t be here’ - True Authority in The Apostle

This notion of self-evident faith is depicted in an early scene from Robert Duvall’s 1997 film The Apostle. Set in the American South, Duvall plays Eulis ‘Sonny’ Dewey, a holiness preacher from Texas who we find out through a series of flashbacks was ‘called to the ministry’ at the age of 12 after a near-death experience. In this scene, Sonny is driving with his mother, ‘Momma’ Dewey (played by June Carter Cash, wife of singer Johnny Cash) when they happen upon an auto accident along the highway. Sonny crosses over the police tape and goes directly to the accident scene where a young couple is barely holding on to life. Sonny begins to speak to the young man in the driver’s seat and asks him if he wants to ‘come to Jesus’ and find salvation. In a poignant scene, Sonny lays his leather Bible on the roof of the wrecked car and begins to pray for the couple’s salvation. A police officer comes up to the scene and tells Sonny he needs to leave immediately - ‘you can’t be here’ - and that he has no right to be there. Sonny continues to pray, ignoring the complaints of the police officer and eventually pushes the policeman away in order to finish his prayer.

This brief scene encapsulates much of the Radical Reformation: the question of authority and the question of the administering of sacraments such as unction and last rites in a means and form not found on either side of the reformation divide. The role of the democratic ideals seen in the grassroots movements that formed the Church of Christ, the Disciples, Church of the Nazarene, American Methodists and Baptists has become one of the continued dominant expressions of Christianity in America, at times both rivalling and eclipsing the more established Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian and Presbyterian mainline denominations.11 Peter Cartwright, one of the key Methodist circuit riders of this period, notes the difference between the more reserved mainline Presbyterians and the surging growth of the Radical Reformers:

The Presbyterians, and other Calvinistic branches of the Protestant Church, used to contend for an educated ministry, for pews, for instrumental music, for a congregational or stated salaried ministry. The Methodists universally opposed these ideas; and the illiterate

Methodist preachers actually set the world on fire, (the American world at least,) while they [the others] were lighting their matches!12

Cartwright’s rather grand statement that the world was being set ‘on fire’ is not far from the truth given the exponential growth in converts to the Christian faith and the growth of preachers during this period. Between 1775 and 1845, the population of the United States grew from 2,500,000 to 20,000,000 - an increase due not to immigration but to high birth rates and the availability of land. Recorded numbers of preachers and ministers soared from 1,800 in 1775 to almost 40,000 by 1845 with the number of preachers per capita more than trebling from one minister per 1,500 inhabitants to one per 500.13 This growth of American Christianity continued for the better part of the nineteenth century, and popular American Christianity has remained the dominant form of faith into the present day, steering away from high culture concerns found in large theological schools and gathering to its membership leaders and preachers from the ranks of the lower and middle classes. In this regard, the children of the American Radical Reformation are viewed, much to the consternation of the mainline theological institutions, as an ‘untutored’ or ‘irregular’ style of Christianity.14 Statements like this one made by Peter Cartwright in his Autobiography represent the sentiments of many during the Radical Reformation: ‘I have seen so many educated preachers who forcibly reminded me of lettuce growing under the shade of a peach-tree, or like a gosling that had got the straddles by wading in the dew, that I turn away sick and faint.’15

It is from this period that the face of American Christianity in its popular form continues to draw its identity. From the sawdust of the camp meetings and the passion of the revival circuit riders arose a number of American religious movements that preached an egalitarian, evangelical Christianity that spoke to the affections of a populace calling for freedom to try out new forms of Christianity as the truest form of the gospel.16 As Nathan Hatch states in The Democratization of American Christianity, ‘Christianity [in America] was effectively reshaped by common people who moulded it in their own image and who threw themselves into expanding its influence.’17 As we saw earlier in Alexis de Tocqueville’s reflections, it was not the form of Church governance that gave Christianity its democratic aspect, for power was often concentrated in a few leaders or a structured hierarchy, but the ‘incarnation of the church into popular culture’.18 This incarnation perhaps best expresses itself in these churches’ disdain for regular clergy and the removal of any distinction between clergy and laity. By placing the common man in the pulpit, power was given to ordinary people to express and expound the truth of God, to develop their own forms, traditions and orthodoxies, and to employ the vernacular in sermon and song.19

5. ‘Well, ain’t it a small world, spiritually speakin’?’ - Unity and Affiliation as Tradition in O Brother Where Art Thou?

Further democratic expression is found in the way various movements of the Radical Reformation allowed people to act on their own behalf in their practice of the teaching of Scripture rather than censuring their actions through the scrutiny of orthodoxy by the institutional Church and clergy. This freedom was seen as allowing space for the experience of the supernatural and the divine in the course of everyday life. The sanctioning of the dreams, ecstasies, and visions of ordinary people helped put them on an equal level.

In a scene 20 minutes into The Coen Brothers’ 2000 release entitled O Brother Where Art Thou?, we see the fusing of realism and surrealism around a moment of baptism. Three escaped convicts - Ulysses Everett McGill (played by George Clooney), Pete (played by John Turturro) and Delmar (played by Tim Blake Nelson) - are on the run and in search of buried treasure when, in the middle of their brief meal of barbecued rodent, they are surrounded by the voices raised in song of white-robed penitents amidst the rite of baptism. Both Delmar and Pete hear the ‘song of salvation’ and are baptized. As they continue on their journey, the trio pick up a lone hitch-hiker standing at a dusty crossroads, named Tommy. Tommy claims to have had a meeting with the Devil where he sold his soul in order to be given the gift of playing blues guitar. Reflecting on being surrounded by the recently saved and the recently damned, George Clooney’s Ulysses Everett McGill sums up the situation: ‘Well, ain’t it a small world, spiritually speaking ... I guess I’m the only one that remains unaffiliated!’ The idea of affiliation is one of the key tenets of the Radical Reformation — unity and affiliation. In his Declaration and Address, Thomas Campbell expressed this notion beautifully by stating:

That the church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one; consisting of all those in every place that profess their faith in Christ and obedience to him in all things according to the scriptures, and that manifest the same by their tempers and conduct, and of none else as none else can be truly and properly christians.20

This quest for Christian unity arose out of a desire to do away with sectarianism and to simply be Christians - a simple faith and a simple message that went beyond the restrictions of denominationalism. Yet as demonstrated by Thomas Campbell serving as a minister for an Old Light, Anti-Burgher, Seceder Presbyterian Church, each phrase of the church name spelled out what the church was against, but no part of it said what it was for. It seemed to Thomas Campbell and the other leaders of the Radical Reformation movement that the Church had never been meant to be fractured as it was, and that unity was the chief need of the day. Figures like Wesley, Zinzendorf and Campbell had no initial intention of creating yet another denomination, rather they sought an ecumenicism worthy of many contemporary discussions. The high importance placed on finding the common thread - the connections that bind together - almost had a downside with the turning away from much of the theology and creeds of the previous 16 centuries of Christian thought and the promotion of a theological motto of ‘No Creed but the Bible’. Their assumption was that if everyone came to the Bible and simply read it as if they had never seen it before, they would arrive at the same conclusions. In practice, this simply meant that everyone arrived, not at similar points of agreement, but each at their own conclusion. Further, in spite of their inclusive language, differing opinions were little tolerated (in fact, throughout the 200-year history of the Christians/Disciples, the question of just what was essential and what was opinion has been a great source of division among what is now three branches off the original tree). As Nathan Hatch points out, rather than ‘erecting a primitive church free from theological tradition and authoritarian control, [the Radical Reformation] came to advocate their own sectarian theology and to defer to the influence and persuasion of a dominant few’.21

It was also in the unbounded hope that the various reformers of this period in America had for their chances of success that we see yet another democratic impulse. They felt that, through their efforts, a new age of religious and social harmony would be ushered in to replace the oppressive and sectarian forces at work.22

This ‘radical reformation’ of the social order was directed largely by the new breed of preachers that arose. Populist preachers, such as the preacher portrayed by Robert Duvall in The Apostle and the faceless Baptist in O Brother Where Art Thou? did much to accelerate both the rapid growth and the continual splintering of American Christianity into the various factions and denominations that exist today. As these preachers of the common man began to explain theological matters for themselves they arrived each at his/her own conclusion, differing from one another as easily as they differed from the established Churches. Religious options multiplied as each group taught its own particular brand of Christianity. Preachers tended to mingle diverse and often contradictory sources in order to make their points - whatever it took to sell the gospel was fair game. High and popular culture, supernaturalism and Enlightenment rationalism, mystical experience and biblical literalism were intermixed at will as preachers reversed the traditional religious authorities, promoting youth, free expression and emotional experiences over education, tradition and proper conduct.23

6. Unity in Diversity - Tent Meeting Form in The Apostle

There is a wonderful illustration of the different yet similar revivalist stylings of the Southern tent meetings about 16 minutes into The Apostle. Though their respective movements often held radically different beliefs from one another, the preachers and leaders from all groups shared several traits that contributed to the growth of each movement. Each group had a passion for reaching common people, through whatever means necessary, often in highly unorthodox manners. Each group recognized a need for the reformation of the Church as a response to the needs of the times and developed plans to accomplish that reformation.24 Preachers actively sought out opportunities to preach and to spread their message. They did this in different ways, through revivalist camp meetings or circuit riding, in each case going to where the people were rather than waiting for people to come to them.25 With little education or experience to inform their preaching, the popular sermon became something of a scandal among the educated clergy. The sermon’s power and emphasis did not lie in doctrine and well-reasoned argument, but in ‘daring pulpit storytelling, no-holds-barred appeals, overt humour, strident attack, graphic application, and intimate personal experience’.26

The Radical Reformation as a movement in American Church history was truly a movement. There was nothing static about this period. As Nathan Hatch notes in The Democratization of American Christianity these movements were:

a new plateau of social possibility, based on self-confident leadership and widespread methods of internal communication, [which permitted] people to conceive of acting in self-generated democratic ways, to develop new ways of looking at things less clouded by inherited assumptions, and to defend themselves in the face of adverse interpretations from the orthodox culture.27

7. Common Media, Common Folks, Uncommon message

Part of what sustained and encouraged the numerous religious movements of this time was the loss of power and authority that had previously been centralized in the clergy, and more importantly, the explosion of religious communication through religious periodicals and pamphlets aimed at the common reader.28 In this regard the Radical Reformation shares space with the multiplex cinemas of today - finding and using the media of the common person.

It was through the use of various print media that many of the obscure men who were to become the leaders of the disparate movements gained an equal footing with men such as Jonathan Edwards and Timothy

1. What is the American Restoration Movement?

The roots of the Restoration Movement extend backward to the period after the Revolutionary War in which several Americans with religious interests grew restless over autocratic structures, European control and theology, and denominational boundaries. These pressures revamped the mainline churches, but also resulted in independent movements springing up in various regions. Four such independent groups in (1) Virginia, (2) New England, (3) Kentucky and (4) Pennsylvania-West Virginia-Ohio, played a role in the crystallization of the Restoration Movement in the 1830s.

The two most important tributaries for the larger movement resulted from the work of Barton W. Stone (1772-1844) and the two Campbells, Thomas (1763-1854) and his son Alexander (1788-1866).

Early in the 1830s the churches from the Stone and Campbell groups began merging in Kentucky. The amalgamation expanded to churches in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri. Several churches from the New England Jones-Smith, and Virginia O’Kelly movements also became a part of the Stone-Campbell merger. After the Civil War the Christian Connexion churches that did not merge established headquarters in Dayton, Ohio. In 1931 they merged with the Congregational Church, then with the Evangelical and Reformed Church, to form in 1957 the United Church of Christ.

Dwight, many publishing more material and read by a wider audience than the foremost clergy of the day.29 One chronicler of the period has estimated that of the 605 religious journals that could be found in the year 1830, only 14 of them had existed prior to 1790. Subscriptions skyrocketed from 5,000 at the turn of the century, to 400,000 by 1830. An 1823 editorial in the Christian Herald, argued for the inseparable connection of pulpit and press, one no less ordained by God than the other.30 It was also through the use of the press and other methods of giving power to common people that they forever changed American life. Never again was a Jonathan Edwards to arise in the American cultural milieu - the authority of the man of ideas had been confined and authority was instead offered to the common man.31

Of all the religious movements of the days of the American ideal after the Revolutionary War, it was perhaps these Radical Reformers, second only to the Mormon Church, who took the ideologies of true theology as freedom for self-evident authority, equality and unalienable rights for all citizens, and the right of private judgement on scriptural matters to be at the forefront of their movement. As noted by Nathan Hatch, this fervour in the Radical Reformers was grounded in the ‘self-evident [belief] that the priesthood of all believers meant just that - religion of, by, and for the

14- Re-membering the American Radical Reformation 249 people’.32 The primary leaders of this movement, steeped in the common sense of the Scottish Enlightenment, all arrived independently at remarkably similar conclusions within the space of a few short years. They desired to throw off the messy confines of history and begin again as a Lockean tabula rasa. The way to accomplish this, they believed, was to form a Church based on democratic principles and return to the Bible as the only rule for faith and practice - a rule that not only allowed, but demanded that ordinary believers interpret the New Testament for themselves.33

8. Conclusion

I believe that what continues to captivate audiences and film-makers about these aspects of the ‘Radical Reformation’ is that it continues to be the ‘open secret’ of not only the American Christian landscape, but also the common human experience of Christendom worldwide. In an environment that has become so weary of postmodern rhetoric that circles and circles but never lands, there is the whisper of deep import that breaks forth in moments such as those portrayed in films such as The Apostle and O Brother Where Art Thou?. Not merely a nostalgia for a bygone time of simple truths prior to the Internet, junk bonds and September nth, but a deeper and more abiding sense that in the affairs of the common human experience, there continues to be a hunger and thirst for meaning, community and creativity that is readily accessible and radically open to all. While factions of various Academic guilds may proclaim the final adieu to Christianity per se, darkened theatres continue to be a meeting place for viewers and film-makers who draw strange inspirations (particularly strange in the case of O Brother Where Art Thou?) from ‘the age-old story’. Yet what is being portrayed on the flickering silver screen in films such as The Apostle and O Brother Where Art Thou? is a Christian faith that is something more than an aesthetic source or typology. There is a tendency for modern readers and viewers of the tent revivalists and Radical Reformers of this period not to take this movement seriously and merely typecast the ‘Southern Tent Preacher’ as comic, wicked or irrelevant. Like the Radical Reformers, what we see in these films is something that is alongside and yet somewhat apart from centre stage in the affairs of mainline Christendom proper. The depictions of Christian faith seen in these movies and others like them offer a threefold differential reading of American Church history:

1. a nostalgic retrieval of the tenets of this vital part of the Christian frontier history,

2. a contemporary framing of the content, form and import of the radical reformation tenets in a present and active way, and the use of an imaginative medium in film where the viewer not only is asked to retrieve and enact the questions of the time, and

3. with the unspoken contract between viewer and film whereby the viewer engaged in what Samuel Taylor Coleridge termed a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ as the imaginative leap into the Possible, the viewer is invited to recall and represent these possibilities into a re-imagined and re-membered Now.

But the words to the audience from the Blind Seer at the beginning of O Brother Where Art Thou? speak volumes:

You seek a great fortune, you three who are now in chains. You will find a fortune, though it will not be the one you seek. But first. . . first you must travel a long and difficult road, a road fraught with peril. Mm-hmm. You shall see thangs, wonderful to tell. You shall see a ... a cow ... on the roof of a cottonhouse, ha. And, oh, so many startle- ments. I cannot tell you how long this road shall be, but fear not the obstacles in your path, for fate has vouchsafed your reward. Though the road may wind, yea, your hearts grow weary, still shall ye follow them, even unto your salvation.

Notes

1. Mieke Bal, Narratology, 2nd edition, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997, p. 59. The use of the term ‘poetics’ throughout this paper will be in keeping with this operational definition.

2. With regard to ‘framing’, I refer to Jonathan Culler’s assertion that ‘since the phenomena criticism deals with are signs, forms with socially-constituted meanings, one might try to think not of context but of the framing of signs: how are signs constituted {framed) by various discursive practices, institutional arrangements, systems of value, semiotic mechanisms . . . The expression framing the sign has several advantages over context: it reminds us that framing is something we do; it hints of the framing up (‘falsifying evidence beforehand in order to make someone appear guilty’) . . . and it eludes the incipient positivism of ‘context’ by alluding to the semiotic function of framing in art, where the frame is determining, setting off the object or event as art, and yet the frame itself may be nothing tangible, pure articulation’ (Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988, p. ix).

3. The notion of ‘the gaze’ {le regard) is explored in the twentieth century by Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s use of le regard builds upon his reflections of Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological analysis of le regard. As noted by Sartre, what is ‘seen’ is not essentially grounded upon the physical act of sight: ‘Of course what most often manifests a look is the convergence of two ocular globes in my direction. But the look {le regard) will be given just as well on occasion when there is a rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening

14- Re-membering the American Radical Reformation 251 of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain.’ See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenlogical Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, London: Methuen, 1958, p. 257.

4. ‘Substance or import is something different from content. By content we mean something objective in its simple existence, which by form is raised up to the intellectual-cultural sphere. By substance or import, however, we understand the meaning, the spiritual substantiality, which alone gives form its significance. We can therefore say: Substance or import is grasped by means of a form and given expression in a content. Content is accidental, substance [or import] essential, and form is the mediating element. The form must be appropriate to the content; so there is no opposition between the cultivation of form and the cultivation of content; it is rather that these two represent one extreme, and the cultivation of substance [or import] represents the other’ (Paul Tillich, ‘On the Idea of a Theology of Culture,’ in What is Religion?, trans. James L. Adams, New York: Harper and Row, 1969, pp. 165-6).

5. Jacques Derrida stated in an interview entitled ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’ that authentic art is ultimately a ‘fictive institution which in principle allows one to say everything’. The power of art is seen in its ability to ‘break out of prohibitions in every field where law can lay down the law. The law of [art such as] literature tends, in principle, to defy or lift the law ... It [in our case, film] is an institution which tends to overflow the institution.’ This ‘overflowing’ that Derrida speaks of as the power found within the institution of true art often becomes dammed, blocked, and (with certain artists) constipated behind the structure or ‘poetics’ of a given text and how the poetics of a work is ‘framed’. See Jacques Derrida, ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’, in Derek Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 3 6ff.

6. See Paul Tillich, ‘On the Idea of a Theology of Culture,’ pp. 165ft.; ‘The Nature of Religious Language’, in Theology of Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959, pp. 53ff.; and ‘The Spiritual Presence and the Ambiguities of Culture’ in Sytematic Theology Volume 5: Life and the Spirit; History and the Kingdom of God, London: SCM Press, 1997, pp. 245-62.

7. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835). Cited by Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972, p. 386.

8. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, p. 432.

9. Barton Warren Stone, ‘A Short History of the Life of Barton W. Stone Written by Himself’, in Rhodes Thompson (ed.), Voices from Cane Ridge, St Louis: Bethany Press, 1954, p. 68. Cited in Alhstrom, A Religious History of the American People, p. 433.

10. Thomas Campbell, Declaration and Address of the Christian Association of Washington, in Thomas H. Olbricht and Hans Rollmann (eds), The Quest for Christian Unity, Peace, and Purity in Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address: Text and Studies, Lanham: Scarecrow, 2000, p. 5.

11. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, p. 4.

12. Peter Cartwright, Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, ed. Charles Wallis reprint edn; London: Abingdon Press, 1986, p. 64. Cited in Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, p. 43 8.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 3. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 5. Peter Cartwright, Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, p. 64.

Peter Cartwright, Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, p. 7. Peter Cartwright, Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, p. 9. Peter Cartwright, Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, p. 9. Peter Cartwright, Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, p. 9. Thomas Campbell, Declaration and Address, p. 18.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 80. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. roff. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 35. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 56. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 55. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 57 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 58. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 126. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 11. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 142. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 162. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 69. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 69.

15. Perversion and Fulfilment:

Revivalist Christianity in The Night of the Hunter

TOM AITKEN

To watch this film is, as they used to say in travelogues and documentaries, to journey through space and time to a distant land, far away and long ago. A rural land, where the faithful gather at the river to sing hymns and eat and drink in blameless sobriety. A land where economic depression is an overarching reality, informing every aspect of life. A land in which travelling evangelists of various sorts bring with them not merely their particular brand of salvation, but a whiff of an exotic otherwhere, of a wider world full of mysterious, sinister excitements.

As it happens this description fits not only the southern states of America in the 1930s, the setting for The Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton’s only film as director, but, mutatis mutandis, my youth in the town of Taumarunui, New Zealand, derisively known to sophisticates from other parts of the country as ‘the dead centre of the North Island’. It was here, in the late 1950s, not too long after it was released, that I first saw The Night of the Hunter. No film I had seen previously portrayed a world of which I had first-hand experience and which I recognized effortlessly.

I had better add that none of the travelling evangelists who had come my way was a murderous exploiter of widows (for a summary of Revivalism, see Text Box 15.1). Nor, anywhere in New Zealand, had the depression of the Thirties continued into the 1950s. But my parents and uncles and aunts had all been at the sharp end of it. It had been the formative socio-economic experience of their lives. They were acquainted, if not with stomach-churning hunger, at least with living on short commons, the constant threat of unemployment and the need to make one penny do the work of two. In consequence, their ambition for their children was a secure, lifelong job - a concept which, 50-odd years on, seems as remote as other peculiarities of the period, such as unquestioning enlistment when required by King and Country, or going to school barefooted all summer long.

But, the wickedness of Harry Powell and the absence of actual as opposed to remembered economic depression aside, the world of Laughton’s film was all there. We sang ‘Leaning on the everlasting arms’

1. Revivalism

What is a ‘Revival’?

• A time when believers are called to spiritual renewal and non-believers to faith.

What are the core beliefs of Revivalism?

• Everyone is a sinner, dependent upon repentance and conversion for eternal salvation.

• Preaching the gospel is the principal method of promoting revival.

• Belief is validated only through entire commitment of the believer’s heart and life.

Where and when has Revivalism been practised?

• Revivalism is largely a Protestant evangelical phenomenon and in terms of sheer numbers, a largely North American one.

• In America there have been revivals, or ‘great awakenings’, since colonial times. At first they followed supposed evidence of God’s anger in the form of natural disasters. Later they were associated with revivalist preachers, such as Charles Finney (1820s), Moody and Sankey (late nineteenth century), and, during the twentieth century, Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson and Billy Graham. Many such evangelists have preached throughout the world.

• Some Christian denominations have been, during their early history, almost entirely revivalist in their practice, including early Methodists, the Salvation Army, Baptists and others.

• Revivalism has traditionally been associated with rural or workingclass industrial areas. The Alpha Course may be the most sophisticated and urbanized form of revivalism yet seen.

• Revivalism, usually in the form of parish missions conducted by members of religious orders, has also occurred in Catholicism. Such missions spread across Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, following the Protestant Reformation, and, after declining in the eighteenth century, throughout the Catholic world during the nineteenth century. They declined again in the mid-twentieth century.

What faults have been ascribed to Revivalism?

• Emotionalism and enthusiasm may lower standards of theological precision and social decorum.

• Conversions arising from fear of hell-fire may be thought dubious.

• However obtained, conversions may prove superficial and temporary.

• Certain notorious revivalists have proved to be, like Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter, financial exploiters and fraudsters, spiritual charlatans, philanderers and abusers.

• In the USA, in particular, ‘televangelism’ has generated large personal fortunes.

and ‘Bringing in the sheaves’. We gathered each year at the riverside for the Sunday School picnic in an atmosphere of pious jollity very like that prevalent on the occasion at which Powell meets the hapless Willa. In Taumarunui, as in the film, evangelical Christians, with the best intentions but not always the best results, engaged in blatant matchmaking. And, outside the inner circle of the saved, there were one or two town drunks, casualties of economic change and domestic loss, like Uncle Birdie.

But it wasn’t merely these day-by-day parallels that struck me; I also recognized a much deeper theme, that of a dichotomy within the sort of Christianity with which I was familiar, between, on the one hand, sensationalist preachers who were often in some way on the make - if not so vilely as Preacher Powell - and, on the other, people who possessed a serener, self-sacrificial, practical faith, like that of Rachel, the woman who looks after John and Pearl when they escape from Powell’s clutches. But although Powell and Rachel are chalk and cheese, they nevertheless have revivalist Christianity in common, as is bizarrely demonstrated in the film during that last night when Powell is lurking outside Rachel’s house, singing his theme song, ‘Leaning on the everlasting arms’, and Rachel joins in with a descant: ‘Leaning on Jesus’. The same song: two entirely different takes on those everlasting arms. For Powell, the everlasting arms, one labelled love, one labelled hate, are those of a vengeful God who smites his opponents hip and thigh. For Rachel they are those of a comforting, merciful, benign saviour.

It is easy to conclude - and indeed it is the central plank of my platform, that Rachel’s life is a fulfilment of Bible Belt revivalist Christianity and Powell’s is a perversion of it. Nevertheless, I think we have to take Powell’s religion as being, at least in part, more than just a ploy useful in the entrapment of widows in possession of money. He talks to God when there is no one present to hear him. An absolute hypocrite would not bother. The most perverted part of his religion, his loathing of sex, his uncontrollable, murderous misogynism, is itself a perverted version of a strand in historical Christianity, a kind of cracker-barrel version of the Manichaean heresy, according to which humans were formed by the rulers of darkness and procreation is demonic in origin. But his hatred of soft, frilly things and sexual allure also arises from his unconscious depths. He has looked in Christianity for something that appears to support his neurosis, and found it. Religion, for him, is not something handed down as a set of doctrines in which he has no say. In reply to John’s father’s enquiry as to what religion, exactly, he professes, he says it is one he and the Lord have worked out betwixt them. He is telling nothing more or less than the truth. This is a partial and egocentric version of a process many believers will recognize - of taking a faith on board in stages according to what aspects of it prove easiest to relate to. Many Catholic or Orthodox thinkers, however, would regard Powell’s phrase

2. Are the Songs Sung by Harry Powell in The Night of the
   Hunter Genuine Revival Hymns?

‘Leaning on the everlasting arms’ was written in Alabama, in the southern states of America where The Night of the Hunter is 'set, by Anthony Showalter (1858-1924). in letters of condolence to two former pupils whose wives had died, he quoted Deuteronomy 33.27: ‘Underneath arc the everlasting arms’ and was instantly inspired to compose, before finishing the letters, the words and music of a refrain on the theme. He sent this to Elisha A. Hoffman (1839-1929), who added the verses, beginning ‘What a fellowship, what a joy divine’. The song was published in The Glad Evangel, for Revival, Camp and Evangelistic Meetings in 1887.

‘Bringing in the sheaves’ was first printed anonymously in The Golden Gate for the Sunday School in 1874. In ^77 it appeared in The Morning Star, a New Collection of Sunday School Music, attributed to Knowles Shaw (1834-78), who compiled both volumes.

Although the song is often sung at harvest festivals, it has a more general meaning, as the opening words of the first verse indicate: ‘Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness . . .’ picking up the metaphor found at Matthew 9.37 and Luke 10.2: ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few’. The sheaves are souls harvested for God.

as simply a working definition of Protestantism. But Powell has no yearning for the fullness of faith. He can relate to hatred and the notion of himself as the instrument of divine punishment. He has no idea of love, human or divine, despite the sermon he preaches on the subject.

Despite my possibly tendentious scriptural allusions (the God who smites his opponents hip and thigh as opposed to the merciful saviour), the different way in which Powell and Rachel understand the Bible-based revivalism they have in common is not traceable to the distinction between Old and New Testament ideas about God. It is, rather, that between contrasting - and, many would argue, both partial - forms of belief that have been found within Christianity throughout its history. Numerous revivalist movements during the last couple of centuries could, if they chose, trace their ancestry back to medieval heresies. Harry Powell would not have been altogether out of place preaching at the market cross in a medieval town. Nor is his religion of hatred and wrath so very remote, psychologically, from the terrifying Catholic hellfire sermons that render incandescent James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and feature, more recently in the film Liam, written by Jimmy McGovern and directed by Stephen Frears.

Turning to Rachel, we can see that her religion of love and sleeves- rolled-up practicality, of the sort once called ‘muscular Christianity’, is to be found in all manner of religious groupings, ranging from orders of monks and nuns to the Salvation Army in which I grew up.1 Such people place the needs of humanity at the centre of their faith. It would be going much too far to say that Harry Powell, in contrast, exalts the demands of God above all other considerations, although he might appear to be doing so to anyone who failed to detect his self-serving hypocrisy.

Many of the early critics, who in all sorts of ways entirely missed the point of the film, assumed that Powell was simply mad. There is a sense in which this is obviously so, but another in which it demands careful examination. I have argued that his beliefs, such as they are, are genuine. But may we speculate that he may at one time have been a revivalist Christian in some more innocent sense? Why, after all, should he choose religion as the basis for his confidence trickery if it were not something to which he had once felt sincere attachment? Was it necessarily an easier option than dodgy insurance or bogus gold mines? Perhaps in the Bible Belt it was. But then, why does he murder his victims as well as fleece them? I think we must concede that Powell at least in part believes what he preaches, and sees himself in some way as an instrument of divine wrath.

This is madness enough, you may think, and in any case my questions (still more my conclusion) may seem to ignore the fact that this is a surrealist, not a naturalistic film. But I suggest that even in the context of a work that seeks to present vivid images of mental turmoil rather than to explain or analyse it, such points are worth raising.

Whatever his original vocation may have been, by the time we meet him it has rigidified into a technique for living off the gullible hero worship he can arouse in others and, especially, of exercising hostile, destructive power over women. His loathing for them, as I have already suggested, is the force that drives him, but as well as being his driving force it is also his downfall. Key moments in the film are the two occasions when he shouts abusively at Pearl. She has been his ally against her brother and has believed that he loves her. Now he has blown his cover.

These scenes are wonderfully played, not only by Mitchum, but by the young Sally Jane Bruce, and this is perhaps the moment to mention one of the odder ironies about this film and its making. To quote Laughton’s biographer, Simon Callow:

As for the children, they too are perfect; which is something of a mystery, because Laughton kept as far away from them as possible. His special loathing was reserved for the little girl, Sally Bruce, but he didn’t have much time either for Billy Chapin . . . after Mitchum had given Billy a note: ‘Do you think John’s frightened of the preacher?’ ‘Nope,’ said Billy Chapin. ‘Then you don’t know the preacher and you don’t know John.’ ‘Oh really?’ said Billy. ‘That’s probably why I just won the New York Critics’ Circle prize.’ ‘Get that child away from me,’ roared Laughton. Thereafter Mitchum directed the boy - with the most remarkable results. Odd paradox, that Laughton should have failed to create any rapport with the children, when it was his vision that the entire film should be a child’s nightmare.2

But I digress. If Powell is a genuine believer who has slipped stage by stage into the role of a misogynist serial killer, perhaps he is mad. If, as seems more likely, he is a calculating, plausible villain who has made God in his own image, then surely he is less mad than wicked. This, however, I repeat, is not to say that he does not in some sense believe in the God he has created. His chats with him, for example when he salutes God for putting him in a cell with a convicted killer with $10,000 whose wife is a widow in the making, seem genuine enough, although we may note that Powell behaves as if he is virtually on more or less equal terms with the deity. He complains, for instance, of feeling tired and suggests that God neither understands nor extends sufficient sympathy to his problems. Then he moves to a point on which, he supposes, they are at one: women, those ‘soft frilly things’.

That particular chat with God follows immediately after the scene in which Powell watches a stripper at work. This scene is interesting in various ways. It is one of the moments that early critics may have had in mind when they accused Mitchum of overacting. To my mind, however, his curious facial expressions and contortions express very aptly the inner turmoil of a man ill at ease with the strength of feeling that is aroused within him. But we should notice also the economy and tact with which the scene is shot. The bored dancer is not supposed to arouse the cinema audience; it is her effect on Powell which matters. That effect is conveyed by his face, then, as the camera pans down, his clenched left fist, its knuckles tattooed with the letters HATE. Then that hand goes into his pocket and we see the blade of his flick-knife rip through his black preacher’s jacket. His eyes turn upwards and, in a further brief address to God, he regrets the fact that he cannot murder all of the world’s harlots. Then the hand of a policeman falls on his shoulder and he is arrested as a car thief. All this happens in less time than it takes to tell it, and the swiftness of movement, coupled with the almost abstract, iconic nature of each of the images, is characteristic of Laughton’s directorial method.

Much of what we are told about the making of the film makes it seem even more deplorable that its commercial failure brought Laughton’s career as a director to a premature end. Although Laughton did not get on with his child actors, in most other respects he was a model of the collaborative leader. Lilian Gish, by 1955 a film acting veteran of more than 40 years’ experience, wrote that

I have to go back as far as D.W. Griffith to find a set so infused with purpose and harmony . . . there was not ever a moment’s doubt as to what we were doing. To please Charles Laughton was our aim. We believed in and respected him. Totally.3

Laughton, as it happens, had thought that Griffith’s visual world was the appropriate one for his film and had looked at the senior director’s work afresh. In fact it was watching Birth of a Nation that reminded him of the intense composure and inwardness of the work of Lilian Gish and led him to cast her as Rachel. If we recall the scene in Griffith’s film in which Gish, as Elsie Stoneman, nurses the wounded, I think we can see the qualities of warmth and compassion that made Laughton want Gish to play Rachel. We can also see many of the devices that Laughton took over from Griffith. Short sequences of action and image build up into scenes; photographs inspire memories from the past; there are frequent frames within the frame; the titles introducing scenes have something of the sententious, quasi-proverbial nature of Rachel’s utterances. And, of course, there is the luminosity of the black-and-white photography.

To reproduce that luminosity Laughton turned to Stanley Cortez, a dandyish, experimentally inclined cinematographer who had filmed The Magnificent Ambersons for Orson Welles. Cortez spent a deal of time explaining cameras and lenses to Laughton, finding after a while that in the matter of the poetic conception of a scene he had things to learn from his pupil. Between them they produced those stunning chiaroscuro effects, which, of course, are emblematic of light and dark, beauty and ugliness, good and evil.4 This is particularly evident in the lyrical episode when John and Pearl, pursued on a stolen horse by Powell, escape down river in the skiff. Incidentally, the overhead shots of the children in the boat were filmed on location in Ohio, but the shots showing the river bank, with its screech-owl, turtle, frogs and rabbits were done in a studio. Most astonishing of all, the shot of Powell, a black silhouette riding across the skyline, singing, as ever, ‘Leanin’, leanin’...’ while John and Pearl are hiding in the barn, was also filmed indoors, using, as Cortez tells us, ‘a midget on a pony’.5

Not everything about the production was sweetness and light. Laughton entrusted the script to James Agee, much admired scriptwriter, critic and novelist, only to find himself confronted by a self-destructive drunk who eventually presented him with 350 pages of screenplay. This recreated Davis Grubb’s rather floridly written - but at the time very popular - novel in extraordinary detail and demanded extensive sequences of newsreel footage that would have tied the story very firmly to the atmosphere and politics of the urban depression instead of letting it float free in a surreal Arcadia that had gone catastrophically wrong. Laughton himself set to to produce a workable script (for which he took no credit, leaving Agee’s name on the film). Agee complained, but died before the film was released.6

Another source of minor friction was the fact that Mitchum deplored the casting of Shelley Winters as Willa, whom he thought fit only to end up in the river with her throat cut. Laughton, however, having been Winters’s teacher, took no notice of Mitchum’s curmudgeonly grumbling. In the event, whatever Mitchum thought, Winters brought both eroticism and innocence to the role. She thought this one of her best, most restrained performances. I would agree.

Mitchum also thought his performance in this film his best, and Laughton his best director. Surprisingly, the two men - macho boozer and bisexual teetotaller - got on well from the outset. Laughton said, ‘I want you to play ... a diabolical shit.’ Mitchum’s laconic reply was ‘Present.’ On some later occasion they were driving along the freeway when Laughton told Mitchum, ‘I don’t know if you know, and I don’t know if you care, and I don’t care if you know, but there is a strong streak of homosexuality in me.’ ‘No shit!’ cried Mitchum. ‘Stop the car!’7

To my mind, Night of the Hunter is one of the most genuinely frightening thrillers ever made. For most of the film this quality of fright derives from the relationship between Powell and the children. In thriller terms it is all very cunning. We know that the children are safe as long as Powell does not know where to find the money their father hid before he was arrested, but the fate of 25 dead widows reminds us that their lives will be at risk as soon as he has found out. The ‘child’s nightmare’ that Laughton was set on making is principally John’s nightmare and it is through his eyes that we see most of the action. Until his mother disappears and he and his sister go on the run, John is trebly burdened: first, by his promise to his father to tell nobody of the money’s whereabouts; second, by his awareness that his mother - who believes that the money has been destroyed - would pass the news straight to Powell if she discovered otherwise; third, by Pearl’s permanent eagerness to spill the beans because she loves Powell and does not understand the situation she and John are in. There is no one to whom John can talk, and Powell hounds him at every opportunity.

During the course of the film, John is deprived of or let down by a series of previously reassuring presences. His father is executed for murder, his mother murdered by Powell. When he goes on the run, dragging the reluctant Pearl, and turns for help to Uncle Birdie, the poor old soak proves quite useless, having seen Willa’s body in the river and got into a state of moral and alcoholic collapse. Only at the very end of the story does John learn once again to trust an adult.

Two points I have raised in discussing The Night of the Hunter - whether or not Powell is mad, and John’s successive loss of supportive figures - point forward rather interestingly to a later film by another director. When Alfred Hitchcock became interested in doing Psycho as a black- and-white, low budget thriller, The Night of the Hunter was one of the precedents for such an enterprise, albeit not an encouraging one, since it had been neither a critical nor a box office success. Stephen Rebello tells us that Hitchcock quizzed his colleagues about the profitability of Laughton’s film as well as that of Howard Hawks’ and Christian Nyby’s The Thing (1951), a humorous sci-fi shocker, and Mervyn Leroy’s The Bad Seed (1956), about a malicious child who causes several deaths.8 This research does not of itself mean that he was artistically influenced by any of the three, but the two points I have just mentioned in The Night of the Hunter are interestingly echoed in Psycho. There is also a parallel in the later film to the stripping away of comforting presences that afflicts John in Laughton’s piece, but as Kenneth Tynan pointed out, Hitchcock indulges his sadistic nature by inflicting this process of successive loss on the audience rather than on any of his characters. At the beginning of Psycho, we follow Marion, the absconding secretary; then she is murdered in the shower at a motel. The amiable, shambling investigator Arbogast sets out to find her. We follow him to the same motel, then up the hill to the Gothic pile behind it from which enigmatic conversations have been heard; he is last seen falling backwards down a flight of stairs, stabbed to death by, apparently, an old woman wielding a huge knife. We are now well over halfway through the film, still very much in the dark, and two people for whom we have developed affection and, in some sense, trust, have been taken from us. When Marion’s sister Lila sets off in pursuit of Arbogast we are on the edge of panic. What will happen to her, and where will that leave us?

Then there is the question of the degree of insanity evident in Powell and in Norman Bates, the murderous motel-keeper in Psycho. When we see Norman having a long chat with Marion, in his office, we are made aware of his strangeness, but there are also many indications of self- awareness, in both speech and behaviour. Indeed, his repressed, allusive, stuttering nervousness is understandable enough in an isolated young man who finds himself talking to a cool, apparently self-possessed beauty like Marion. Given what we later learn about Norman, however, is his behaviour during this scene the play-acting of the deranged? Within moments of this conversation’s conclusion, he is in drag, clutching his large knife, charging into Marion’s shower, totally out of control. In The Night of the Hunter, by contrast, Powell seems very much in control almost throughout. There are some moments, however, when we are invited to suppose that he has lost that control: when he watches the stripper, when he appears upside down from his top bunk in prison; on the two occasions when he shouts abusively at Pearl; when he is stunned in the cellar and during the chase that follows before the children escape in the skiff; and when, again twice, he scuttles like a frightened rabbit from the gun toted by Rachel.9

This ambiguity over the degree and nature of the killer’s supposed madness is exploited powerfully but quite differently in the two films. In Psycho a first time viewer might get almost to the end before realizing who the villain - if that is the word - actually is. In The Night of the Hunter, Powell’s first appearance is heralded by the biblical text urging us to beware false prophets: no ambiguity there.

There is a third similarity between the two films: The Night of the Hunter, like Psycho, is a black comedy.

Whether or not Hitchcock was in fact ‘influenced’ by The Night of the Hunter, the comparison between these two classic thrillers, which appeared five years apart, in 1955 and i960, makes clear the very special quality of Laughton’s film. In crude generic terms Psycho is a slasher movie (although that is by no means all it is). The Night of the Hunter is something quite different. Powell has a knife, it is true (a flick-knife, which when closed looks like a stunted crucifix) but we do not see him kill Willa with it, and since he does not find out where the money is until the moment when the children finally elude him he can otherwise employ it only as a threat. This means that our reactions, from the time he insinuates himself into their home and starts hounding them, are governed by a complex amalgam of pity and terror on their behalf; of disgust and horror at his vicious pitilessness; and of powerful moral revulsion from the thought that he might ever get his hands on the booty.

As I have mentioned, the film was neither a critical nor box office success. Neither critics nor public seem to have understood it. One of the reasons for this was the confusion over whether Powell is mad (which also affected critical assessments of Mitchum’s performance). The other, I believe, was confusion over the nature of revivalist religion. Let us dip into some of these critical assessments.10

Laughton’s direction and the film in general were hammered: ‘a horrible yarn . . . [an] extremely morbid story ... [a] repulsive picture’, ‘dismally arty . . . fearfully entangled with dreary allegory’, ‘so heavily macabre that I found myself laughing in the wrong places’. Nor did the child actors escape censure: they ‘disappoint and fail to communicate emotion’.11 Only Lilian Gish attracted much praise.

But what of Robert Mitchum? ‘Mitchum can’t carry this story’, thought the Evening Standard, while the Daily Mirror considered that he overacted. Variety found intermittent depth in his performance, but barely adequate conviction when he was lusting after the money. Dilys Powell thought that Laughton should have taken the role himself . Some of these critics seem to have wanted a more full-bloodedly melodramatic portrayal. Lillian Gish actually said to Laughton during shooting that she wondered whether he was softening the role of Powell overmuch. Laughton said, partly in jest, that he didn’t want to ruin ‘that young man’s career’.12

As I have already noted, however, Mitchum and, nowadays, many others regard this as his best performance ever. Those who complain that he was too restrained, perhaps fail to grasp that what is in question here is what Hannah Arendt, apropos Adolf Eichmann, called ‘the banality of evil’. Although he towers over this film, Powell is really a small character, impressive only to those who want to be impressed. He can persuade Willa that she is a sinner needing redemption rather than a woman needing physical companionship, but John remains adamant that ‘he’s not my dad’, and Rachel knows him for a fraud as soon as she claps eyes on him.

The critics’ treatment of Shelley Winters and Willa will serve to introduce the second of my explanations for the initial failure of the film: neither critics nor audiences were closely or objectively enough aware of the nuances of revivalist Christianity to assess it with any great degree of perception. They provide evidence of the inadequacy of so-called sophisticated criticism. The Daily Mail was content to dismiss Willa unkindly as Powell’s ‘stupid wife’, while the Daily Herald remarked of her death that ‘since she has previously gone round saying things like my whole body is just a-quivering with cleanliness, 1 was rather glad.’ A funny enough crack, of course, but disdainful of all the many, essentially innocent people who - however much we may disapprove - in real life have felt and spoken as she did.

Writing in 1976, the earlier of Laughton’s two biographers, Charles Higham, describes the small community where the treasure is buried as ‘gripped by religious hysteria’.13 Even granted that many people are disposed to respond with this charge to any mention of personal faith, this assertion seems strange to me.14 Icey and Ben Harper, the elderly couple who matchmake Willa into Powell’s clutches still strike me, after many viewings of the film, as fairly run-of-the-mill small town believers, comic rather than sinister, their worst failing that they know not what they do. I accept that Higham’s interpretation makes more convincing their metamorphosis, at the film’s climax, into a lynch mob, but although this development is not unbelievable, Icey and Ben’s abrupt change of personality strains at the limits of one’s credulity. Ben, especially, who has always tried to put a brake on key’s willingness to interfere in the lives of others, looks more than odd as he froths at the mouth with the worst of them. I’ve no doubt that high-minded Christians not revivalistically inclined might argue that the great weakness of revivalist Christianity is that it leaves its victims with no intellectual or spiritual bulwark against this kind of violent evolution from loving child of God into baying scourge of the guilty. Nonetheless, we see such howling mobs all over the place these days, and few of them have arrived where they are from the starting point of rural revivalism.

Perhaps even now most viewers of the film will not bother very much about taking on board the nuances of revivalist Christianity evident in Ben and Icey, Willa, Rachel and Powell, but at least now proper weight is given to the film’s sensitivity; its imaginative and often poetic photography; its nerve-racking narrative power; its Mark Twain-like exteriors (idyllic riverside life) and expressionist interiors, full of moody night time shadows.

The star-lit moments which open and close the film are widely regarded as unfortunate intrusions of kitsch, and despite the almost angelic presence of Lilian Gish, I’m inclined to agree. Nonetheless, considering the film as a whole, I that that we can all salute a considerable miracle: that a bunch of (variously) agnostics, atheists and careless pagans, drunks and lechers, geniuses and fools, got together and against all the odds produced an overwhelmingly powerful parable of the perversion (in Powell) and fulfilment (in Rachel) of a variety of backwoods Christianity, which, however much it may be despised by irreligious people (even more, of course, by many other Christians) is, or was, the real world of the faith for millions of people during the decades between the Great Depression and the invention, as Philip Larkin expressed it, of sexual intercourse in 1963.

But the upward revision of critical estimation of The Night of the Hunter came too late for Laughton. There is a price to be paid for unrecognized miracles. As I have said, following the commercial and critical failure of his solitary masterpiece Laughton never worked as a director again.

Select Bibliography

Paul S. Boyer (ed.), The Oxford Companion to United States History, New York:

Oxford University Press, 2001.

Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor, London: Methuen, 1987. Lillian Gish, The Movies, Mr Griffith and Me, London: W. H. Allen, 1969. Charles Higham, Charles Laughton: An Intimate Biography, London: W. H.

Allen, 1976.

Stephen Rebello, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, London: Marion Boyars, 1990.

Gordon Taylor, Companion to the Song Book of the Salvation Army, London: International Headquarters of the Salvation Army, 1989.

Christopher Tookey, The Critics’ Film Guide, London: Boxtree, 1994.

Notes

1. I should perhaps add that none of the evangelists more or less on the make to whom I referred earlier were Salvationists; when young I was often taken to hear peripatetic preachers.

2. Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor, London: Methuen, 1987, p. 233. During discussion following this paper, Dr Andrena Telford remarked that the film had put her in mind of many fairy stories, some of them decidedly sinister, including Cinderella, Snow White and Babes in the Wood. The biblical text warning against wolves in sheep’s clothing reminded her of Little Red Riding Hood. Charles Higham, Charles Laughton: An Intimate Biography, London: W. H. Allen, 1976, p. 193, suggests that Lillian Gish, as she opens and closes the film, is like Mother Goose.

3. Callow, Charles Laughton, p. 231.

4. Dr William R. Telford points out that Laughton’s use of chiaroscuro may well have been influenced by David Lean’s Hobson’s Choice, in which Laughton had starred in 1954, the year before The Night of the Hunter.

5. Higham, Charles Laughton, pp. 191-2.

6. Higham, Charles Laughton, pp. 184-5.

7. Callow, Charles Laughton, pp. 229 and 232. Laughton’s parents had been hotel-keepers and one of the legacies the experience left with him was a dislike of drunkenness. There was, however, a considerable amount of drinking during the filming of The Night of the Hunter. Mitchum said that a woman from the Welfare Department, ‘used to hang around in a white hat and constantly threatened to report to the Welfare Department about the drinking and cursing on the set. Charles did not drink but Shelley and I always did, and so did the crew, when Charles wasn’t looking. One day we caught the Welfare woman drinking beer behind a bush at Rowland V. Lee’s ranch when we were shooting there. She gave up all thought of reporting us after that’ (Higham, Charles Laughton, p. 192).

8. Stephen Rebello, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, London: Marion Boyars, 1990, p. 22.

9. In an all too characteristically American way, this film about redemption is finally resolved by a sweet old lady with a gun.

10. See Christopher Tookey, The Critics’ Film Guide, London: Boxtree, 1994, pp. 585-6.

11. These hostile judgements are those of, respectively, Reg Whitley, John McCarten, The Daily Herald and The Times.

12. Lilian Gish, The Movies, Mr Griffith and Me, London: W. H. Allen, 1969, p. 364.

13. Higham, Charles Laughton, p. 193.

14. The scene in which, lit by flaming torches, Willa testifies that she drove a good man to murder, is certainly hysterical, but the excitement of the occasion need not be taken as evidence that all the townsfolk are ‘gripped by religious hysteria’ day-in, day-out.

16. ‘His blood be upon us, and our children’:
    The Treatment of Jews and Judaism in
    the Christ Film

WILLIAM R. TELFORD

1. Introduction

The Aims of the Chapter

The title of this chapter is ‘“His blood be upon us, and our children”: The Treatment of Jews and Judaism in the Christ Film’. The quotation is taken from Matthew 27.25, the notorious passage in which the first evangelist transfers responsibility to the Jews for the death of Jesus. Instrumental in fostering later antisemitism, this verse is an appropriate one to introduce the aims of this chapter, namely, an examination of the treatment of Jews and Judaism in the Christ film. What I wish to do in particular is to examine the depiction of Jews and Judaism in a selected number of biblical epics or Christ films stretching from the early silent movies to the late 1980s. After some preliminary remarks about methodology, I shall provide some background for our study, first, by giving a brief summary of the ways Jews and Judaism are treated in the New Testament (more particularly the Christian Gospels), and, second, by offering some general observations on Jews and Judaism in the cinema, and especially about the role of Jews in the film industry. Then we shall proceed to a discussion of six selected Christ films that, hopefully, will demonstrate some of the trends or strategies that can be observed in the treatment of Jews and Judaism therein. Text boxes will offer some background notes on the films selected, and the Notes at the end of the chapter will supply some select bibliography for further reading.

The term ‘anti-Semitism’, it should be said, was coined in the second half of the nineteenth century, and with predominantly political and racial connotations.1 Some scholars regard it as anachronistic, therefore, to use it in connection with an ancient text like the New Testament, preferring instead the terms ‘anti-Jewishness’ or ‘anti-Judaism’. While the term is relatively new, the phenomenon of hostility towards the Jews is an ancient one, and since this essay will also be more concerned with the effects of the New Testament texts than with their original context, I

16. ‘His blood be upon us, and our children’ 167 intend to follow common usage (and Wolfgang Benz) in employing the term to refer to ‘all anti-Jewish statements, tendencies, resentments, attitudes, and actions, regardless of whether they are religiously, racially, socially, or otherwise motivated’.2

Approaching the Subject Critically

As in my previous chapter on the characterization of Peter and Judas, let me offer a brief word, if I may, on my methodological approach to the subject of this chapter. Here I refer the reader not only to the first chapter but also to that chapter. Since I shall, once again, be dealing with biblical epics or Christ films, one of my major concerns will be to examine them in relation to their New Testament sources and with respect to the question of how these sources have been used or treated. I shall be exploring them with regard to their intertextual references, therefore, looking at how filmmakers have altered or adapted these texts in their filmic representations. Where aesthetics (camera-work, editing, mise-en-scene, visual quality, sets, lighting, music, etc.), as well as plot, settings and characterization, are relevant to our subject, I shall make appropriate comments. Films, as we have seen, are also interesting for their social context and ideology. They reflect the culture in which they were produced, and the audiences for which they were made, and it is this aspect, along with intertextuality, that will also occupy me.

The subject of ‘Jews and Judaism in the Christ Film’ relates to some very important concerns of our day. In general, it impinges upon the power of cinema to reflect and influence popular attitudes and values. It relates to the phenomenon of racial stereotyping in general, and antisemitism in particular. It touches upon the vexed question of the antisemitic nature of some aspects of Christianity’s sacred text, the New Testament. As Margaret Davies points out in her article, ‘Stereotyping the Other: The “Pharisees” in the Gospel According to Matthew’:

Stereotyping can be useful in learning to make initial distinctions and has always formed part of our didactic literature aimed at children. What is distinctive about our cultural individualism, however, is that we recognize this and guard against allowing these categories to become rigid. Our individualism gives us a sense that ‘justice’ requires a just appreciation of individual complexities, and has led to legislation that outlaws slandering and discriminating against ethnic and gender groups.3

In what follows, I shall attempt to demonstrate some of the complexities, as well as some of the ironies and conundrums, that are entailed in a study of the biblical epic or Christ film from a racial or ethnic perspective, and some of the strategies that have been used in dealing with the ethnically sensitive passages to be found in the New Testament Gospels. A major presupposition of this chapter is that, in making ourselves aware of these complexities, we can be more sensitive to the power of the filmic text, as well as the written one, to perpetuate damaging stereotypes.

2. Jews and Judaism in the New Testament

The first and major conundrum is this, and it faced me as I began this study: biblical epics were produced for mass audiences - the earlier ones for a predominantly Christian society - by largely Jewish directors and producers. Where the Christ film is concerned, this was based on the New Testament Gospels whose depiction of Jews and Judaism has in part been so derogatory that these sacred texts of Christianity have been used to justify the persecution of Jews down through the centuries. Why, then, did Jewish producers support the filming of these texts? How were the antisemitic elements in them treated? What compromises were made with Christianity’s sacred texts? What compromises were made with Jews, Christians and mass audiences when they came to the cinema? It is this intriguing tension, then, between the Christian sacred text, the Jewish film producer and the exigencies of the market, shall we say, that I now want to explore.

Let me now fill out some of these points, and let us begin with a brief summary of the way Jews and Judaism are treated in the New Testament, with particular reference to the Gospels. The earliest Gospel was the Gospel of Mark, and this is where we find the mainspring of the New Testament’s derogatory picture of Jews and Judaism. If any New Testament writing deserved to be described as antisemitic, Mark would be a good candidate. The Gospel’s treatment of Jews and Judaism amounts, in the eyes of some scholars, to a pronounced campaign of vilification. Jewish religion is depicted in a poor light. Jewish lustration practice is disparaged, as are other Jewish practices (cf. Mk 7.1-23). Judaism is implied to be obsolescent (cf. Mk 2.21-22 - new wine is not be placed in old wineskins). The Markan Jesus himself is presented as more Gentile than Jewish.

The Jewish people, their leaders, and even his Jewish disciples and family fare no better. The Jewish authorities are depicted as hard of heart (cf. Mk 2.1 ff.; 3.5), as hypocrites (cf. Mk 7.6-7), as guilty of the unforgivable sin in questioning the source of the Markan Jesus’s power (cf. Mk 3.28-30), and as wicked murderers for rejecting Jesus (the beloved Son of the vineyard owner) and the prophets before him (cf. Mk 12.iff.). All the Jewish leadership groups are shown implausibly as plotting his death, with Jesus anticipating their culpability in the passion predictions (cf. Mk 8.31; 9.31; 10.33-34). They act with stealth and deviousness (cf. Mk

14.1-2), they are accused of acting out of envy (cf. Mk 15.10), and they are depicted as cruelly mocking Jesus on the cross (cf. Mk 15.31-32).

One New Testament scholar sums up Mark’s treatment in this way:

There can, accordingly, be traced throughout the Markan Gospel a consistent denigration of the Jewish leaders and people, and of the family of Jesus and his original Apostles, which adds up to a truly damning indictment of the Jews for their treatment of Jesus. The Jewish leaders and people are responsible for his death, his family regard him as insane, and his Apostles fail to understand him and finally desert him.4

Matthew, the most Jewish of the Gospels, draws on Mark, and introduces some new twists. It is Matthew who puts a powerful series of denunciations upon the lips of Jesus against the scribes and the Pharisees (Mt. 23). It is this evangelist who creates the famous passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter, where Pilate is made to wash his hands of responsibility for the death of Jesus, and who makes the Jewish crowd accept it, not only for themselves but for all subsequent generations of Jews, in the bloodcurdling words: ‘His blood be on us, and on our children!’ (Mt. 27.25).

Luke is generally regarded as being more benign toward Jews and Judaism. He it is who informs us that Jesus was circumcised as a Jew (Lk. 2.21) and purified in the Temple (2.22-32), and he it is who gives us the only childhood story of Jesus conversing with the learned doctors of the law in the Temple (Lk. 2.41-51). Nevertheless Luke includes, for example, the damning parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, the former thankful that he is not like other men, the latter a paragon of humility (Lk. 18.9-14).

The Gospel of John is regarded as the most notoriously antisemitic of all. The Johannine Jesus is distanced from his Jewish roots, and speaks to his opponents, ‘the Jews’, as if they were a single hostile entity, and, in addressing them, uses terms such as ‘your law’, ‘your fathers’ (the patriarchs) or ‘your father Abraham’ as if they were not also his (e.g. Jn 8.17; 8.56). ‘You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning’, he tells them (Jn 8.44).

All four Gospels have Jesus challenge Judaism’s greatest institution, the Temple, in the famous ‘Cleansing of the Temple’ incident. All four Gospels, moreover, have Jesus judged and condemned not only by Pilate, but by the Jewish authorities themselves, under Caiaphas. All four Gospels make the Jews responsible, then, for the death of Jesus, and all have contributed, therefore, to the powerful image of Jews as Christ-killers. There have, of course, been scholarly attempts to soften this picture, and to claim in a number of ways that this was not the intention of the Gospel writers. For those of you interested in this discussion, a fuller summary of it

(together with bibliography) is to be found in my book, The Theology of the Gospel of Mark (1999).5 Nevertheless, it is not the intention here that counts, but the effect, and this effect has had disastrous consequences, as we know, for Jews through the centuries.

3. Jews and Judaism in the Cinema

Let me fill out the second half of the conundrum, namely, the fact that many of the biblical epics were produced and financed by Jews, or if they were not, they were produced in the context of a Hollywood that was dominated by Jews.

Jews have been associated with the cinema and the cinema industry from its very inception.6 In their seminal essay exploring the dynamics of assimilation on the part of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, Claire Pajaczkowska and Barry Curtis point out that Jews had played a prominent role (as performers and agents) in the theatre of the 1890s, that is, prior to the advent of cinema, and thereafter, with the arrival of the nickelodeons (the rough and ready motion picture theatres of the time) made eager audiences for the early films of the first decade of the new century.7 Nickelodeons, as their name implies, charged only a nickel (five cents) for admission. They were particularly popular in the working class areas of major cities,8 as well as among immigrant populations, and there is statistical evidence that they were exceptionally numerous in Jewish districts. Cheap and accessible, they not only offered appealing entertainment to poor, urban Jewish immigrants but also a visual route into American life and ‘the American dream’.

Jews not only provided eager audiences for the infant film industry, but from the 1910s onwards, they also worked in Hollywood itself, where they founded many of the major film studios. The list is impressive, as Text Box 16.1 indicates, and you might like to research some of these names for yourself, with the aid of tools I have listed in the endnote.9

According to Claude Singer, ‘[a]lmost all the producers who managed to make their mark in the industry of the American Dream during the 1920s were Jewish’.10 Many of these first cinema entrepreneurs came from humble origins, having made their money in the garment industry (or rag trade), as jewellers, or as the owners and managers of the nickelodeons. Pajaczkowska and Curtis cite a description of them as ‘the old regime of fur peddlers, second hand jewellers and nickelodeon proprietors who started all the cinema companies . . ,’.n

A second wave of Jewish emigres arrived from Europe from the 1920s to the 1940s, some seeking to better themselves, others fleeing Nazi oppression. Some of these had had experience of the performing arts, or had worked in the European film industry, and they included directors

1. Jewish Producers and Directors

Harry Cohn Samuel Goldwyn Carl Laemmle

Fritz Lang Ernst Lubitsch

Louis B. Mayer Irving Thalberg Harry Warner Jack Warner Billy Wilder Adolph Zukor

such as Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder or the half-Jewish Fritz Lang.12 Many of the famous film studios, so familiar now to cinema audiences, were either founded by Jewish producers or bear their names: Columbia (Harry Cohn), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM (Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg), Paramount (Adolph Zukor), Universal (Carl Laemmle), Warner Bros (Jack and Harry Warner). In an opinion that many would echo, A. Gordon considers that ‘Louis B. Mayer of MGM was probably the most powerful, the most exemplary of the meddling, patriarchal style, and the one who best represents the complex mixture of showman-like chutzpah and subconscious abnegation of ethnic identity that so many of the others shared.’13

What is remarkable about the rise of these so-called Hollywood moguls, in the estimation of Pajaczkowska and Curtis, is ‘the ease and rapidity with which they seemed to make the transition from the passivity of spectatorship to the activities of film exhibition, distribution, and production’. Their judgement is in fact worth quoting in full:

The genius of the future Moguls was a complex one, partly sheer business ingenuity, partly ruthless risk taking and a kind of competitive solidarity; but perhaps its most interesting component was coherent with immigrant aspiration and Jewish prioritizing of ‘culture’. They recognized that the potential of film and the basis for its future appeal lay in the compulsive attractions of narrative, star appeal, and the conspicuous glamor of mise-en-scene both on screen and in the theaters in which films were screened. Members of the audience had to be rescued from the crowd which they constituted, offered individualism and intimacy - respected and turned into individual spectators ... In an important respect, men like Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, Louis Meyer, Harry Cohn, and Jack and Harry Warner became conspicuous examples of the American dream.14

It was this connection with the American dream that explains one of the major paradoxes associated with the Hollywood moguls. This paradox is that, although they retained their Judaism, and they employed many Jewish associates, they tended not to promote Jews and Judaism within the context or content of the films that they produced. Claude Singer recounts the celebrated incident, which has been taken as indicative of the ethos then prevailing in the major studios:

The story goes that a director employed by Columbia once asked his boss, Harry Cohn (1891-1958, known as King Kohn because of his legendary rages), to engage a certain actor for an important part. Cohn categorically refused to have the actor, who, he said, looked ‘too Jewish’. In his studio, he pointed out, Jews only played Indians.15

L. Mulvey offers another insight into these complex individuals:

The Jews who built Hollywood built it out of a double migration: that of their families to the United States and of their industry to California. California represented a new newness, in which the East Coast - its ghettos, ethnicities and traditions - could be left behind.16

The moguls were influenced, then, by the policy of assimilation, of America as the melting-pot of ethnic differences. ‘The Hollywood cinema of the years between the wars’, according to Singer, ‘was not intended to promote the specific character of any minority group.’17 The moguls wished to downplay racial differences, and to place emphasis on that which unites all upward-striving Americans in a common vision.

That vision was the American Dream, and indeed, there are those who would claim that it was Hollywood under the Jewish moguls who invented the American Dream itself. In the words of Pajaczkowska and Curtis: ‘What is particularly interesting about the success of Hollywood is that the imaginings of the Jewish immigrant “arriviste” could become a format for widely shared representations of American life.’18 According to another commentator: ‘Hollywood - the American dream - is a Jewish idea in a sense, it’s a Jewish revenge on America. It combines the Puritan ethic with baroque magnificence.’19

This is one reason why Hollywood took to the biblical epic because in its underlying mythology, concepts such as the exodus or the ‘promised land’ could be, and were, a vehicle for the promotion of American values, values such as liberation, freedom, justice and equality. There is a hint, too, that the Old Testament epic was embraced, especially in the 1950s, because it showed Israelite warriors and heroes vanquishing their enemies, a depiction that acted against the post-Holocaust criticism that Jews had done little to resist their Nazi oppressors.

Having said this, it is also important to point out that the Jews who ran the Hollywood establishment were also anxious to avoid perpetuating the age-old stereotypes of Jews. To cite Pajaczkowska and Curtis again:

They were also subject and highly sensitive to successive waves of antiSemitism, which found different forms of expression - panics about immigration and ‘hyphenated Americans’ in the 1920’s [sic]; the omnipresence of Fascists in American public life; much publicized vilification by prominent figures like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh; various Christian fulminations opposed to the immoralities of Hollywood; attacks on the presumed link between Communism and Jews; and accusations of an inevitable ‘racial feeling’ among Hollywood Jews promoting war with Germany.20

It is these conflicting factors, then, that help account for some of the complexities and conundrums that we see in Jewish treatment of, and reactions to, the biblical epic, particularly the Christ film. And with these preliminary remarks, let us now turn to our selected films and clips.

4. Jews and Judaism in the Christ Film: Some Selected Films and Clips

In Text Box 16.2, you will find brief information about the six films selected.

With each of the films discussed, you will also find a selected sequence that you should watch (its approximate time location within the film is given in square brackets at the end of the subheading). Another text box (16.3) is supplied to enable you to make your own comments upon it. Further reading on each film is to be found in the endnotes. Our aim will be to observe how Jews and Judaism are depicted in our chosen films, and, in particular, to see how directors have dealt with the vexing passages, as well as the (so-called) ‘notorious texts’, in the Christian Gospels that portray Jewish complicity in the death of Jesus. Below you will find my remarks on each sequence, comprising an introduction to both the film and the sequence, followed by comments inspired in some cases by social context and ideology, in most cases by intertextual reflection. A summary of the trends or strategies observed is given at the end.

Intolerance (1916): The Two Pharisees (the first cut to the Judaean story) [00.07.21-00.10.13]

Our first film sequence is from D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916).21 Intolerance is not strictly a biblical epic, since there are only two biblical

2. Notes on the Films Selected

Intolerance (D. W. Griffith, 1916)

Though not technically a biblical epic, since the biblical portions of this four-part treatment of hypocrisy and intolerance through the ages are confined to a Judaean story of the crucifixion of Jesus and a Babylonian story of the fall of the city of Babylon to Cyrus and the Persians, Griffith’s silent epic, Intolerance, followed close on the heels of his famous and controversial Birth of a Nation in 1915.

The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, 1927)

A major classic, this was the first full-length, silent Hollywood epic on the life of Jesus, as seen from the perspective of Mary Magdalene. It presents Mary as a rich courtesan with Judas as her lover. Its many memorable moments include Mary’s riding off in her chariot to rescue her Judas from the clutches of the carpenter of Nazareth (‘Harness my zebras - gift of the Nubian king!’), her subsequent exorcism by Jesus in a swirl of exiting demons, the moving giving of sight to a little blind girl and dramatic crucifixion and resurrection scenes.

King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961)

A remake of the DeMille version in name only, this Sixties’ Hollywood adaptation presents Judas and Barabbas as political revolutionaries, with Jesus as a reluctant pawn in their game. Criticized by the Catholic Legion of Decency as ‘theologically, historically, and scripturally inaccurate’ (R. Kinnard and T. Davis, Divine Images. A History of Jesus on the Screen, NewYork: Citadel Press, 1992,p. 13 2), the film is now viewed in retrospect as better than its critics made it out to be.

The Gospel according to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)

A low-budget, black-and-white, European film made by the Marxist director, Pier Paolo Pasolini and dedicated to Pope John XXIII, this unconventional adaptation of Matthew’s Gospel in cinema verite style had more impact on audiences than the traditional, glossy Hollywood epic, The Greatest Story Ever Told, which was to follow it a year later.

Jesus of Nazareth (Franco Zeffirelli, 1977)

With a screenplay by Anthony Burgess and others (later turned into a novel by William Barclay), this six-and-a-half-hour made-for-television movie (screened on ITV in 1977) was the result of a promise made by its producer Lew Grade to the Pope to do for Jesus what he had done for Moses.

The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988)

Based on Kazantzakis’s novel about ‘the dual substance of Christ’ and ‘the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh’, and directed by one of Hollywood’s most distinguished film-makers, this is one of the finest, most religious and yet most controversial Christ films ever made.

3. Comments on Films/Clips

Intolerance (D. W. Griffith, 1916): The Two Pharisees (the first cut to the Judaean story)

The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, 1927): Jesus before the crowd

King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961): Jesus before Pilate

The Gospel according to St. Matthew (Pier Paulo Pasolini, 1964): The Denunciation of the Pharisees

Jesus of Nazareth (Franco Zeffirelli, 1977): The Circumcision of Jesus

Jesus of Nazareth (Franco Zeffirelli, 1977): The Sanhedrin debates Jesus’s Fate

The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988): Jesus’s Speech in the Temple portions within what is a four-part treatment of hypocrisy and intolerance through the ages. These two biblical sections present a Judaean story of the crucifixion of Jesus and a Babylonian story of the fall of the city of Babylon to Cyrus and the Persians. The other two parts comprise a modern story of a young man in the United States sentenced to die for a murder he did not commit, and a French story of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots by Catholics in 1572. The intercutting between the biblical portions and the other stories, especially the modern story, lend support for what W. Barnes Tatum describes as ‘Griffith’s indictment of those social do-gooders (or “Uplifters,” as he calls them in the film) whose claim to know what was best for society often expressed itself, in his eyes, as an intolerance toward others’.22 The Judaean story is told in seven individual cuts occupying in total (for reasons that will shortly be explained) no more than twelve minutes of screen time. The part you are asked to watch is the first cut to the Judean story, which occurs after the opening sequence of the film that introduces the modern story. The woman and the cradle, which is an image taken from lines in a Walt Whitman poem in Leaves of Grass (‘Out of the cradle endlessly rocking’),23 is the device he uses to mark the transition from one story to another. You should watch out also for the tablets of stone in Hebrew, which denote the biblical sections, and the intertitles characteristic of these early silent films.

From an intertextual point of view, this sequence is interesting for a number of reasons. One notes the incorrect reference to Bethlehem, not Nazareth, as the place where Jesus was brought up. Visually, the depiction of the Jewish people in the streets owes much to the illustrated Bibles of the period, especially those of Gustave Dore or James Tissot. One also notes the madonna-like figure, with the child in her arms. The reference to the party of the Pharisees and their identification with hypocrisy is particularly striking. Ethnic characteristics are clearly displayed, such as the tefillah, or phylactery attached to the forehead of the Pharisee (cf. Exod. 13.1-10; 13.11-16; Deut. 6.4-9; 11.13-21). One notes the elaborate bowing and scraping of the people, as well as the touch of humour, as one man interrupts his eating while the Pharisees conduct their prayers in the street. Interestingly, as Tatum observes, Griffith has here turned the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector of Luke 18.9-14 (along with Mt. 6.5) into a narrative event.24

Griffith’s silent epic, Intolerance, followed close on the heels of his famous and controversial Birth of a Nation in 1915, and here an interpretative approach that emphasizes social context and ideology offers some fascinating glimpses into the cultural processes behind the film. This is the film that, on account of its glorification of the Klu Klux Klan, and its denigration of blacks, was condemned by many as racist. Some have assumed that Griffith made Intolerance as a way of making amends for the bigotry deemed to have characterized that film. This is untrue, as Simon Louvish has pointed out,25 and the following excerpt from the media journal, Variety, of Friday, 7 April 1916, cited in Louvish’s perceptive article, makes this abundantly clear.

The headline of the article read: ‘GRIFFITH FORCED TO RE-TAKE SCENES IN “MOTHER AND LAW’” (The Mother and the Law, as Louvish informs us, was Griffith’s original title for Intolerance); and its caption: ‘B’nai Brith Objected to Showing Saviour Being Nailed to Cross by Hebrews - Confront Producer with Proofs Backed by 48-Hour Ultimatum. Los Angeles, April 5’.

The article (which is worth quoting in full from Louvish’s article) stated:

David W. Griffith has about completed his latest ‘masterpiece’ entitled ‘The Mother and the Law’, dealing with the life of Christ. For the big crucifixion scene he repaired to the local ghetto and hired all the orthodox Hebrews with long whiskers he could secure.

When the B’nai Brith (the most powerful Hebrew society in the United States) was apprised of it they requested Griffith to omit that portion of the picture, but he refused. They then brought pressure to bear upon him through his associates, but could not move him.

A committee of three members of the society . . . brought the matter to the attention of Jacob H. Schiff, Joseph Brandeis, Louis Marshall and other prominent Hebrews. Armed with data gathered from colleges, professors and historians, the committee returned to Los Angeles and waited upon Griffith with so-called indisputable proofs that the Jews did not crucify the Saviour, showing that the orthodox method of killing in those days was strangulation and that the Romans believed in crucifixion. They supplemented the ‘proofs’ with a 48-hour ultimatum to destroy that portion of the ‘masterpiece’ negative on penalty of a concerted national campaign of blacklisting and other pressure which powerful financial and industrial interests might bring to bear, which included the assertion that censors, governors of states and even the President would do all in their power to prevent the showing of the picture with the objectionable scene.

Confronted with such formidable antagonism Griffith burned the negative of the scene in the presence of the committee and has retaken it, showing Roman soldiers nailing Christ to the cross.

This is an astonishing episode, casting, as it does, a fascinating light into the ethnic tensions operating in the early cinema, and of the powerful forces operating on film-makers like Griffith in relation to their depictions of the life of Jesus on screen. It is a potent reminder, too, at the beginning of our study, of the issues involved in this subject, and of one of the more extreme courses of action taken by a film-maker when confronted with the problems of representing Jesus’s death on screen. As an aside, too, it is one of the great ironies of film history that what enabled Louis B. Mayer, arguably, as we have seen, the greatest of the Jewish Hollywood moguls, to raise enough capital to found his own production company, was his acquisition of the north-east rights to Griffith’s allegedly racist Birth of the Nation (1915)!26

The King of Kings (1927); Jesus before the crowd [01.28.5601.33.42]

We turn now to Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927). Working in collaboration with his scriptwriter, Jeanie McPherson, and with religious consultants such as Bruce Barton, one of the founding figures of modern advertising, DeMille produced the first full-length, silent Hollywood epic on the life of Jesus, as seen from the perspective of Mary Magdalene. We had our first introduction to this film in chapter 13 (‘The Two Faces of Betrayal: the Characterization of Peter and Judas in the Biblical Epic or Christ Film’) to which you might like to refer, or to Text Box 16.2, which summarizes its plot. The sequence for viewing and comment is Jesus’s appearance before Pilate, the High Priest and the Jewish crowd and his consequent condemnation to death. The source is Mk 15.1-15 and parallels. This is, therefore, one of the vexing passages I referred to earlier. It deals with the question of who was ultimately responsible for the death of Jesus, and it is interesting to observe how DeMille treats this issue.

The sequence begins after Jesus has been scourged by the Roman soldiers and mocked. He is brought before the crowd. Pilate releases Barabbas at the bequest of the crowd, and delivers Jesus for crucifixion. As we observe this sequence, we note the characteristic DeMille devices:

• the use of biblical captions;

• the little snatch of hymn music;

• the creative embellishment of the Gospel texts.

This last is seen, for example, in the various invented speeches, and in the treatment of Mary Magdalene. Here she is seen pleading for the crowd to call for Jesus’s release, a role not found in the Gospels. In counterpoint to her role, one notes, is that given to the High Priest’s henchmen in stirring up the crowd to demand Jesus’s crucifixion. The crowd has been earlier bribed, on the High Priest’s orders, and through these selfsame henchmen, to call for Jesus’s condemnation. Also acting in counterpoint to each other are Pilate and the High Priest. Both appear together on the podium. Jesus has had a brief previous appearance before Caiaphas but in this film, as in so many of the Christ films that were to come later, there is no specific trial before the Sanhedrin.

Here DeMille plays up the individual characterization of the High Priest who appears like the devil at Pilate’s shoulder. Most striking of all, the High Priest (contrary to the Gospels) takes sole responsibility for Jesus’s death: ‘If Thou, Imperial Pilate, wouldst wash thy hands of this Man’s death, let it be upon me - and me alone.’ The effect of these changes, then, is to remove culpability from the Jews as a people, and to place it firmly in the hands of one corrupt High Priest - and, as is stated earlier in the scene: ‘The High Priest speaketh not for the people!’ This point is later reinforced, in the crucifixion scene, when Caiaphas prays, ‘Lord God, Jehovah, vent not thy wrath on thy people Israel - I alone am guilty.’

Bruce Babington and Peter Evans point out that, despite this alteration to the biblical text, in his autobiography DeMille complained about the ‘organized opposition of certain Jewish groups to this filmed history of the greatest Jew who ever lived’, claiming that ‘we went to great lengths in The King of Kings to show that the Jewish people of Jesus’s time followed and heard him gladly, that his death came at the hands of a few unrepresentative corrupt leaders and the cowardly and callous Roman government’. The opening title of the film was inserted in response to Jewish pressure, and it, too, implied that Caiaphas was unrepresentative of his people: ‘The events portrayed in this picture occurred in Palestine nineteen centuries ago, when the Jews were under the complete subjection of Rome - even their own High Priest being appointed by the Roman procurator.’27

Like Griffith before him, and like the film-makers who were to succeed him, DeMille made use of Jewish advisors on his film, in order to anticipate and defuse Jewish sensitivities. Ironically, however, as Babington and Evans acutely observe:

Caiaphas, the Romans’ Jew, asserted to be in no way representative of Jewry, is an anti-semite’s dream caricature of wickedness: obese, cynical, rubbing his plump fingers together in gleeful anticipation of his plots, appearing like a well-fed devil at Pilate’s side to whisper ‘Crucify him!’ So the scapegoat who apparently frees the Jews from blame is simultaneously the living epitome of ethnic guilt.28

King of Kings (1961):Jesus before Pilate [02.11.45-02.13.30]

Our next sequence is from Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961), a film also introduced and discussed in chapter 13.

The scene you should watch comes after Judas arrives with the soldiers, Jesus is taken away to Caiaphas and Peter denies Jesus before the retainers. It shows Jesus being tried before a brisk, quick-speaking and businesslike Pilate (played by Hurd Hatfield), with the omnipresent Lucius (played by Ron Randell) acting as his advocate. Lucius points out that the defendant has only spoken of the kingdom of God, and has said nothing about the kingdom of Judaea. The report of the Sermon on the Mount is discussed, and then Jesus is referred to the effete Herod Antipas who requests a miracle from him.

If Griffith’s forced strategy in the face of Jewish opposition to his treatment of the Christ story was to burn the negative of an offending sequence, and DeMille’s was to alter the biblical text so as to inculpate the Jewish High Priest only, the approach taken by Ray was simply to omit any public scene in which Jesus is condemned by either the Jewish crowd or the High Priest. Here one notes the entirely private nature of the proceedings. Brief reference is made to an interrogation before Caiaphas, but the audience is not presented with this scene, far less a full trial before the Jewish Sanhedrin. The charge against Jesus here is sedition, and the religious charge of blasphemy of which the Gospels speak (cf. Mk 14.53-65 and parallels) is simply set aside. The responsibility for condemning Jesus to death is taken by Pilate alone, and emphatically; indeed his words almost echo those of the High Priest in the DeMille version:

You have just been interrogated by Caiaphas. They have adjudged you guilty on two counts, blasphemy and sedition. This court takes no cognizance of your blasphemy, but the charge of sedition is a major offence. The rules of Roman law will prevail. I, Pontius Pilate, the Procurator of Judea, by grace of the emperor, the divine Tiberius of Rome, will judge your case. No matter what you have done up until this moment, no matter what others have accused you of doing, I, and I alone, have the authority to sentence you to be crucified, or flogged, or to set you free. How you conduct yourself here and now, will determine your fate. Do you understand?

The Gospel according to St. Matthew (1964): The Denunciation of the Pharisees [01.28.40-1.30.09]

If Ray avoided the negative impact of the so-called antisemitic passages in the Gospels by simply omitting them, the same strategy could not be adopted by our next director, Pier Paolo Pasolini who made The Gospel according to St. Matthew in 1964.29 By taking the words of the Gospel According to St Matthew as his primary textual source, Pasolini could hardly avoid the powerful anti-Jewish passages referred to in my introduction, passages that include the denunciation of the Pharisees (23.136), the trial before the Jewish Sanhedrin (26.57-67), the trial before Pilate and the condemnation of Jesus by the Jewish crowd (27.1-2, 11-26).

The sequence that we shall comment on is part of Jesus’s denunciation of the Pharisees, a passage normally omitted or downplayed in the Christ film. It comes after the authorities try to trap Jesus by their questions only to be answered cunningly and confidently with teaching that ends with the famous love command (‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’). In the next scene, Jesus begins his denunciation of the Jewish leaders. The crowds are shown running to him, and he is seen from a distance addressing them with the words with which Mt. 23 begins: ‘The scribes and Pharisees sit in the chair of Moses. Do what they tell you, observe what they tell you but do not imitate their actions, they do not practise what they preach. . . .’ The people are shown reacting to his words. A shaky handheld camera then approaches Jesus through the crowd as he intones his denunciation. Choral music intensifies the effect of the scene, as does the total silence of the crowds.

In this scene, one should note, among other things, Pasolini’s fondness for lingering facial close-ups, especially of Jesus whose animated persona is often in sharp contrast to the passive acting, silent stares and looks of awe from the supporting cast of unknown, untutored and unprofessional actors. The actor who played Jesus was likewise an unknown, a Spanish student, Enrique Irazoqui, who had never acted before. Pasolini also gives us a soundtrack throughout his film that draws upon the full range of the classical and Christian musical tradition: from Bach to Billie Holliday; from Prokofiev to the Congolese Missa Luba; from Mozart to Leadbelly; from the haunting sound of the flute to the world-weary sound of the negro spiritual ‘Sometimes I feel like a motherless child’.

In this sequence, one particularly notes the savage condemnation of the scribes and Pharisees by Jesus, although no Jewish leaders are actually in attendance. One also observes the Southern Italian backdrop, and the Italian peasant audience. Accompanying the sequence, as we have observed, is the emotive choral background. The effect of all of this is to produce a solitary Jesus who denounces the religious establishment (and hence the Church) of the twentieth century and not the Judaism of the first.

W. Barnes Tatum observes something similar in the later appearance of Jesus before Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin.30 Here what appears on screen closely follows what appears in the Matthean account. On the other hand, Jesus’s appearance before Pilate has been considerably curtailed, when compared with the Gospel text. In contrast to what we find in Nicholas Ray’s film, King of Kings (1961), he notes, Jesus is not presented as posing a political threat to the Roman state. Where Ray downplayed the charge of blasphemy, Pasolini plays it up, and has Jesus die ultimately on a religious charge, and at the instigation of the Jewish authorities, supported by the crowds. As he puts it: ‘Ironically, Pasolini the Marxist has completely de-politicized the crucifixion.’ At the same time, however, by abbreviating the trial before Pilate, Pasolini has eliminated those very elements, those ‘notorious’ texts, that have encouraged antisemitism. Pilate is not presented as washing his hands of responsibility for the death of Jesus, and the crowds are not depicted as asking that Jesus’s blood be on them and on their children (Mt. 27.24-25).

Furthermore, opines Tatum, with the voicing of Isaiah 6.9-10 (‘Hearing you will hear, but not understand and seeing you will see but not perceive, for the heart of this people has been hardened and with their ears they have been hard of hearing . . .’; cf. Mt. 13.14-15) at a key moment during the crucifixion, the implication is conveyed that responsibility for Jesus’s death extends to everyone, and not just the religious authorities. This supports our reading of the sequence selected for discussion above, and leads us to concur with Tatum’s overall conclusion:

As Pasolini himself said, he was not trying to reconstruct the past but rather to find some equivalence between that past and his own present. This led him away from Palestine to Calabria in southern Italy as the site for filming. The logic of analogy draws an equivalence not between the Jewish leaders in first-century Palestine and twentieth-century Judaism, but between the religious establishment of ancient Palestine and the religious establishment of contemporary Italy - that is to say, the present-day church, specifically the Roman Catholic Church.

It is another of the ironies that surround this subject, however (as Tatum also notes) that if this were Pasolini’s intention, then it failed, for the film was enthusiastically received by the Church, meriting among other things, an international Catholic film prize!

Jesus of Nazareth (1977/- The Circumcision of Jesus

[Pt 1. 00.52.59-00.55.32]

If Christian religious authorities, the Church or religious hypocrisy in general are, in effect, the real targets in The Gospel according to St. Matthew (1964), and not the Jews and Judaism of Matthew’s own day, then this is borne out by another observation that emerges from a close scrutiny of Pasolini’s film. Pasolini’s settings for the sayings and miracles of Jesus are striking, but despite the fact that Jesus’s teaching and activity in the Gospel occurs within the vicinity of Jewish synagogues, no synagogue setting is ever provided for these by Pasolini in his film.31 Like the Jewish authorities, the Matthean Jesus is likewise distanced from his Jewish roots and his Jewish community. Not so in the Christ films that emerged in the following years. One year after Pasolini issued his Gospel according to St. Matthew, the Roman Catholic Church, in the shape of Vatican Council II, issued its famous declaration on the Jews, Nostra Aetate. This statement emphasized the spiritual links between Christians and Jews, rejected the notion that all Jews indiscriminately were guilty of the death of Jesus, and condemned all forms of antisemitism.'32 It was this statement that led our next film-maker, Franco Zeffirelli to make Jesus of Nazareth in 1977, and it was this film that produced a very different image of Jews and Judaism. Jesus of Nazareth emphasized, perhaps more than any previous Christ film, the Jewishness of Jesus himself.

One of the two sequences that I have selected from the film is the circumcision of Jesus. It occurs in the film after the familiar story of Jesus’s birth in the manger and the visit of the shepherds, and between the report to Herod of the coming of the magi and their eventual arrival. Jesus is circumcised with Simeon (played by Ralph Richardson) attending the service and celebrating the coming Messiah.

The story is found only in Luke’s Gospel (2.21-40), but is considerably embellished. Here in this excerpt (as with Jesus’s bar mitzvah which follows) all the elements of a Jewish origin and upbringing are signalled. One notes the synagogue location (and, by contrast, again, the lack of synagogues in Pasolini) rather than the Temple, which is the setting in Luke’s account. Mary and Joseph approach the synagogue through a crowded marketplace. Joseph adjusts his prayer shawl before he enters. He is wearing ringlets. They are beckoned forward ‘Come, come!’ by the huperetes, the synagogue attendant. Joseph takes the infant Jesus to the table reserved for the circumcision, while Mary looks on. The rabbi is summoned, puts on his prayer shawl and intones over the infant Jesus ‘And the Lord said to Abraham, “Keep my alliance and circumcise each child born unto Israel on the eighth day of his life”.’ ‘Amen’, the elders respond. ‘This is the seal in the flesh of the covenant between the Lord and his people’, says the rabbi. The circumcision is graphically depicted with a close-up of the circumcision knives, and a tiny whimper from Jesus when it is accomplished. ‘The child shall be called?’ asks the rabbi. Joseph looks at Mary, who nods. ‘His name shall be called Jesus’, says Joseph. A Christian overlay on this scene is provided, however, with the appearance of Simeon who points to Jesus’s future destiny as ‘[a] light of revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people, Israel’.

Jesus of Nazareth (1977): The Sanhedrin debates Jesus’s Fate [Pts 3 Sc 4. 01.35.12-01.40.42]

If the biblical text is enlivened by Zeffirelli with such local colour, then a further striking example of a developed sensitivity to Judaism on the part of the film-maker is to be seen in our next sequence, the director’s treatment of the Sanhedrin’s debate over the fate of Jesus. The sequence occurs at the beginning of Part IV. The Sanhedrin deliberates over Jesus and the disturbance he is causing. Voices are raised both for and against him. Caiaphas (played by Anthony Quinn) listens to the debate in proud, uneasy silence before speaking. The crux of the matter, he says, is that Jesus declares himself to be the Son of God.

This scene is not found in the Gospels, since Jesus is not actually being arraigned in person before them at this point, but the influence of Jn 11.47-53 is clearly in view. What is significant about the sequence is that the Jewish Sanhedrin is treated with sympathy and respect by the film-maker. The debate is held in an imposing Hall. A genuine exchange of views is presented with people on either side of the debate. Jesus is defended here by Joseph of Arimathea (played by James Mason) and Nicodemus (played by Laurence Olivier). When a complaint is made that Jesus has interfered with the merchants in the Temple, and the Sanhedrin has not intervened, Joseph replies that the Sanhedrin itself has often protested at the presence of money-changers being allowed in the precincts of the Temple.

While not all Jews would accept Nicodemus’s claim that ‘[t]he coming of the Messiah is the heart of our faith’, Judaism is itself treated sympathetically, as can be seen in the case of the member of the Sanhedrin who, in answer to a disparaging comment about the plethora of visionaries and prophets, makes the following reply:

That is the richness of our religion, that it is always being kept alive by new ideas ... What an incredible people we are! Thirsty for knowledge, but hypocrites afraid of change. We say that we want new ideas so our religion will speak to each generation, and yet when a prophet appears, burning with faith and fiery revelations, we stifle him. Shall we go down in history as a people who destroys its prophets?

Jesus’s place within Judaism, therefore, is clearly established (Jesus is later described, too, as ‘one of our brothers’ by Joseph), but the Christian overlay, recognized in the circumcision sequence, is here summed up well by Caiaphas when he raises the crucial question of Christology, and the claim (ascribed here to Jesus himself) that Jesus is the Son of God. Belief in such a claim forms, of course, the essential dividing line between Jews and Christians, and so the debate reaches its climax with this fundamental point of difference.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988): Jesus’s Speech in the

Temple [01.22.10-01.24.23]

Our final sequence, which deals with the action objected to by Zeffirelli’s complainant, namely, the cleansing of the Temple, and which also presents in very sharp focus the Christological issue separating Jews and Christians, is taken from Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). The film was introduced and discussed in chapter 13. The sequence selected begins after Jesus has just overturned the tables of the money-changers, and consists of a direct exchange, this time, between him and the High Priest. A striking camera shot catches the coins as they ascend into the blue sky and descend - one of them to be picked up by the High Priest from a blood-spattered wall.

What impresses one about this scene is the clever, bold and lively script that was produced for Scorsese by ex-seminarian Paul Schrader. In the exchange, there is a striking restatement of the Gospels’ Christology, which carries all the ambiguity of their confessional statements about Jesus, this ‘saint of blasphemy’. ‘When I say “I”, Rabbi, I’m saying “God”,’ says Jesus. One also notes the use of the controversial ‘I have not come to bring peace on earth, but a sword’ saying of Matthew 10.34, here imported into a different but relevant context. One further observes Schrader’s placing of Pauline teaching on Jesus’s lips, with the echo of Romans 10.4: ‘For Christ is the end of the law’. A sympathetic (and nonstereotyped) treatment, nevertheless, is offered of the High Priest (in contrast to that, for example, of DeMille in our second selected sequence). He is allowed to defend the Temple’s practice regarding the Temple tax.

‘You expect the people to pay the tax with Roman coins?’ the High Priest asks (of Jesus).

‘They have images of false gods on them!’

‘You want pagan gods in the Temple?’, he further protests.

‘All foreign coins have to be exchanged for shekels. That is the Law!’

When Jesus says that he is ‘throwing away the Law’, and the High Priest asks, ‘Has God changed his mind about the old law?’, Jesus responds, not with a statement that implies the superiority of Christianity over Judaism, but with the delicate words: ‘No, He just thinks our hearts are ready to hold more, that’s all.’

Although Jesus is made to attack the Jewish doctrine of election, he does so by extending its scope, by emphasizing the principle of universality, by democratizing it, in a sense: ‘God’s an immortal spirit who belongs to everybody, to the whole world. You think you’re special? God is not an Israelite!’

This representation of Jews and Judaism is in line with Scorsese’s treatment elsewhere. In the Last Supper scene, as we shall see in chapter 17, the ethnic elements are profuse, with all the particularity of Judaism’s customs and rituals being reflected, as in Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977). And when we look for Scorsese’s treatment of the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin and his arraignment before the Jewish authorities on religious charges (Mk 14.53-65 and parallels), we seek for the scene in vain. As with Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961), it is absent from the film. Only Jesus’s trial before Pilate is represented (Mk. 15.iff. and parallels), but even here, when Jesus is put on public display, there is no sign of Barabbas, and Matthew’s notorious ‘his blood be upon us, and upon our children!’ passage (27.25) is nowhere in evidence. Jesus is referred to as ‘King of the Jews’ or ‘another Jewish politician’ by Pilate, and the implication is that the charges against him, again as with Ray, are political, not religious.33

5. Conclusion

We began our discussion of our six selected films by noting the vigorous protest that Jewish groups made to D. W. Griffith’s depiction of Jews in Intolerance (1916). Scorsese’s more recent film, as is well known, attracted, on the other hand, a Christian fundamentalist crusade against it. The irony, then, is that, in this, our final film, ‘instead of Jewish pressure groups objecting to representations of Jews, Christians accused Universal Studios of a Semitic plot against Christianity’.34 In between we have seen a progressive sensitivity on the part of film-makers to the question of antisemitism, and a corresponding desire to promote fair and non-stereotypical images of Jews and Judaism in the biblical epic or Christ film.

We have observed various strategies at work in dealing with the awkward or vexing Gospel passages I summarized in my introduction:

• DeMille’s attribution of sole culpability for the death of Jesus to a corrupt and venal High Priest;

• Ray’s omission of the offending passages and his corresponding emphasis on the political dimension and Roman culpability;

• Pasolini’s subtle alteration of the context so that the modern religious establishment, not ancient Judaism, is the target for Jesus’s invective.

We have also seen Zeffirelli’s attempt to root Jesus firmly within his Jewish context and community, and to represent Jews and Judaism with fairness and equity, albeit with a strong Christian conviction. And in the boldest Christ film of all, that of Scorsese, we have seen a deft combination of many of these strategies.

When I first gave this presentation at St Deiniol’s Library in 2001, I ended by expressing the sentiment that such growing sensitivity boded well for the future of Jewish-Christian relations. In light of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), and the discussion of its treatment of Jews and Judaism at the end of this book, the reader might wish to ponder whether that hope was justified.

Notes

1. See, for example, the article on ‘Antisemitism’ in R. J. Z. Werblowsky and G. Wigoder (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 53-4; P. Pulzer, ‘Antisemitism’, in W. Laqueur (ed.), The Holocaust Encyclopedia, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001, pp. 16-26; W. Benz, ‘Anti-Semitism Research’, in M. Goodman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 943-55.

2. Benz, ‘Anti-Semitism Research’, p. 943.

3. M. Davies, ‘Stereotyping the Other: The “Pharisees” in the Gospel according to Matthew’, in J. C. Exum and S. D. Moore (eds), Biblical Studies/Cultural Studies. The Third Sheffield Colloquium, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, i998,p. 430.

4. S. G. F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots. A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press; Scribner, 1967, p. 279.

5. W. R. Telford, The Theology of the Gospel of Mark, New Testament Theology, Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 234-41.

6. See, for example, P. Erens, The Jew in American Cinema, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984; N. Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, London: Allen, 1989; as well as L. D. Friedman, Hollywood’s Image of the Jew, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982, and his The Jewish Image in American Film, New Jersey, NJ: Citadel Press, 1987; M. J. Wright, ‘Lights! Camera! Antisemitism? The Cinema and Jewish-Christian Relations’, in E. E. Kessler and M. J. Wright (eds), Themes in Jewish-Christian Relations, Cambridge: Orchard Academic, 2004, pp. 171-200.

7. C. Pajaczkowska and B. Curtis, ‘Assimilation, Entertainment, and the Hollywood Solution’, in L. Nochlin and T. Garb (eds), The Jew in the Text. Modernity and the Construction of Identity, London: Thames & Hudson, 1995, pp. 23 8-52, and esp. p. 244.

8. See ‘Nickelodeon’ in E. Katz (ed.), The Macmillan International Film Encyclopedia, London: HarperCollins, 1994, p. 1013.

9. S. Hochman (ed.), A Library of Film Criticism. American Film Directors. With Filmographies and Index of Critics and Films, New York: Ungar, 1974; D. Quinlan, The Illustrated Guide to Film Directors, London: Batsford, 1983; D. Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, London: Deutsch, 1994; Katz, Macmillan Encyclopedia; J. Walker (ed.), Halliwell’s Who’s Who in the Movies, London: HarperCollins, 2001.

10. C. Singer, ‘Films, US, Jews in’, in G. Abramson (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Jewish Culture. From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, pp. 227-9, and esp. p. 227.

11. Pajaczkowska and Curtis, ‘Assimilation’, p. 244 and n. 19.

12. See A. Gordon, ‘J for Jewish. Sight and Sound A-Z of Cinema’, Sight and Sound, p,-} (1997)' 2.8-32, and esp. P- 3°-

13. Gordon, ‘J for Jewish’, p. 30.

14. Pajaczkowska and Curtis, ‘Assimilation’, pp. 244, 245.

15. Singer, ‘Films, US, Jews in’, p. 229.

16. L. Mulvey, ‘The Innovators 1920-1930: Now you has Jazz’, Sight and Sound, 9,5 (1999): 18.

17. Singer, ‘Films, US, Jews in’, pp. 227-8.

18. Pajaczkowska and Curtis, ‘Assimilation’, p. 240.

19. Jill Robinson in Studs Terkel, ‘American Dreams Lost and Found’, cited in Friedman, Jewish Image; gratia Pajaczkowska and Curtis, ‘Assimilation’, p. 238 and n. 3.

20. Pajaczkowska and Curtis, ‘Assimilation’, pp. 245-6.

21. For useful discussion on this film see W. B. Tatum, Jesus at the Movies: A Guide to the First Hundred Years, Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 1997, pp. 33—43-

22. Tatum, Jesus at the Movies, p. 34.

23. Gratia Tatum, Jesus at the Movies, p. 35.

24. Tatum, Jesus at the Movies, p. 37.

25. S. Louvish, ‘Burning Crosses’, Sight and Sound, 10,9 (2000): 12-13.

26. Gordon, ‘J for Jewish’, p. 30.

27. B. Babington and P. W. Evans, Biblical Epics. Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, p. 121.

28. Babington and Evans, Biblical Epics, p. 122.

29. See chapter 13 on ‘The Two Faces of Betrayal: the Characterization of Peter and Judas in the Biblical Epic or Christ Film’ for information and discussion on this film (cf. Text Box 16.2).

30. Tatum, Jesus at the Movies, pp. 111-12.

31. This point is made, for example, by R. C. Stern, C. N. Jefford and G. Debona (eds), Savior on the Silver Screen, New York: Paulist, 1999, p. 107.

32. See Tatum, Jesus at the Movies, p. 133.

33. See Tatum, Jesus at the Movies, p. 170.

34. Babington and Evans, Biblical Epics, p. 107.

17- Ritual Recast and Re visioned:
Hollywood Remembers the First Passover and
the Last Supper

WILLIAM R. TELFORD

1. Introduction

The Aims of the Chapter

The title of this chapter is ‘Ritual Recast and Revisioned: Hollywood Remembers the First Passover and the Last Supper’. My general aim will be to examine two of the most important religious rituals within the Jewish and Christian traditions, the Passover Meal, or Pesah Seder, as Jews refer to it, and the Last Supper - or what is variously termed by Christians ‘the Lord’s Supper’, the ‘Eucharist’ or simply ‘communion’. I wish to conduct this examination by observing the narrative reconstruction of these rituals within film, and I want to direct your attention to sequences from seven biblical epics or Christ films in which the Pesah Seder and the Last Supper have found cinematic expression. By way of background, let me say that the genesis of this presentation was an international conference to which I was invited in May 1999, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on the subject of ritual, or more precisely, ‘Narratives of Rituals: Reconstruction in Religious Studies’. This interdisciplinary conference drew together a number of scholars in a variety of fields (anthropology, religious studies, ancient history, etc.) and I was asked if I might do something on the subject of ritual from the perspective of a New Testament scholar interested in film. A developed form of the paper was subsequently given in April 2000, at the St Deiniol’s Theology and Film conference.

This essay operates from the assumption that film is an important reflector of our cultural values, ideologies and traditions, that it is a legitimate medium for scholarly analysis, and that it offers valuable insights into the way societies understand and configure their religious traditions. Furthermore, in making my selections from the biblical epic, I do so with little apology. In the face of the disparagement often directed at this particular genre, but in line with recent scholarly rehabilitation of it, as in B. Babington and P. W. Evans, Biblical Epics. Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema (1993),1 I intend to treat the biblical epic, for the most part, with some seriousness.

Approaching the Subject Critically

First of all, let me offer a brief word, as usual, on the subject of criticism. Discussion of film criticism and film theory has a long academic history, and a distinguished pedigree, as was pointed out in chapter 1. The interdisciplinary study of religion and film, by comparison, is still in its infancy. In my 1995 article, ‘The New Testament in Fiction and Film: A Biblical Scholar’s Perspective’,^[9] I charted some of the developments in this field, and suggested some ways in which films might by approached by biblical scholars, like myself, with no proper grounding in film theory or criticism, yet with a love for film, with other legitimate perspectives, and with the conviction that the critical study of films as cultural products should not be left simply to experts in film studies with their differing concerns.

Since 1995, a number of books have appeared on the subject, particularly on methodology, and you are referred again to chapter 1 for a review of these. One written from the perspective of religious studies, and worth recalling, in particular, is J. W. Martin and C. E. Ostwalt (eds), Screening the Sacred. Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film (1995).^[10] In line with the experience of Martin and Ostwalt, I have worked for a number of years in a department of religious studies in Newcastle (although I am currently now in the Department of Theology and Religion in Durham). There I have taught biblical studies, and hence my approach to film has been influenced by the perspectives appropriate to these two interrelated disciplines. In approaching the Passover and the Last Supper in film, therefore, and following a similar procedure to that in previous chapters, I shall be sensitive to intertextuality, to the various ways that the biblical sources have been used, to the creative power of the cinematic imagination in bring these sources to visual expression, and to the influence of ideology and social context as a factor in interpreting them. A prominent concern will also be the relation of the filmic Last Supper accounts to the Pesah Seder meal, and the degree to which our film-makers have represented the Judaism of the period, the Jewishness of Jesus and his disciples, and the Jewish features of his last meal with them. from my old teacher and mentor, Professor William Barclay’s book on The Last Supper (1967),5 which gives an admirable outline of the Passover Meal ritual.

Barclay describes the six main things necessary in the preparation of the ritual (highlighted in the text), namely, the lamb, the unleavened bread, the bowl of salt water, the collection of bitter herbs, the paste of fruit and nuts (or charosheth), and the four cups of wine.

He also summarizes the meal itself with its various elements: the first cup, or cup of the Kiddush or consecration, the first handwashing by the celebrant (u’rechatz), the eating of the lettuce or parsley after it has been dipped in the salt water (karpas), the first breaking of the unleavened bread (yachatz), the paterfamilias’ explanation to his son of the meaning of the Passover (the proclaiming) (maggid), the singing of the first two psalms of the Hallel (Psalms 113—118), the drinking of the second cup (of the proclaiming), the normal ceremonial handwashing (rachtzah), the grace (motzie matzah), the eating of more bitter herbs (maror), the dipping of the sop and the eating of bitter herbs and charoseth (korech), the meal proper (shulchan orekh), the conclusion of the meal with the ceremonial handwashing, the eating of the remainder of the Passover bread (afikoman/tzafun), the thanksgiving, the drinking of the third cup (of thanksgiving) (barekh), including a libation for Elijah and the coming Messiah, and the conclusion of the ritual with the drinking of the fourth cup (nirtzah), the singing of the remainder of the Hallel, and the final prayers, shout and prayer of praise to God.

I myself have never attended a modern Pesah Seder (although I have celebrated Shabbat in Jerusalem, courtesy of my good friend and colleague, Professor Ithamar Gruenwald) and for the text of the Seder I am grateful not only to a former colleague in Newcastle, Rabbi Moshe Yehudai-Rimmer, but also to Jonathan Sacks’s The Chief Rabbi’s Haggadah (2003).6

Turning now to the Last Supper in the New Testament, let me make a few brief comments. The New Testament Last Supper narratives are found in Mark 14, Matthew z6, Luke 22 and 1 Corinthians 11. The Fourth Gospel, it should be noted, offers no account of the institution by Jesus of the Christian ritual we now know as the Lord’s Supper, or the Eucharist, a fact, as we shall see, that has not proved a deterrent to filmmakers in their cinematic reconstructions.

A number of questions and problems confront the New Testament scholar, with regard to the Last Supper accounts, and there are four in particular. First, what was the origin of the meal? Did Jesus himself institute the rite and mean it to be celebrated regularly by successive generations of disciples as a sacrament? Film representations never question this.

Second, what was the nature of the original meal? Was it in fact a Passover meal or some other kind of meal, a Kiddush, that is, a meal held

1. Passover Meal and Last Supper in the Biblical Epic:
   An Outline of the Passover Ritual

There were six things necessary for the Passover and which had to be prepared in advance.

1. There was the lamb to remind them of the lamb with whose blood the lintel and the door posts of their houses in Egypt had been smeared, so that the angel of death would pass over them in the night of the slaying of the Egyptian firstborn (Exodus 12.21-23). It had to be cooked in a special way. It must not be boiled or stewed; nothing must touch it, not even water, not even the sides of a pot. It had to be fixed on a spit which went through it from mouth to vent, and then roasted, entire with head and legs and tail, over an open fire. The minimum number who could constitute a Passover company was twelve, and the lamb had to be eaten entire and nothing left.

2. There was the unleavened bread. Unleavened bread is not like bread at all, but like a water biscuit. It was unleavened bread that the Israelites made on the night of their escape, because there was not time to make leavened bread in the haste of their way-going (Exodus i2.33f.).

3. There was a bowl of salt water, partly to remind them of the tears they had shed in their wretchedness in Egypt, and partly to remind them of the waters of the Red Sea through which they had been brought in miraculous safety.

4. There was a collection of bitter herbs, such as horse-radish, chicory, endive, lettuce, horehound, once again to remind them of the bitterness they had endured as slaves. All through this meal there runs the observance of the more than once repeated saying of God to the people: ‘You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you’ (Deuteronomy 15.15).

5. There was a paste called Charosheth. It was made of apples, dates, pomegranates, and nuts, and through it there ran sticks of cinnamon. The paste was to remind them of the clay with which they had made bricks in Egypt, and the cinnamon was to remind them of the straw which was necessary to make the bricks, and which the Egyptians had withheld from them (Exodus 5.7-9).

6. Lastly, and very important, there were four cups of wine each containing one-sixteenth of a hin, that is, a little more than half a pint of wine, diluted in the proportion of two parts of wine to three of water. They were so important that the poorest must have them, even if he had to be helped from the poor-box to buy them, and even if, as the Talmud says, a man had to pawn his coat, or hire himself out to get them. The four cups of wine were drunk at different points in the meal, and stood for the four promises of Exodus 6.6f.:

I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment, and I will take you for my people, and I will be your God.

One thing is absolutely clear from beginning to end - the Passover meal was a commemoration of deliverance, of rescue and of redemption. We now turn to the meal itself.

1. It began with the first cup, the cup of the Kiddush, or the consecration. Certainly in later times, most likely even in the time of Jesus, the cup was accompanied with a prayer, thanking God for this memorial of redemption, and for taking Israel to himself as his own people.

2. There followed the first handwashing, in which only the person to preside ceremonially three times cleansed his hands.

3. Next a piece of lettuce or parsley was taken; it was then dipped into the salt water, and eaten. The lettuce or parsley stands for the hyssop which was dipped in the blood of the Passover lamb, and with which the lintel and the doorposts were smeared (Exodus 12.22), and the salt water stands, as we have seen, for either the tears of Egypt or the waters of the Red Sea.

4. Next there came the first breaking of bread. Three unleavened cakes of bread were in front of the host. The larger part was to be eaten later, but at this point he took the centre one, and broke it into little pieces.

The broken bread was to remind them of the bread of affliction which they ate in Egypt and it was broken into little pieces to remind them that a slave never had a whole loaf, but only fragments to eat. In the full ritual of the Passover the host then says:

This is the bread of affliction which our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt. Whosoever is hungry, let him come and eat; whosoever is in need, let him come and eat the Passover with us.

It was, and is, at this point that the Jews of the Dispersion say: ‘This year we eat it here, next year in Jerusalem.’

5. Next there came the proclaiming. It was the duty of the father to explain to his son what the Passover meal meant.

‘And you shall tell your son on that day, It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt’ (Exodus 13.8). In the full order for the Passover, here the youngest person present is to ask:

Why is this night different from other nights? For on all other nights we eat leavened or unleavened bread, but on this night only unleavened bread. On all other nights we eat any kind of herbs, but on this night only bitter herbs. On all other nights we eat meat roasted, stewed or boiled, but on this night only roasted.

In reply the father must begin at the saying in Deuteronomy 26.5: ‘A wandering Aramaean was my father’, and, beginning with Abraham, he must tell the story down to the deliverance of the Passover.

6. For the Jew, one of the most sacred parts of scripture, a part to be memorized in youth and never forgotten, is the Hallel. Hallel .means ‘Praise God’, and the Hallel consists of Psalms 113—118, which are praising psalms. At this point the first two psalms of the Hallel, Psalms 113 and 114 are sung.

7. At this point the second cup is drunk. It is called the cup of the proclaiming, because it followed the proclaiming of the hand of God in Israel’s history.

8. At this point all who were to participate cleansed their hands. This is the normal ceremonial handwashing before a meal, for now the meal proper was to begin.

9. First, grace was said, and small pieces of the unleavened bread were distributed to the company. The Passover grace is:

Blessed art thou, o Lord our God, who bringest forth fruit from the earth. Blessed art thou who hast sanctified us with thy commandment, and enjoined us to eat unleavened cakes.

10. Some more of the bitter herbs were then eaten, once again to waken the memory of their bitterness and of God’s redemption from it.

11. There followed what was known as the sop. Some of the bitter herbs were placed between two pieces of Passover bread, dipped in the charosheth and eaten. Still again, memory is awakened.

It is here that the narrative of the Fourth Gospel takes a Passover turn, for it is there said that Jesus dipped the morsel in the dish and gave it to Judas (John 13.26L). This looks like the taking and the giving of the sop.

12. Then the meal proper began. It was a meal of hungry men for the rule was that no food might be eaten after the sacrifice of the lamb in the Temple, until the Passover meal itself, and the sacrifice could be as early as midday. As we have already noted, the whole lamb had to be eaten. Anything that remained had to be burned, for it could not be used for any ordinary purpose.

13. At the conclusion of the meal the hands were again ceremonially cleansed.

14. The remainder of the Passover bread was brought out and eaten.

15. There followed a long thanksgiving for the meal, which to this day contains a petition for the coming of Elijah as the herald of the Messiah.

16. After the thanksgiving prayer, the third cup, which was called the cup of thanksgiving, was drunk, with this prayer:

Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast created the fruit of the vine.

17. The cup was filled for the fourth and last time. The second part of the Hallel, Psalms 115—118, was sung, and then the Great Hallel, Psalm 136 with its ever-recurring refrain:

O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures for ever.

After that the fourth cup was drunk.

18. There follow two prayers. In the full ritual, the second of them runs as follows:

The breath of all that lives shall praise thy name, O Lord, our God. And the spirit of all flesh shall continually glorify and exalt thy memorial, O God, our King. For from everlasting to everlasting thou art God, and beside thee we have no king, redeemer, or saviour.

And so the Passover ends with a shout and a prayer of praise to God. (W. Barclay, The Lord’s Supper, London: SCM Press, 1967, pp. 20-4).

Finally, there is the interpretation of the words themselves. Even if we could reconstruct the original words from these variant versions, the New Testament scholar would have to ask what these words actually meant.

3. The Passover and Last Supper in Film: Some Selected Clips

None of these problems are of particular concern for the holistic reconstructions of the cinema. The meal is usually a Passover meal, although its relation to the Pesah Seder, as Jews practise it, varies, as we shall see. Filmic versions of the Last Supper are given to conflation of all the accounts, incorporating into them elements from the separate Johannine discourses. Their interest, as we shall see, lies, for the most part, in the dramatic elements of these accounts (the betrayal by Judas, the prediction of the disciples’ desertion and Peter’s denial). Their particular focus is on the figure of Jesus who is almost invariably treated in a conservative way, that is, as the Christian Christ of faith and not the Jewish Jesus of history.

In approaching these filmic texts, we need, moreover, to be sensitive to three factors in particular which govern their production:

• Their religious/ecclesiastical context;

• Their contemporary context;

• The fact that they were produced for mass audiences.

With these preliminary remarks, let us now turn to the films themselves. Text Box 17.2 offers some brief information on the films selected (in some cases, where the films overlap with information given in previous chapters, the information has been repeated).^[11] Further reading is to be found in the Notes. I shall give a brief general introduction to each sequence (whose approximate time location in the film is given in square brackets), and then make some comments on its depiction of either the Passover meal or the Last Supper. When you yourself view the sequences, you may wish to note down your own observations and comments on them, and for this purpose a further text box (17.3) is provided.

The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, 192.7)

A major classic, this was the first full-length, silent Hollywood epic on the life of Jesus, as seen from the perspective of Mary Magdalene. It presents Mary as a rich courtesan with Judas as her lover. Its many memorable moments include Mary’s riding off in her chariot to rescue her Judas from the clutches of the carpenter of Nazareth (‘Harness my zebras - gift of the Nubian king!’), her subsequent exorcism by Jesus in a swirl of exiting demons, the moving giving of sight to a little blind girl and dramatic crucifixion and resurrection scenes.

King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961)

A remake of the DeMille version in name only, this Sixties’ Hollywood adaptation presents Judas and Barabbas as political revolutionaries, with Jesus as a reluctant pawn in their game. Criticized by the Catholic Legion of Decency as ‘theologically, historically, and scripturally inaccurate’ (R. Kinnard and T. Davis, Divine Images. A History of Jesus on the Screen, New York: Citadel Press, 1992, p. 132), the film is now viewed in retrospect as better than its critics made it out to be.

The Greatest Story Ever Told (George Stevens, 1965)

Perfectionism in pursuit of the Perfect, George Stevens’s Christ film was the most expensive ever made. Though luminescent with its galaxy of stars, and presenting some memorable sequences (such as the raising of Lazarus as well as the crucifixion), this was a commercial failure that set the Christ film back where Hollywood was concerned.

Jesus Christ, Superstar (Norman Jewison, 1973)

Filmed in Israel, where young tourists re-enact episodes of the life of Christ, this vibrant movie, which was based on the successful rock opera by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber (with a screenplay by Norman Jewison and Melvyn Bragg, and musical direction by Andre Previn) mixes the historical and the contemporary to good effect.

Jesus of Nazareth (Franco Zeffirelli, 1977)

With a screenplay by Anthony Burgess and others (later turned into a novel by William Barclay), this six-and-a-half-hour made-for-television movie (screened on ITV in 1977) was the result of a promise made by its producer Lew Grade to the Pope to do for Jesus what he had done for Moses.

The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988)

Based on Kazantzakis’s novel about ‘the dual substance of Christ’ and ‘the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh’, and directed by one of Hollywood’s most distinguished film-makers, this is one of the finest, most religious and yet most controversial Christ films ever made.

3. Comments on Films/Clips

The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1923/1956): The First Passover

The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, 1927): The Classic Last Supper

King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961): The Y-shaped Last Supper

The Greatest Story Ever Told (George Stevens, 1965): The Greatest Supper Ever Eaten

Jesus Christ, Superstar (Norman Jewison, 1973): The Last Picnic

Jesus of Nazareth (Franco Zeffirelli, 1977): The Supper That Lasts

The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988): The Last Last Supper

The Ten Commandments (1956): The First Passover [2.47.49- 2.53.04]

For sheer pageantry and spectacle, few motion pictures can claim to equal the splendour of C. B. DeMille’s 1956 remake of his epic The Ten Commandments (1923). Filmed in Egypt and the Sinai with one of the biggest sets ever constructed for a motion picture, this version tells the story of the life of Moses, once favoured in the Pharaoh’s household, who turned his back on a privileged life to lead his people to freedom. The part of Moses was played by Charlton Heston, that of Aaron by John Carradine, and that of the Egyptian princess, who brought Moses up, and who appears in the sequence under review, by Nina Foch (cf. 1 Chron. 4.17 ‘the daughter of Pharaoh whom Mered married’). Of his casting for this part, Heston writes (facetiously) in his autobiography:

The embodiment of the most important role I got through the nose (as it were) is on permanent display in the Chapel of San Pietro in Vincoli, in Rome. Michelangelo’s marble figure of Moses is one of the greatest statues in the world, certainly the finest representation of the prophet. It also looks a lot like me, particularly the nose. The overall likeness is startling. Someone pointed this out to C. B. DeMille early in his deliberations on casting the part for The Ten Commandments. I think he never could get it out of his mind.9 •

With these few frivolous words of introduction, let us now turn to the classic cinematic presentation of the Pesah Seder meal.

The Passover in The Ten Commandments (19 §6) is eaten in a dramatic setting, as God wreaks his vengeance on the Egyptians for refusing to let his people go. In depicting the Pesah Seder, DeMille, a practising Christian but with part-Jewish origins,10 has captured certain characteristic elements. The meal begins with the pouring of wine. There are bowls of bitter herbs on the table, as well as lamps. A space is provided around the table for a stranger (here the Egyptian princess, Bithia). There is even one cup that appears not to belong to anyone (is it the prefiguration of the cup reserved for Elijah?). In the background there is the intoning of scriptural references by one of the characters, in the manner of a cantor, and there are refrains from the others. Moses himself is, in this case, the paterfamilias. Following the Pesah Seder ritual, he blesses the bread with the prayer ‘Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, who bringest forth bread from the earth’. A prayer is offered by John Carradine’s Aaron. A junior, here Eliezer, Moses’ nephew, questions the paterfamilias: ‘Why is this night different from all others?’ ‘Why do we eat unleavened bread, and bitter herbs, my uncle?’ he then asks. The bitter herbs are explained first, and then the unleavened bread. Unleavened bread is passed around. The wine is drunk from individual cups. The narration of the story of salvation is understandably brief, as the tenth plague (represented by a green slime) is here enacted rather than recounted, with the viewer being given a glimpse of the blood on the lintels of the door, which protects the Israelites.

There are also some differences. Apart from the fact that, in a number of places, Moses’ words are freely adapted from the Pesah Seder, certain elements are missing. There is no removal of leaven. There is no washing of the hands (u’rechatz) or eating of salted vegetable (karpas). There is no highlighting of the four specific cups of wine consumed at the Pesah Seder. There is no breaking of the middle matzah (yachatz) or eating of the afikoman (tzafuri). The junior’s question ‘Why do we eat unleavened bread, and bitter herbs, my uncle?’ usually precedes rather than follows, the preliminary blessing over the food in the Pesah Seder.11 The bitter herbs are explained first, and then the unleavened bread, where the reverse order is followed in the Pesah Seder.12 Overall, the ritual aspects of the meal itself are overshadowed by the action (the death of Egypt’s firstborn, the arrival of Bithia, the arrival of Joshua played by John Derek).

These differences and omissions are all consistent not only with the biblical epic’s emphasis on dramatic action and spectacle but also with the genre’s de-emphasis of particularity or what we might call ethnic elements, and its championing of universal values.13 For his audiences, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim or secular, DeMille distils the essence of the Passover meal and interprets it as a ritual statement about freedom or liberty. ‘This night the Lord will deliver us from the bondage of Egypt’, says Moses. ‘Tomorrow the light of freedom will shine as we go forth from Egypt’, he later declaims. When Bithia asks if her Nubian slaves can be included in the exodus, Moses replies, ‘All who thirst for freedom may come with us.’ According to Exodus 12.44, however, slaves who participated in the Passover needed first to be circumcised.

Universality is the keynote here, therefore, and another core value enacted is that of inclusivism. Inclusivism is represented by Bithia’s journey with the Israelites, and DeMille’s elaboration of the ‘stranger’ motif. When Bithia arrives, she asks: ‘May a stranger enter?’ ‘There are no strangers among those who seek God’s mercy, ’ says Moses. Bithia is conducted to the table where a space is provided for her. According to the Exodus account (12.43) no foreigner or sojourner was allowed to participate in the passover meal unless they, too, were circumcised. This inclusivism in DeMille’s version is, surprisingly, even made to extend to all of the Egytians. ‘They are my people!’ says Bithia (as Egyptian screams are heard in the background). ‘All are God’s people’ is the response (although a somewhat ironic one, given the circumstances!).

But deeper mythic elements also inform the narrative, and carry it away from the emphasis on ethnicity and particularity that characterize, by contrast, the biblical accounts. The film’s social context and its ideology,

in reality, inform its presentation. DeMille’s film was made in the 1950s at the height of the Cold War, and when America was also grappling with racial issues. Here Babington and Evans (in speaking of the epic genre, in general, and DeMille’s prologues to his films in particular) perceptively capture the ideological essence:

De Mille’s prologues to Samson and Delilah and The Ten Commandments clearly articulate the allegory of America: Democracy; Russia: Slavery, for all that the enemy is never named. This, the most constant motif across the genre, disappears only in the 1980s where its polarities have begun to feel simplistic . . . The presence of blacks in the film [The Ten Commandments] (for instance the King of Ethiopia; Bithia’s Nubians), while alluding to racial questions in America, also signifies America’s concern about the Third World beginning to fall under Soviet influence. In the Statue of Liberty allusion at the end of the film where Moses stands holding the torch of freedom, his rhetoric looks forward to the triumph of democracy, expressed not so much in the maternal, intaking words on the original statue (‘Give me your tired, your poor,’ etc.) as in the expansionist direction of ‘Proclaim Liberty throughout all the lands! Unto all the inhabitants thereof!’14

The King of Kings (1927): The Classic Last Supper [o 1.01.18- 01.09.06]

We turn now to the first major representation of the Christian Last Supper in the biblical epic, that in Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927). As mentioned in chapters 13 and 16, this major classic was the first full- length, silent Hollywood epic on the life of Jesus, as seen from the perspective of Mary Magdalene. The film presents itself to us as if it were an illustrated Bible story book. This is no accident since DeMille drew upon not only the religious art and paintings of the Renaissance (including, as here, Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper), but also on the Bible illustrations of the Victorian period based upon it, in particular those of the painter James Tissot and the engraver Gustave Dore. In viewing the sequence, you should also note the music. When the film was reissued in 1931 with synchronized music and sound effects, DeMille made effective use of traditional Christian hymns played at strategic moments (in this excerpt you will recognize, for example, ‘Abide with Me’). A third feature is the intimate use of the camera, with medium, close-up and point-of-view shots that do much to humanize the biblical characters. The stylized religious expressionism, however, a static camera, and special effects such as the radiance around Jesus as well as the stunning finale to this sequence preserve the image of an objective Christ, whose divinity is clearly recognizable. The actor chosen by DeMille to portray Jesus was the distinguished British actor H. B. Warner. Judas (at Jesus’s left) in the sequence is represented as a gigolo. Peter, the big fisherman, is the one hugging the cup to his breast. Mary, the mother of Jesus, appears at the end of the sequence.

A noticeable feature of DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) is the selection of biblical quotations from the Authorized Version (some wrested from their original context) that are presented as captions, and act as an unspoken commentary on the action. The rise of fundamentalism would have made the King James Bible familiar to the audiences of this period. Where the film’s treatment of its biblical sources is concerned, you might also note the conflation that has occurred with respect to the Gospel texts. In the words of the institution, the Longer Version of Luke 22.i9(ab) is quoted: ‘Take, eat - this is My body which is given for you. This do in remembrance of Me’. Sayings from the Fourth Gospel are included, however, despite the absence of the institution of the Last Supper in that Gospel: ‘Little children, yet a little while I am with you. A new commandment I give unto you - that ye love one another, as I have loved you’ (Jn 13.33-34). Another verse from Luke is also given: ‘Behold, the hand of him that betrayeth Me - is with Me on the table!’ (Lk. 22.21), and Judas is despatched by Jesus with a verse from the Fourth Gospel: ‘That which thou doest - do quickly!’ (Jn 13.27). As Judas creeps out - the order is reversed from the Matthean text where Judas is still present at this point - the other disciples remonstrate in words drawn from Matthew (Mt. 26.22): ‘Lord, is it I?’ Jesus then delivers another utterance from one of the Johannine discourses (Jn 16.33): ‘My peace I give unto you. In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer - I have overcome the world!’ He ends with a Matthean passage (‘The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many!’ Mt. 20.28) which, though it, too, is taken out of context, effectively captures the essence of the meaning of the Last Supper for Christians.

In addition to these textual conflations, DeMille, or his scriptwriter, Jeanie McPherson, has also taken artistic liberties with the Last Supper account. Jesus, it should be noted, embraces his mother (who is dressed in wimpled and nun-like fashion) at the end. She, of course, does not appear in the Gospel Last Supper narratives. Here she is given an invented speech: ‘O my beloved Son - wilt Thou not return to Nazareth with me? Here I fear Thine enemies!’ The whole sequence ends stunningly with the empty Passover meal table and the symbolic imagery of the ‘holy grail’15 and the dove, the former so increasingly incandescent as to call to mind the ‘burning bush’ of the Hebrew Bible (Ex. 3.2).

In relation to the Pesah Seder meal, and where the ritual aspects are concerned, the meal is clearly overshadowed by the dramatic action (the betrayal of Judas, the responses of the disciples and, in the closing sequence, Jesus’s relationship with his mother). For purely dramatic effect, for example, Judas is made to decline the bread by dropping it surreptitiously. His discomfiture at receiving the cup is emphasized, and he treats it as if it were a poisoned chalice. The breaking of the bread by Jesus comes first, it should be observed, rather than the blessing over the first cup as in the Pesah Seder. Jesus next takes the cup, the caption reading: ‘This is My blood of the new testament - which is shed for many unto the remission of sins. Drink ye all of it’ (Mt. 26.27-28). The wine too, as in traditional Christian iconography, is drunk from a common cup. In short, there are few elements that draw on the Pesah Seder meal, and the Jewish features are subordinated to Christian piety or mythology.

King of Kings (1961): The Y-shaped Last Supper [01.58.56-02.04.30]

Not so with our next film, Nicholas Ray’s King of Rings (1961), for which I supplied an introduction in chapter 13 (‘The Two Faces of Betrayal: the Characterization of Peter and Judas in the Biblical Epic or Christ Film’). The first thing to note about Ray’s version of the Last Supper is the curious Y-shaped table arrangement that characterizes the scene, with Jesus (Jeffrey Hunter) at the centre of the Y. Jesus is dressed in white, and his disciples (in keeping with the style of the film) in garments with solid blocks of colours (brown, grey, dark red, dark blue) or stripes.

Ray’s version is clearly a Passover meal. The voice-over at the beginning announces its Passover/Feast of Unleavened Bread setting. The table has a bowl of bitter herbs, and lighted lamps. The meal is preceded by a ritual handwashing. Jesus begins with the prayer, ‘Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who bids us eat bitter herbs’, an invocation associated (albeit in slightly different form) with the Seder.16 They all eat the bitter herbs. The first cup (of the Pesah Seder) is not drunk, however, and there are no preliminary blessings over the food at this point (but see below). A second prayer is given by Jesus: ‘Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth’, a prayer which in the Pesah Seder is included with the preliminary blessings over the food.17 Jesus next intones, ‘Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who creates the fruit of the vine’ which in the Pesah Seder meal represents the first cup (the cup of sanctification - kiddush - at the beginning of the Pesah Seder before the handwashing).18 All of these elements, it is to be emphasized, are absent from the Gospel texts, or merely adumbrated there. It is clear, therefore, that a special effort has been made to give a ‘ritual visualization’ to the Gospel text by conforming it to the Pesah Seder.

So much for the ritual setting, and the sequence’s relation to the Seder, but what about the plot and characterization, and the sequence’s relation to the Gospel narratives? Here the film follows its genric predecessors, its action centring on the betrayal by Judas who shortly departs. Jesus’s words thereafter to his disciples are a freer rendition of the Gospel texts, yet they are still formal and stylized. Hunter’s lines are in modern English (Revised Standard Version style) but are delivered in a traditional way, at a formal, measured pace, and in a smooth, mellifluous, controlled voice. They include material from the Johannine discourses (Jesus’s words about his departure, and the love commandment, for example) and from the Synoptics (the prophecy of the desertion of the disciples, for example) and Peter’s denial). Jesus’s words ‘Take ... Eat.. .'For this is my body. Do this in remembrance of me’ conflate the shorter Markan version with the Lukan ‘Do this in remembrance of me’, and the word over the cup comes from Matthew’s version (Mt. 26.28). The scene, in short, is decidedly Christian, and more than a touch ecclesiastical, with its choral background, with Jesus as the solemn celebrant, with the disciples each in turn taking the single cup and sipping from it in silence. The Y-shaped table arrangement, with the prominent display of wood, even gives a certain suggestion of church pews!

The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965): The Greatest Supper Ever Eaten [02.18.32-02.25.37]

Perfectionism in pursuit of the Perfect, our next film, George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) was the most expensive ever made. Though luminescent with its galaxy of stars, and presenting some memorable sequences (such as the raising of Lazarus as well as the crucifixion), this was a commercial failure that set the Christ film back where Hollywood was concerned. The part of Jesus is played by Max von Sydow. Although a distinguished actor, von Sydow was little known at the time outside of Europe, where he had acted in a number of Ingmar Bergman films such as The Seventh Seal (1957). With his straight, black hair and beard, and Swedish accent, his Byzantine Jesus conveys a spiritual and unearthly quality. Jesus’s nobility of character, firmness of purpose, certainty of mind, and sadness of spirit are conveyed well by him. The pace, as elsewhere throughout the film, is slow, even stately, with frequent close-ups of Jesus and the disciples’ faces. The musical accompaniment by Alfred Newman is subdued, unobtrusive but effective.

The Last Supper in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) takes place with Jesus and the disciples seated at a long table. As with other directors before him, Stevens immersed himself in centuries of Christian art, using Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting as his model for the Last Supper. Unlike the other characters, Jesus’s language, as also that of Charlton Heston’s John the Baptist, is largely inspired by the King James Version of the Gospels. The American poet and historian Carl Sandburg was involved, among others, in the writing of the script and, while this is at times banal (one notes here, for example, Jesus’s address to his disciples as those ‘who have walked with me down all those dusty roads’), it is also frequently beautiful, poetic and subtly nuanced. The words of institution are conflated from both the Markan/Matthean and Lukan/Pauline traditions. Again, as in most of the Christ films, the Synoptic Last Supper accounts are supplemented by the Johannine discourses (‘In my Father’s house . . .’ Jn 14.2; ‘I am the Way . . .’ Jn 14.6; the new commandment of love, Jn 13.34, etc.), as elsewhere throughout the film. The scene ends climactically with Jesus’s solemn words ‘Now is the Son of Man glorified’ (Jn 13.31).

What is noteworthy in this sequence is that, although all the disciples are in white, appropriately for a Passover meal, there is little reference, in contrast to Ray’s King of Kings (1961) to the Jewish aspects of the Passover meal. The focus in this presentation of the Last Supper is Christological rather than ritualistic. It focuses on Jesus himself, rather than on the notion of a communal meal celebrating the Passover. Once again, too, the ritual aspect of the meal is overshadowed by the dramatic elements, especially the betrayal of Judas, and the prediction of Peter’s denial. Jesus is a Christian priest officiating at a future Christian Eucharist, not a Jew celebrating the Passover with his disciples.

Jesus Christ, Superstar (1973): The Last Picnic [00.53.22- 00.59.32]

Our next sequence, from Norman Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), offers an entirely different re-enactment of the Last Supper. An introduction and comment was given to this film in chapter 13 and this (or Text Box 17.2) should be consulted.

What strikes us about this version of the Last Supper, in contradistinction to the last one, is its vitality rather than its spirituality. Here we have the Last Supper as a picnic. ‘Forget all my trials and tribulations ... they’ll still sing about us when we die’ sing the disciples in the opening number, which is staged in an olive grove, and leads on to the Last Supper celebrated alfresco. In keeping with the Gospel accounts, Jesus predicts the denial and betrayal of his disciples. The audience is offered in particular a dramatization of the conflict between Jesus and Judas. ‘You think I once admired you, now I despise you’, sings Judas. ‘You made me do it’, he cries. ‘For all you care, this wine could be my blood/this bread could be my body’, sings Jesus, rebuking his disciples but raising thoughts in the mind of the audience of the relationship between the bread and the wine and the body and blood in the Christian Eucharist.

Where the Passover meal is concerned, there is the absence of the usual Passover setting, but the sequence, one notes, is framed by the image of the shepherd and the sheep, recalling perhaps the origins of the Passover as a nomadic shepherds’ rite,19 or perhaps evoking the Paschal lamb of the Fourth Gospel (cf. e.g. Jn 1.36 or 10.1-3). There is a handwashing at the start, and wine is drunk first here, before the bread.

In terms of its ideology and social context, however, it is noticeable that where Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956) is permeated with the ethos of the 1950s, all the characters of Norman Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar can clearly be seen to be rehearsing the rhetoric and counter-rhetoric of the youth revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Jesus of Nazareth (1977): The Supper that Lasts [01.48.05/

01.53.30-01.59.15]

The complete Last Supper sequence in our next Christ film, Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977) is almost n minutes long-hence my description of it not as the Last Supper but as the Supper that lasts. It is worth looking at in full, but a shortened, alternative, five-minute segment of it is included in the time location information. With a screenplay by Anthony Burgess and others (later turned into a novel by William Barclay), this six-and-a-half-hour made-for-television movie (screened on ITV in 1977) was the result of a promise made by its producer Lew Grade to the Pope to do for Jesus what he had done for Moses. The part of Jesus is played by the British actor Robert Powell, although Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman were also considered for the role.

In its depiction of the Last Supper, the usual conventions are followed. The scene focuses on such basic elements as the prediction of Peter’s denial, and the betrayal of Judas, and draws liberally on the Johannine discourses. The words pertaining to Jesus’s departure are cited, as well as the new/love commandment (Jn 13.34), the Johannine Jesus’s invocation to ‘glorify the son’ and his so-called high priestly prayer (Jn 17). The Christological declaration ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’ is the saying chosen to end the scene (Jn 14.6).

Some liberty is taken with the words of the institution. The Synoptic words of institution are given interpretative embellishments, as when Jesus intones: ‘From now on, this cup will not only be a memorial and sacrament to the covenant God made with our fathers on Mount Sinai. This is the blood of the new covenant which is poured out for the many.’ In some cases, the words are invented, but with Johannine overtones. 'From now on this will no longer be the bread of the passage of our fathers from bondage to freedom,’ says Jesus. ‘This Passover is for you today the passage from the bondage of death to'the freedom of life.’ In other cases, Johannine passages are freely adapted. ‘This is the bread of life’ intones Jesus. ‘Whoever eats of this bread shall have eternal life’ (cf. the ‘bread of life’ discourse of Jn 6.25-71).

Some care has been taken, therefore, at a theological level, to relate the Christian Last Supper to the Pesah Seder. And this care also reveals itself in the setting, which offers the audience some of the particularity, or ethnic elements often lacking in the biblical epic or Christ film. The Last Supper takes place in a low-ceilinged, mud-walled room. There is music, dancing and singing at the beginning (in the longer version of this sequence). Jesus leans against a wall, the others sit around, cross-legged, in an arc, on the floor. There is a genuine sense of a shared celebration of the Passover on the part of Jesus and his disciples. The participants drink wine from individual cups, or bowls.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988): The Last Last Supper [01.40.10-01.44.30]

Our final sequence, and our last Last Supper, is taken from Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), a film commented upon in previous chapters. What one notes here is that Scorsese’s version is at last a genuine Passover meal. The ethnic elements are profuse. Oriental music is heard throughout in the atmospheric ‘world music’ soundtrack by Peter Gabriel. The Passover begins with the blowing of the sophar, the long horn with the turned-up end, used to summon people on a religious occasion. In keeping with the Passover feast, there is chanting to the accompaniment of timbrels (cf. Ex. 15.20). A Passover lamb is shown slaughtered, its blood being caught in a bowl. Blood is shown being thrown over an altar. Pilgrims entering Jerusalem are dressed in white, and carrying torches. Ritual ablutions are taking place. A seven-branched candlestick or menora is shown at the start of the Last Supper scene itself. Jesus meets with his disciple in a canopied area. The women are bringing the items needed for the meal (wine). Jesus is sitting cross-legged, and his disciples reclining. The unleavened bread is passed around in a circle.

In his treatment of the words of institution, Scorsese has brilliantly solved the problem of previous enactments of the Last Supper. Here the words of the institution are minimal: ‘Take this bread. Share it together. This bread is my body . .. Now drink this wine. Pass the cup. This wine is my blood. Do this to remember me.’ ‘All of you. I want to tell you something’, says Jesus and the scene ends. Thus there are no laboured or artificial borrowings from the Johannine discourses, or no climactic saying chosen by the scriptwriter from the Gospels and wrested from its context for dramatic effect.

Scorsese’s Last Supper is distinctive in other ways too. Reflecting the 1980s, for example, is its inclusion of women in the circle receiving the bread and the wine (Mary Magdalene included). What is truly remarkable about this re-enactment is that it is truly visual and truly cinematic. This is a film drawing on visual imagery rather than words to make its point. Here cinema becomes the counterpart to myth and ritual, with its offering of visual images and ritual actions in place of a superfluity of words to represent the transcendent. Peter removes a mouthful of wine between thumb and forefinger, and we are shown it as a trickle of blood in his upturned palm. Judas (who actually drinks of the cup, one observes, in contrast to the Judas of DeMille’s The King of Kings who lets it pass) looks on. The wine/blood is poured over the unleavened bread. Judas departs without a word. The economy demonstrated in this scene is impressive. As with the finale to DeMille’s The King of Kings, striking visual imagery and symbolism is used to good effect, obviating the need to repeat the now familiar elements of the Last Supper to audiences.

Notes

1. B. Babington and P. W. Evans, Biblical Epics. Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.

2. W. R. Telford, ‘The New Testament in Fiction and Film: A Biblical Scholar’s Perspective’, in J. G. Davies, G. Harvey and W. Watson (eds), Words Remembered, Texts Renewed. Essays in Honour of J. F. A. Sawyer, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995, pp. 360-94.

3. J. W. Martin and C. E. Ostwalt (eds), Screening the Sacred. Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995.

4. See, for example, J. C. Rylaarsdam, ‘Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread’ in G. A. Buttrick (ed.), The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, New York and Nashville: Abingdon, 1962, pp. 663-8; D. L. Jeffrey, ‘Passover’, in D. L. Jeffrey (ed.), A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992, p. 587; J. Jeremias, ‘pasca’, in G. Kittel (ed.), Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967, pp. 896-904.

5. W. Barclay, The Lord’s Supper, London: SCM Press, 1967.

6. J. Sacks, The Chief Rabbi’s Haggadah, London: HarperCollins, 2003.

7. D. L. Jeffrey and I. H. Marshall, ‘Eucharist’, in Jeffrey (ed.), Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, pp. 243-50, and esp. p. 244. See also J. Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, Oxford: Blackwell, 1955; M. H. Shepherd, ‘Lord’s Supper’, in Buttrick (ed.), The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, pp. 158-62.

8. For more information on these films, see, for example, R. Kinnard and T. Davis, Divine Images. A History of Jesus on the Screen, New York: Citadel Press, 1992; L. J. Kreitzer, The Old Testament in Fiction and Film. On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow, The Biblical Seminar 24, Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1994, pp. 21-7 (on DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, 1913/1956)-, W. R. Telford, ‘Jesus Christ Movie-Star: The Depiction of Jesus in the Cinema’, in C. Marsh and G. Ortiz (eds), Explorations in Theology and Film. Movies and Meaning, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, pp. 115-39.

9. C. Heston, In the Arena. The Autobiography, London: HarperCollins, 1995, p. 126.

10. Babington and Evans, Biblical Epics, pp. 34-5.

11. See Sacks’s description of the fifteen stages of the Seder in Sacks, Haggadah, PP- 2.-3-

12. See Sacks, Haggadah, ad loc.

13. Babington and Evans, Biblical Epics, pp. 34-6.

14. Babington and Evans, Biblical Epics, pp. 54, 55.

15. The cup is in the form of a traditional chalice, and hence evocative of all the imagery surrounding the ‘holy grail’.

16. See the Eating of the Bitter Herb (maror): ‘Blessed are You, O God our Lord, King of the world, who made us holy with His commandments, and instructed us to eat the bitter herbs’, Sacks, Haggadah, p. 5 5.

17. See the Blessing and Eating of the Matzah (motzie matzah): ‘Blessed are you, O God our Lord, King of the world, who brings bread out of the earth’, Sacks, Haggadah, p. 53.

18. See the recitation of Kiddush (kaddesh): ‘Blessed are you, O God our Lord, King of the world, Creator of the fruit of the vine’, Sacks, Haggadah, p. 7.

19. See Rylaarsdam, ‘Passover’, p. 664.

Epilogue

Table Talk:

Reflections on The Passion of The Christ
(Mel Gibson, 2004)

1 om Aitken (TA), Eric S. Christianson (EC), Peter Francis (PF),
Jeffrey F. Keuss (JK), Robert Pope (RP), William R. Telford (WRT),
Melanie Wright (MW)

As this book was in preparation, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ was released. As contributors, we wanted to offer some response to the film. In the summer of 2004, most of the contributors to this volume gathered at St Deiniol’s Library to reflect on the film. This is an edited version of a long afternoon of discussion.

The discussion focused on the film as the latest in the genre of Christ films and went on to consider it as a ‘Mel Gibson’ film, exploring common traits and themes. We were all numbed by the relentless violence of the film and the discussion pondered the point and purpose of depicting such excessive violence. The claims of ‘realistic’ violence led us into a discussion of the film’s claim to authenticity, which in turn led us to discuss the antisemitism and possible homophobia of the film. We all noted that Gibson was trying to make a film with a clear theological message; some of us more cynically thought that the theological stance of the film was part of a deliberate marketing strategy. However, before embarking on these critical reflections, we’ll start with what we liked about the film.

1. The Opportunity for Debate

PF: Whether you love it or loathe it, The Passion of The Christ was arguably the most talked about religious film of all time. It is not everyday that such blatant theology storms the box office and we must be grateful for the opportunity it gives us to debate and discuss the Gospels and in particular the death of Christ. We have all been involved in debates, public and private, about the film. Shouldn’t we trust the audience to make up their own mind?

EC: It is a deeply personal film. I want to applaud the fact that he has made, in an age when film-makers are not necessarily making ‘position’ films, a film with a distinct theology and spirituality.

TA: Some of the worst effects of the film will be absorbed by the fact that a lot of people who go and see it will already have a Christian belief and they will back off in certain parts of this film. They will like parts and they will think parts are over the top.

MW: For some inter-faith professionals, who ostensibly see the film as problematic, it is frankly the best thing that has happened to them for years. It offers free publicity for organizations, brings issues into the open. And the direct threat of the film is really small: research suggests that watching a film is unlikely to make one adopt (or reject) antisemitic or other prejudices.

2. The Horror of Crucifixion

TA: The main thing that is an advance on previous Jesus biopics is the scene of the crucifixion itself. No one will ever produce a movie with Robert Powell, beautifully composed, not looking all that uncomfortable. It won’t be possible to have that kind of crucifixion scene again.

PF: No more looking on the bright side of life.

3. Cinematography

TA: The acting was competent but didn’t really require great skill or range. But it was a tremendous film to look at when you weren’t busy thinking ‘I really don’t want to see the result of seven hours of make-up again and again please.’

WRT: Critics have actually spoken quite well of the cinematography. The film was photographed by Caleb Deschanel who did the Black Stallion, The Right Stuff and Gibson’s The Patriot. Richard Corliss, for example, in Time Magazine,1 describes the film as ‘an attractive clash of eerie blues in the outdoor night scenes, burnished umbers in the trial scenes, and blistering whites and yellows on the road to Calvary’.

MW: You can locate this film vis-a-vis other dark epics: for example, the film stock, tones, etc., evoke Gladiator and Lord of The Rings. The opening images of the moon in a dark smoky sky, the menacing demonic children are evidence that several production crew members cut their teeth in the horror genre.

WRT: Caleb Deschanel gives us a very objective camera with very few point-of-view shots. The only significant ones that I could spot were in connection with the scourging, the road to the cross, the crucifixion and its dramatic outcome. When Jesus was being scourged, you get the point- of-view of Jesus as he is being dragged away. The camera turns upside down and you see things from the victim’s point of view. Then at various points on the Via Dolorosa, you get a point-of-view shot from Jesus’s perspective. There are two other notable shots: God looking down on the crucifixion scene with the fall of the raindrop/teardrop expressing his sadness or judgement; and following the earthquake and before the deposition, a similar heaven-to-earth view of Satan being condemned, again conveying the divine perspective on the triumph of Jesus.

JK: Caleb Deschanel’s camera fulfils Gibson’s hallmark as director and producer of a controlling gaze that is very particular and akin to the name of his production company Icon Entertainment, always bent on transfixing the viewer - at times in a voyeuristic and pornographic sense - to that which lies beyond, beneath and behind the flickering images on the screen.

EC: The camera objectifies the whole experience. We identify with the perpetrators of violence and the spectators and not with Jesus.

PF: In that respect, Deschanel and Gibson have been uncomfortably successful.

4. Atonement Theology

RP: One of the things that strikes me is that if you take the story of Jesus in Christian theology as being redemptive, then virtually all Jesus films are intensely dissatisfying. When it comes down to it you are still left wondering why it is that the crucifixion of one man has drawn this theological significance. Now this film attempts from the start to address that. None of the Jesus films are able to explain the meaning of this atoning death. Gibson at least prefaces his film with the quotation from Isaiah showing his intention to offer an explanation.

PF: It does have a definite theological slant compared to the other Jesus films. The devil frames the whole film, the film presents a cosmic battle beginning with the devil in Gethsemane and ending with the devil being cast down and defeated.

WRT: Well, it’s interesting that Time magazine ran a cover story entitled ‘Why did Jesus die?’2 It is extraordinary to have theology on the front page of an international news magazine, and the claim was made in the article that, throughout America now, atonement theory is back on the agenda, and people are discussing it. Gibson’s film dramatizes two of the classic atonement theories: first, Anselm’s idea of substitutionary atonement: the notion that payment is made to God on behalf of humankind by Jesus’s vicarious death; and second, the interpretation that Gustav Aulen calls the classic theory in his book Christus Victor.3 In this theory, Jesus’s sacrifice is seen to be directed not towards God but against the devil, who is defeated by a display of superior power (or even by divine subterfuge). Gibson’s film can be seen to exemplify the classic theory in that Satan appears in all the key scenes, and is shown being finally overcome.

PF: Atonement debate hasn’t been central in theology for a long time. Contemporary theology seems more interested in the life, ministry and mission of Jesus rather than his atoning death. Perhaps Gibson’s film is a corrective to this trend. It certainly serves to make us reflect on the current enthusiasm for Jesus’s life and ministry. Gibson ignores Abelard’s theory of Jesus’s death as a supreme example of self-giving love, a theory that honours his life and ministry to a much greater extent.

RP: The film has a serious theological intent in contrast to the other Jesus biopics.

5. Intertextuality

PF: Eric and Bill, as biblical scholars, was there anything you particularly admired about the film?

EC: Gibson does show a little bit of flair with intertextuality, for example, with the Genesis reference in Gethsemane, crushing the serpent’s head. Though the example I found most interesting was the reference to the Jewish liturgy of Passover. Jesus is starting to undergo his torture, Mary wakes up from sleep realizing that something is wrong with her son. We see a light under the door and you have the Passover citation about this night being different from all other nights (cf. Exod. 12.26-27; 13.14). The citation fails, however, as the door bursts open - in other words, the angel of death will visit this night. For me, this Passover reference was the most creative moment of the film.

WRT: The use of the New Testament is all fairly conventional, with very little evidence of creative invention. Very few sayings on the lips of Jesus tease the mind. Except in one flashback, where Jesus is a child, he falls, and his mother runs to him. She reaches him, with the help of the beloved disciple, through the back alleys and rushes to pick him up. He rises to his feet and at that point he turns to her and says ‘Mother, I make all things new.’ Now suddenly we have a quotation from the book of Revelation (a quotation from its penultimate chapter),4 which is found on the lips of God Almighty himself. I wondered why Gibson had chosen to put this saying on the lips of Jesus at that point in the film having hitherto given us a series of standard Gospel sayings.

6. The Passion of The Christ as a Jesus Biopic

PF: That’s what we like about the film. It is time now to consider Gibson’s film The Passion of The Christ as the latest in a long line of films that try to put on screen the life of Christ, Jesus biopics as we might call them. It belongs to the group that I often refer to as ‘reverential retellings’5 as opposed to the ‘imaginative re-tellings’.6 These reverential retellings, attempt to be standard biopics of Jesus’s life. Gibson’s film shares many of the faults of these films, and it fits within the conventions of this genre of Jesus biopics.

TA: As far as genre is concerned it’s intensely old-fashioned. The actual structure of the script is identical in principle and practice with all of the other big action, pious spectacles. They have taken a bit out of this Gospel, a bit out of that Gospel, the occasional pious legends (Veronica with her veil, etc.).

WRT: When I looked at the film in relation to other Jesus films, I was looking for general borrowings from the genre. I was also looking out for the presence of the conventional scenes that we see time and time again in Jesus films. One example of a borrowing from the genre would be the scene in the first flashback, in which Jesus makes a table and when he’s alone with his mother at home. That scene made me think very much of Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings, 1961 film, in which a very similar scene is shown.

PF: It is also reminiscent of the carpentry shop scenes in Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ.

WRT: There were a whole series of conventional borrowings: the Sermon on the Mount, the woman taken in adultery, the entry into Jerusalem, the cleansing of the Temple, the Last Supper, the resurrection. These are scenes that appear in virtually all Jesus films.

TA: But I defy anybody who doesn’t know the Gospels quite well to understand those flashbacks. The triumphal entry is flashed on screen when Jesus is halfway up the Via Dolorosa. Unless you know what it is, you won’t have the least idea.

PF: I was struck by the brief Sermon on the Mount scene. It was straight out of Monty Python’s spoof version. I wanted to add their caption, ‘Saturday. Tea Time. About 4:00 p.m.’ It presented the same kind of image that the Pythons ridicule so well of Christ on the mountain top instructing the masses who wouldn’t hear a word. Gibson also borrows from Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar with its camp miracle-demanding Herod. He borrows the devilish figure from George Stevens’s Greatest Story Ever Told, where Donald Pleasance plays the ever-lurking devil figure. Like all the other reverential re-tellings the film is very painterly in tone.

MW: Yes, the classic pieta pose when Jesus is taken down from the cross.

PF: It borrows its iconography from great Renaissance paintings (Piero della Francesca, Mantegna) and especially from Caravaggio. Gibson constructs carefully composed scenes that are tableaux vivants based on these great masters (just like Stevens, de Mille and Zeffirelli have done before him).

EC: It’s as if those painterly scenes and borrowings are a kind of structural reassurance. Gibson is taking us into new territory in the violence. We are being reassured with the nice comfortable genre conventions of the Jesus biopics.

TA: The problem with filming the life of Jesus is that there is very little biographical colouring in the Gospels. What can we know of Jesus the human being? Who does he love? Everybody. Who does he hate? No one. What makes him laugh? We don’t know. What are his flaws and shortcomings? He has none.

PF: All the Jesus biopics fail in that respect. We get very little impression of why Jesus is so charismatic. There’s no bio!

TA: The film leaves out any sort of context. Other Jesus biopics give us context. Ray’s King of Kings paints a careful picture of the political situation, for example. In Gibson’s film we have no context. What is going on in Jerusalem? In reality nobody cared about Jesus’s fate, nothing out of the ordinary was going on. But in Gibson’s film the whole world is watching Jesus. I think in reality people were enjoying the preparations for the Passover festival and carrying on as usual. There is no sign of that in this film. There is no real mention of the fact that Passover is going on. He doesn’t stress that this was a very tense time and the Romans and Jews had ways of trying to deal with it and instead of abusing each other, Caiaphas and Pilate would have been at their closest. Other films in the genre give us a lot of context.

7. A ‘Gibson’ Film

PF: OK, it shares a lot in common with other Jesus biopics, except for its failure to supply a context for the violence, but is it recognizably a ‘Mel Gibson’ film?

MW: It is identifiably a Gibson film in the sense that it fetishizes violence and constructs the roles of masculine and feminine genders conservatively. Gibson is a heavy-handed director and to borrow a phrase from Spinal Tap, in The Passion he gives us the crucifixion ‘turned up to 11’.

WRT: In The Patriot, Lethal Weapon, The Tear of Living Dangerously, Mad Max, Mad Max 2, Signs, Conspiracy Theory, We were Soldiers, you have this character (Gibson) who can take a lot of punishment but also acts in a kind of redemptive way. Mad Max is an apocalyptic hero but, at the same time, someone receiving violence as well as perpetrating it. In Braveheart, William Wallace is almost a Christ-figure at the end, even adopting the cruciform position as he is tortured.

PF: Of course, Braveheart whipped up a great deal of anti-English feeling in Scotland when it was released as well as anti-WASP feeling in USA. The Passion whipped up a good deal of antisemitic feeling when it was released. Like The Passion, Braveheart was not at all nuanced in its characterization, with very clear distinctions between the good and the bad. If you heighten the cruelty and humiliation done to the good by the bad and link it to emotive subjects like national independence or religion, the result is bound to be explosive. Neither of these two films is easy to have a calm rational conversation about; they both instil outrage.

JK: One thing that is clear throughout Mel Gibson’s filmic history (going back to Mad Max in fact) is a central theme that cultures, nationalism and even religion will perish but what remains is the call of the family. The plot of Mad Max, Braveheart, The Patriot and The Passion of The Christ are all cut from the same Shroud of Turin. If the storylines of these films are based on a good sense of the market, then it appears that today’s audiences can’t imagine any cause that could justify political violence other than injury to a child or wife (your own, not your neighbour’s - that’s their problem). What Gibson has picked up on is that the back story of global apocalypse (Mad Max), the parochial patriotism of colonial elites (The Patriot), the genocide of a people and their way of life (Braveheart) and extreme religious intolerance (The Passion of The Christ) are incomprehensible to today’s audiences - all that matters to those sitting in the multiplex cinema is ‘kin’.

WRT: There is this strong notion of the primal unit, the family in Gibson’s films. In The Passion, the family is, in fact, a threesome that you see at various important points in the film. And the threesome is Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and the conflated figure of John/ the beloved disciple. They, in a sense, are almost humanizing elements. When Jesus is being constantly harassed by his enemies, the camera often goes to this threesome who shadow him at every point, lending him succour. The sense of Jesus as the embattled man but, nevertheless, surrounded by a supportive family is so distinctive in this film. There is, of course, no trace of the tension between Jesus and his mother that you find in the Gospels.

JK: The ‘pieta on the move’ in the form of Maia Morgenstern’s Mary and Monica Bellucci’s Magdalene are the only consistent people who follow Jim Caviezel’s Jesus through the trial, up the Via Dolorosa, and wait oh- so-patiently at the foot of the cross. As a reward for patient attention to the torture, Jesus bestows not salvation per se but the blessing of family - ‘Son, behold your mother/Mother, behold your son.’ The fact that Gibson is drawing this from the Gospel of John account (Jn 19.26) is not what is significant - it is the fact that Gibson frames this scene so distinctly and gives as much screen time to it where other Jesus films give little or no time. All other things will perish - but family will remain.

WRT: In this scene lifted from John’s Gospel, where Jesus is on the cross and his mother is at the foot of the cross with the beloved disciple, the biblical text says ‘woman’ (‘Woman, behold your son!’) using the same pejorative term that you find also in John 2, at the marriage in Cana. In the version that we see in this film Jesus doesn’t address her as ‘woman’; he says ‘mother’ (‘Mother, behold your son!’) and then when the beloved disciple is addressed, there is no ‘son’ in John’s text (‘Behold, your mother!’), but Gibson’s version puts in the word ‘son’ (‘Son, behold your mother!’). So mother/son is reinforced in the dialogue of the film in a way that is not in the biblical text.

Gibson gives us a diabolic family running through the film as well as the holy threesome, who represent the holy family. I see one explanation for this in the convention that one finds sometimes in apocalyptic literature, that there will always be a diabolic equivalent to God. The devil mimics God and, therefore, what you are seeing (with Satan and his offspring) is the family theme again - only this is the diabolic equivalent of the Holy Family. This is the diabolic family here: Satan, the father/mother, with his demonic brood who hound Judas, for example, or evil’s alternative ‘virgin and child’, the androgynous figure carrying his grotesque, dwarf-like, superannuated child through the Roman soldiers.

MW: I think the film doubles Mary with the devil. Despite the dubbing of a male voice for this androgynous character, I think we are meant to see these figures as a pair. For example, in the scourging scene, the devil and Mary are clothed alike, the devil is seen suckling a diabolic child.

RP: You know, what we’ve just discussed about the family is good old American Republicanism. The family unit is where you find security and safety and all that and you’ve got to watch the people in government because they can look like they are flogging you to death.

8. A Violent Film

PF: My overriding memory of the film is the relentless violence.

TA: I know I was totally benumbed by the violence, I mean I’d been benumbed since about 20 minutes after the beginning of the film. I think many people would argue that realism is the only possible excuse for that level of violence.

EC: Are we going to talk about the realism of the violence? That’s interesting. People have noted that Jesus bleeds in impossible ways.

WRT: One reviewer has challenged the view that ‘blood plus dead language equals reality’.7 The violence is such that a number of critics, as well as audience, have noted its artificiality. There’s a splendid quotation from the same reviewer who says of the film: ‘an incredibly obtuse piece of macho-masochism, overlooking Jesus’s message of love and his human complexity in favour of a bizarre make-up bloodbath, turning his body into a gory lattice of latex weals, cosmetic stripes and prosthetic wounds which proclaim their lurid and ridiculous fakeness to the very heavens’.

EC: What strikes me, the more I think about The Passion, is that it’s as if Gibson is wanting you to reflect on the perpetrators of the violence and their sadism rather than the victim. It’d be interesting to ask that of the other Gibson films, whether our attention is drawn to the perpetrators. It seems to me, after seeing the violence perpetrated on Jesus, that after an hour it had no impact. Jesus became simply a cipher of abuse. We are completely desensitized and our focus is on the sadism, the pleasure, the voyeurism.

JK: That’s Gibson’s gaze.

TA: What I want to say is that when you compare the violence inflicted on individual people in the last 160 or so years, who can say that the comparatively short suffering Jesus underwent is comparable. There are stories from many situations that show awful long-term suffering compared to Jesus’s last 24 hours. I think that, perhaps unconsciously, the film-makers wanted to make the violence comparable to the deliberate, sadistic and sustained violence that millions of people suffered during the twentieth century.

RP: There are theological reasons for the death of Jesus and there are the actual mechanics of the death. The film does try to give theological reasons. What it fails to do is convincingly portray the mechanics of his death in a historically accurate manner. Nobody could have that done to them and then stand up and ask for more, and that’s what led me to read the film as iconic rather than realistic. If it was intended to be iconic, then it takes us into the kind of mentality that asks how many stripes you would have to have in order for the world to be healed.

WRT: When Isaiah 53 says ‘by his stripes we are healed,’ then the more stripes the better, and the more healed we are going to be!

RP: The violence is also tied to his literal understanding of Anselm and penance. It is almost as though he believes that one stroke of the whip would be ten sins, therefore, dying for the sins of the world would mean so much pain. Stroke after stroke of the whip.

WRT: Anselm belongs to the early medieval world and Gibson presents us, in fact, with a medieval Christ. The film has a fascination for medieval passion iconography and theology. We are back in the period of the Black Death where whole populations were decimated and people saw in the suffering Christ a figure to whom they could relate. Traditional passion/ atonement theology became enshrined in Catholic doctrine, and Mel Gibson taps into this whole medieval world-view.8

PF: Medieval? Maybe, but is it a film for our times? There is the uncomfortable parallel of the stories of the torturing of Iraqi prisoners during the film’s theatrical release. A priest from London told me of a group of Pakistani Christians in his parish who had suffered a great deal of violence in Pakistan, who felt that the film showed Jesus suffering like them, with them even. We live in violent times and this is a violent film.

TA: I think you have to take on board the fact that there are large parts of the world where people won’t find this quite so astonishing and awfully violent as we do.

MW: The film is highly resonant. It speaks to (certain) American audiences with their post-September nth sense of embattlement — physically (war, terrorism) and spiritually (some see conflict with terrorism as a religious war). Conservative Christianity also feels itself to be under 'attack’ from liberalism. Gibson’s film offers a muscular Jesus who is also embattled but wins through. The final scene reminded me of The Terminator. It promises much for the audience in terms of confrontation leading to victory.

9. Authenticity

PF: Gibson’s and Benedict Fitzgerald’s text, although delivered in Latin and Aramaic, is a compilation from all four Gospels as have been nearly all the screenplays of Jesus biopics. Its claim to authenticity is, of course, complete nonsense. Gibson’s film is pre-critical, taking no account of modern biblical scholarship. George Stevens in the 1960s went to great pains to use biblical scholarship to emphasize that the Jews were not to blame for the death of Jesus. Zeffirelli, Scorsese, Pasolini and Nicholas Ray all used mainstream biblical scholars in an effort to ‘get it right’ and to offend nobody. Even DeMille and D. W. Griffith in the silent era posted footnotes in their captions to give historical and theological insight. Gibson eschews all this and that in itself is a theological choice. For Gibson, the Gospel account and Catholic tradition is more authentic than any historical knowledge about Pilate, for instance, or about the trial process in Roman Palestine. He takes little or no account of what archaeology now tells us about the manner of crucifixion. All of this is Gibson’s deliberate choice. Nothing is really authentic, not the violence, nor, indeed, the dead languages.

WRT: Romans in Roman Judaea would not have spoken Latin. They would have spoken Greek and there is some historical evidence that Jesus too may possibly have spoken Greek. Once you start using the original biblical languages in a Jesus film, then you make yourself a hostage to foreign fortune because then the scholar in the audience notes that Pilate, for example, is speaking Aramaic to the Jewish authorities - and one wonders if the historical Pilate would have had a command of Aramaic! Jesus speaks Aramaic to his disciples but he then moves into Latin with Pilate. From a historical point of view, it doesn’t smack of reality at all.

TA: If you have done 12 years of research (as Gibson claims), you may have been expected to get that right.

EC: The authenticity of the language doesn’t matter for what Gibson is trying to achieve. This is an element of the film that really worked for me. It makes strange something that is familiar to us. I thought it successfully achieved that and it made the phrases that we hear so much in Christ films in English, new and fresh. It gave us that sense of encountering an ancient culture.

WRT: I agree with you, if Gibson’s purpose was an aesthetic one of that kind, but in fact that’s not what he claimed. Gibson makes the claim that everything you see on screen is taken from the Gospels and is, therefore, historically true. Any biblical scholar would dispute that claim. First of all, even if something is in the Gospels, it may not necessarily be historically true. You have to look, moreover, at the question of authenticity from different angles. You have to look, for example, at whether the film presents a genuine historical context and explains that context to the viewer. The film lacked, in my view, a proper political and religious context for the presentation of its material. The one area where Gibson could have done this was in the flashbacks, but instead of using the flashbacks to convey an overall historical context you get intra-New Testament Gospel passages conveying all the regular things: the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the Last Supper, etc. The treatment of Pilate jarred with the kind of presentation of Pilate we find in Josephus. There is no attempt by Gibson to address the problems highlighted by biblical scholarship with regard to the trial narratives and the evangelists’ historical depiction of contemporary Jewish legal procedures. In the crucifixion scene, there is no attempt at historical reconstruction. Gibson has nails through the victim’s hands rather than his wrists, shows Jesus on a high cross and the two malefactors on lower crosses, etc. and so privileges traditional Christian iconography over historical authenticity.

TA: I think that, in all of these senses, it’s inauthentic and it has some other really crazy things in it as well. I mean the Roman soldiers. They beat Jesus all the way up the Via Dolorosa. You know they’ve seen crucifixions before. Don’t they want to get the job over and get back to barracks and get on with playing cards and whatever? It seemed to me that there was absolutely no reason for what they were doing there except that, as I’ve indicated, Gibson wants to show all of us being responsible for Jesus’s death.

WRT: One further thing about authenticity. Mel Gibson uses post-biblical traditions: the tradition of Veronica, the tradition of the good and bad thieves, the stations of the cross, the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary. But in addition, a major part of the film and the ostensibly invented scenes are drawn from the mystic visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich’s The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ.9

PF: It is from Emmerich’s visions that much of Gibson’s material about the agony in Gethsemane, the scourging, the crucifixion, the farewell to the Virgin Mary, Pilate’s crisis of conscience all come.

WRT: This introduces a whole new dimension to this film that’s never appeared in any other Jesus film. Gibson seems to be making the claim that one of his historical sources is this late eighteenth/early nineteenthcentury German Catholic visionary, thereby presupposing that visionary experiences are giving us historical knowledge about Jesus’s life. It is an approach that obviously has to be questioned.

PF: Just before we finish this section, I would like to say that I don’t think the screenplay and the actors help us feel that it is authentic or real in any sense. There is no characterization.

TA: The actors do not play characters, they all play icons. They don’t behave anything like people. Jesus is not given a chance to behave anything like a person except in an odd little moment, Mary is an icon of suffering and love, Caiaphas is an icon of utter filthiness, the soldiers are icons of sadism. And I’m afraid Pilate is an icon of a decent, liberal man, trapped in an awkward situation.

EC: All of them are limited by flat characterization. The women cannot be developed as characters because they are not in a dialectical relationship with Jesus. This is what makes them come alive in the Gospels, Jesus speaking with them and transgressing social barriers. There is no opportunity for that in the film. You'just see them again almost objectively because they are not in a relationship with Jesus, so it’s very difficult to talk about any of these characters because we do not know them.

PF: What about constructions of masculinity and femininity in the film?

WRT: Mary is one of those characters who is ‘knowing’, who recognizes what is really going on behind the scenes and who suffers along with the central character. There’s this tremendous empathy, and when you look at the other women, they are all presented in the same way; they lament, they weep, they show anguish. The women are the ones who encourage Simon of Cyrene to come to Jesus’s assistance. They are constantly present as a group offering succour. In some ways, that’s a fairly stereotypical construction of femininity in Jesus films. They also look like nuns.

TA: The men are almost without exception sadists, creeps and conspirators.

WRT: Well, we see them through Catholic eyes. We see Pilate’s wife, for example, not simply through Matthew’s eyes (the only Gospel in which she appears, although she remains unnamed). We see her through the lens of Catholic tradition where she has been turned into a prototypical Christian. Gibson gives her a name, Claudia Procles, a version of her name in the Roman calendar of saints. Like Mary, we see her as a comforter who is prayerfully watching and concerned, and we see her bringing Mary the scarf to mop up Jesus’s blood. All of this is part and parcel of this whole characterization of the woman (in the Jesus film) as the saintly figure.

RP: The women exude a kind of empathy, it is often quite moving, like a traditional Renaissance painting.

EC: But we do not learn anything about them.

WRT: There were also some male characters that had more characterization; for example, Abenader, the commanding officer. One senses that he has some sympathy for Jesus. He’s the one who stops the soldiers from exceeding orders. And Pilate, too, is depicted as a questioning individual, reflecting upon his actions, and concerned about his moral responsibility. Historically, in fact, we learn from Josephus that he was a brutal tyrant.

PF: But Gibson prefers Emmerich to Josephus, visionary imagining to historical scholarship.

WRT: If we are looking for other characters that run counter to the predominantly hard, harsh, and brutal construction of masculinity in the film, then there is the black figure at the court of Herod who is presented, like the women, as a ‘knowing’ character. He comprehends the theology of suffering here and the heroic victim who is subject to it.

RP: And again it’s because he’s black isn’t it? He, like the women, understands what suffering is.

PF: But it is so fleeting as to be tokenistic.

TA: Smacks of a brainstorming session to me.

10. Antisemitism/Anti-Judaism/Homophobia

MW: The film is clearly supersessionist. However, it is hard to see how one would make a dramatically compelling Jesus film, recognizable to popular audiences, that avoids this pitfall. But as we consider the charge of antisemitism, it is important to distinguish anti-Judaism from antisemitism. Both are offensive to Jews and to some non-Jews who work in inter-faith relations and who believe that Judaism can be a valid means to a relationship with God. Conflating the two is unhelpful generally and especially in relation to this film. Teasing them apart helps us to understand the reception of the film. Antisemitism is defined to mean negative prejudice against Jews grounded in incorrect identification of Jews as a race, a genetically distinct group.

PF: Is the film antisemitic?

MW: Antisemitism does not motivate Gibson’s film. However, the film does project a racialized Jewish identity. It also plays on themes in modern antisemitic discourse. We first see the priests discussing money: modern anti-Jewish prejudice is inserted into the story of Christian beginnings.

For the most part, the film approach coheres with the once mainstream Christian anti-Judaism. It certainly contains within it the potential to feed the ‘teaching of contempt’ and retains the Gospels’ move to attribute more blame to the Jews than the Romans for the death of Christ. It offers a sympathetic portrait of Pilate.

EC: Our focus is on violence as applied by Jews and soldiers. In contrast Pilate is always shot in white, with this kind of aura of sensibility and peace (Feng Shui almost). The Jews are shot, particularly at night, in this pale, sickly amber light. The most disturbing thing is the none too subtle association of sadism and voyeuristic violence with Jewish spectators.

TA: That relates very much to the treatment of Caiaphas, which is extremely implausible. Gibson has him present at the crucifixion, which wouldn’t have happened. He’s present at the trial before Herod, which wouldn’t have happened. He demands freedom for Barabbas, which wouldn’t have happened. He witnesses the scourging, he starts the yell of ‘crucify’ - all of this is nonsense. What is happening here is not mob rule, but the boss man, Caiaphas, making it official policy.

WRT: Yes, that’s right. Caiaphas is even present at the foot of the cross in Gibson’s film. It’s only in John’s Gospel that we have someone present at the foot of the cross and that’s the mother of Jesus together with the beloved disciple.

PF: There’s a very interesting difference from the biblical account. ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do’ is said in the Gospel of Luke to the soldiers. In the film it appears to be said to Caiaphas.

WRT: It’s highlighted by the thief, who then repeats it for the sake of the audience, saying to Caiaphas at the foot of the cross, ‘He is praying for you.’

PF: It is a hugely irresponsible time to paint the Jews in such unpleasant tones because it will play very well in some parts of the world.

RP: I didn’t feel it was antisemitic or anti-Jewish when I first watched it. It does present a clear-cut distinction between goodies and baddies, but some of the goodies are Jews.

PF: I’m not sure the goodies are Jews, I think the goodies are Catholics and nuns.

EC: My concerns about the film aren’t that people will go out to inflict violence on Jews or burn synagogues but that it will subtly influence how people think about Judaism and how they approach the Gospel text. The film does reinforce a way of thinking and an approach that is closed. I don’t think that the one-dimensional presentation has raised as much concern as it should.

WRT: The fact that a film presents Christian propaganda in this biased one-dimensional way should worry all of us, shouldn’t it? What you get is a sustained negative portrayal of Jews and Jewish leaders. This comes out in the absence of the kind of devices that other directors have used to mitigate this effect. For example, if you want to humanize the Jewish authorities, you put in dissenting voices. I noted only a very few dissenting voices on the Jewish side within the film. You get some leaders, for example, averting their eyes when Jesus is flogged and in the trial scene you get someone pointing out the illegality of the proceedings. What you do not get (as you got, for example, in Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth) is an intelligent and plausible apologetic coming from the dissenters, explaining their position so that the audience is presented with the other side.

EC: There was a very interesting moment of historical authenticity when the Sanhedrin meets at night and one of the objectors highlights the illegality of the meeting. I thought: this will be interesting; Gibson’s actually making an attempt to engage with authenticity. Then it becomes apparent that the only reason he is doing it is to exaggerate the group’s resistance to that allegation, so it makes their barbarism even clearer.

1 think it might have been Gibson’s naivety and that it was not intentionally anti-Jewish or antisemitic. It is mainly due to very poor storytelling. It could also account for the failure to flesh out the characters or present their views. The only possible exceptions are Pilate and the visual representation of the Jews. Pilate is given two distinct extra-biblical scenes to establish his reasonableness and his inner struggle, which is only vaguely hinted at in the Gospels, if at all. Compare the visual and narrative representation of the Jews with extra scenes devoted to demonstrating their hatred.

WRT: Gibson says that he’s not an antisemite. He claims that he has presented a film in which we should recognize that we are all more or less equally to blame for Christ’s death. My point of view would be that if you are going to present that kind of theology, then you use your artistry to work it into the film. When I’ve seen defences on the part of Gibson and his crew against the charge of antisemitism, three things are pointed out: one, they removed the subtitle for ‘his blood be upon us and our children’. Two, when the nails are put into Jesus’ hands, the first nail is hammered in by Mel Gibson himself. Three, Maia Morgenstern, who plays Mary, mother of Jesus, has Jewish roots. It is a terribly flimsy defence, since it depends, among other things, on the audience’s extrinsic knowledge of these facts! You need something much more powerful in a film than what is being presented here if you are going to present a theology of universal responsibility.

MW: There’s a racializing discourse at play here: Morgenstern’s Jewish family become important in the marketing; Caviezel is given a prosthetic nose. The foregrounding of certain casting details in the film’s publicity suggests a racializing construction of Jewish identity.

PF: And that would be classed as antisemitic presumably.

To change tack (or at least prejudices), what about the criticism of the film as homophobic? The criticism centres around the androgynous devil figure.

EC: Gibson said in an interview that ‘His face is symmetric and beautiful in a certain sense, but not completely, and then we shot her almost in slow motion so you don’t see her blink. We dubbed in a man’s voice, even though the actor was a woman. That’s what evil was about, taking something that’s good and twisting it a little bit.’

PF: That’s the way many conservative evangelicals and traditionalist Catholics would describe homosexuality.

EC: Yes, I agree.

11. The Purpose of The Film: Theology and Pedagogy

WRT: The pedagogical purpose of the film is reinforced by his statement that he’s going to try to release it every year at Easter time.

PF: I do think he believes that he is presenting the Truth. Of course, for us, it is one-dimensional propaganda; but for him, it is the Truth. We might applaud his courage in putting theology on the screen, his attempt to dramatize the atonement. We all seem to recognize that the film has a more serious theological intent than all the other reverential retellings of the Gospel story, but we dislike his theology. The film is out there on release and we are free to debate it.

EC: The key to the problem that we are having with the film is that Christian theology, as we understand it, is aware it is doing theology. Gibson doesn’t seem to have been aware that he’s doing theology.

PF: His theology is powerful stuff. He is quite deliberately going back to a time before critical theology started to undermine the tradition and suggest diverse theologies and alternate readings. Gibson’s is a pre-critical theology, isn’t it? It is as though Vatican II and twentieth-century critical insights have vanished. I’m struck that two people have come to my study after watching the film and talked to me about the film. They hadn’t been aware of the depth of their sin and hadn’t realized that they had done all of that to Christ by their sin. They felt their sin had flayed Christ’s flesh and nailed him to the cross. They felt personally responsible. It strikes me that it’s deliberate and that was exactly the reaction Gibson wanted. It is an evangelical tool with traditional Catholic trappings and copious eucharistic references. The whole film is shot through with a Tridentine, sacrificial understanding of the Mass. The film appeals not only to those who have a very clear substitutionary atonement theology but also to those who have a pre-Vatican II understanding of the Mass.

12. The Purpose of The Film: Making Money

PF: It is a distinct possibility that what this film is doing is simply trying to make money. There is money to be made in producing a Jesus biopic. Gibson for instance has shrewdly played to American traditional Catholics (25% of US Christians are Catholic) and American evangelicals (60%).

At the time of writing, this film is the twenty-fourth most popular film of all time. No other recent mainstream film has had so many column inches devoted to it.

MW: The film has become an event in the USA. One in ten have seen the film. In April, I discussed the film with a range of Catholic, Protestant and Historic Peace Church members across Ohio and Indiana. For many, viewing the film was a marker of Christian identity. I suspect this may have been the case in some UK Christian churches too, but things tend to play out in more muted ways here.

WRT: Mel Gibson has found a very important audience. We have to consider the fact that there are 159 million Christians in America. His film, untainted by biblical criticism, particularly appeals to an audience of evangelical Christians in America. They have been given a film that does not come with all the cynicism of the Hollywood production machine. It’s a film for them, and allied with this group is the smaller but nevertheless influential group of pre-Vatican II Catholic traditionalists. These two markets are symbolized in the two great referees for it. Billy Graham on the one hand has come out and said that at the screening he wept. He said that here in this film is a lifetime of sermons in one movie. And then at the same time you have the Pope, claiming initially that this film was authentic.

PF: ‘It is as it was.’ The apparent papal endorsement, which was later denied, although it had already been widely used in interviews and publicity.

I think we are being naive. The film comes with a very shrewd Hollywood marketing strategy. Like George Stevens before him, Gibson’s film was flagged up as a very personal project, something he felt he had to do. Both men had to invest their own capital in their projects. It is quite possible that Stevens’ and Gibson’s much vaunted costly commitment to their projects is PR spin to show their religious and spiritual commitment and, of course, their sincerity.

TA: I think it was a personal project. He made it for himself and people like him. It does seem to be the case that he was going to make the film come what may. Peter Malone, who thinks far better of the film than I do, says it’s a religious home movie. This is the equivalent in a way of the Passion play, of the thing that happens in certain Italian villages on Good Friday night. Everybody gets together and they make a procession with icons and statues and so on, which gives the essence of what they think of as a Christian faith. Often, in those circumstances, it’s full of semi-pagan influences, just as Gibson’s is full of Hollywood influences.

EC: I found this statement from Icon’s press release of the film, 2003: ‘The partnership combines the expertise of Icon, the company formed by Mel Gibson, and Bruce Deady, which has launched a grassroots, faithbased marketing effort.’

PF: The effort was a phenomenal success.

WRT: Film is a medium that should be respectful of its audience. This is a film that is disrespectful to its Jewish audience, that is disrespectful to its secular audience - because it doesn’t allow us to identify with any secular perspective - and that is also disrespectful to its mainstream Christian audience because it addresses the kind of concerns and theological perspectives of conservative evangelicals and traditionalist Catholics.

EC: It’s the degree to which it is propaganda without the film-maker being aware of it that is disturbing to me. Watching Triumph of the Will recently I was reminded that Leni Riefenstahl, to her dying day, claimed it was a historical depiction of events ‘as they were’, when in fact it is a highly rhetorical, ideologically driven Nazi propaganda film that conveys a very unpleasant ideology. The same kind of historiographical naivety plagues Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ.

Notes

1. Richard Corliss, ‘The Goriest Story Ever Told’, Time (i March 2004), p. 68.

2. D. Van Biema, ‘Why Did Jesus Die?’, Time (12 April 2004), pp. 48-55.

3. Gustav Aulen, Christus Victor, London: SPCK, 1931.

4. Rev. 21.5; cf. Isa. 43.19.

5. Intolerance (D. W. Griffith, 1916), King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, 1927), King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961J, Greatest Story Ever Told (George Stevens, 1965), Gospel according to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1966), Jesus of Nazareth (Franco Zeffirelli, 1977), Jesus Christ Superstar (Norman Jewison, 1973), Godspell (David Greene, 1973), Gospel of John (Philip Saville, 2004k

6. Celui Qui Doit Mourir (Jules Dassin, 1956), Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Terry Jones, 1979), Je Vous Salue Marie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1985), Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988), Jesus of Montreal (Denys Arcand, 1989).

7. Peter Bradshaw, ‘Review of The Passion of The Christ’, The Guardian (26 March 2004). See http://film.guardian.co.uk/

8. See D. Van Biema, ‘Why It’s So Bloody’, Time (1 March 2004), p. 70.

9. Anne Catherine Emmerich, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1923.

chapter,8 and additional reading in the bibliography at the end of the book.

Clint Eastwood has directed. Westerns have an operatic and mythic

The Promised Land

Geographical setting is interesting. Ever since Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 lecture on The Significance of the Frontier in American History5 the west has always been portrayed in contrast to the urbanized east, the wilderness vs. civilization. The east is stifling - a place of unemployment, poverty, humanity enslaved by machines, skyscrapers where people are literally piled on top of each other. The west, on the other hand, conjures up visions of wide-open spaces, promises of hopes fulfilled and the freedom to make a new life. The west is a wide, open country, the big country where there is a freedom to become one’s true self. ‘Phrases like “Far West”, “El Dorado”, “Big Sky Country” or “Virgin Land” all resonate with semantic excess, imposing on that terrain the blankness of an uninscribed page, implying a freedom to alter it at will.’6 In film it doesn’t really matter if these huge landscapes are in Australia, New Jersey, Paraguay, Spain or Italy (and all have been used as the backdrop for Westerns), the wide-open spaces are the west.

trilogy’ of Spaghetti Westerns, For a Few Dollars More (1965).4 In it Clint Eastwood plays a bounty hunter with no name, whom I will refer to as

‘the Man’.5 Leone’s anti-hero goes to collect a criminal that he has heard resides in the town of White Rocks - for bounty. This is the Man’s first appearance in the film and it is preceded only by two establishing sequences for the film’s other anti-hero, Colonel Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), and the film’s intriguing pre-credit sequence in which a rider is shot off his horse from a distance, seemingly without reason.

source dealing with the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread.4 There is no space to outline the main features of the ritual, but you might care to consult Text Box 17.1 in which I have included a brief section

before the Sabbath in order to set it apart, or a Chaburah meal, a fellowship meal? That these questions arise at all stems from a discrepancy in the accounts given respectively by the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John.

Third, what were the original words of Jesus at that meal? The precise wording of the accounts differs, suggesting that in early Christian practice there were at least two streams of tradition in connection with the words of institution. The first is represented by Mark and followed by Matthew, the second by Paul and Luke.7 While Mark/Matthew, for example, have ‘This is my body’, Luke has ‘This is my body, which is given for you’ and Paul ‘This is my body, which is for you’ (Some MSS have ‘broken’ or ‘crushed’ or ‘given’ or ‘which I have delivered for you’). Where the cup is concerned, Mark has ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many’ and Matthew ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many, for the forgiveness of sins.’ Luke, on the other hand has ‘This cup, which is poured out for you, is the new covenant in my blood’ and Paul, likewise, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood’.

Luke’s text of the words of institution has come down to us, moreover, in two forms, a longer and a shorter text (Lk. 22.ij-ipa/iz. 15-20). Some authorities, in other words, in whole or in part, omit Luke 22.i9b-2o: ‘[“This is my body] which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me”. And likewise the cup after supper, saying, “This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood”.’ Furthermore, the words, ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ appear in Luke once (in the longer text) and in Paul twice, but not in Matthew and Mark.

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Unattributed articles

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‘Joan of Arc. Celebrations in France’, The Times, 27 April 1929, 13-14.

‘Joan of Arc. Celebrations at Chinon’, The Times, 29 April 1929, 14.

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Appendix i

Religion, Theology and the Bible in
Recent Films (1993-2004)

The cinema has recently presented us with a very rich harvest of films that engage to a greater or lesser extent with religion, theology and the Bible, or which offer scope for religious, biblical, or theological study. The list below is based on an exploration of such films that William Telford presented in a paper at the second St Deiniol’s Theology and Film conference (16-18 April 1999) and that was subsequently published in a popular form as an article, ‘Religion, the Bible and Theology in Recent Films (1993-99)’, Epworth Review, 27 (2000): 31-40. The original list (arranged chronologically) contained some 134 films up until 1999, but this has now been updated to December, 2004.

The paper/article subdivided the films into seven categories, reflecting everything from a slight to a major degree of engagement with religion, theology or the Bible. The reader is referred to the article for details. In brief, attention was drawn to the following:

1. At the most basic level, the number of recent films which have made use of a religious, biblical or theological theme or motif in their titles, or as a ‘macguffin’;

2. The interest in or use made either of the supernatural or the occult, or of myths or stories drawn from religion in general or the Bible in particular;

3. The way in which a number of recent films have used religion as the background, setting or social context for their stories (whether Buddhism, Sufism, Judaism, Islam or Christianity);

4. Their use of religion or the Bible for character definition (Bible-quoting characters, religious characters in general, clergy/holy men);

5. The number and nature of those films which borrow or present treatments, directly or indirectly, of religious or biblical figures (David and Goliath, Moses, Christ-figures, God, the Devil, angels) or which offer imaginative representations of familiar religious or biblical ‘locations’ like heaven and hell;

6. Their use of religion as a focus for a character’s ‘journey’, development or personal growth (e.g. by means of a conversion, or some kind of transformative encounter or experience);

7. The many films which engage with or otherwise treat religious, biblical or theological themes or concerns, or those which address moral issues or values (e.g. creation, human nature, good and evil, innocence, love, sin, hypocrisy, repentance, confession, forgiveness, acceptance, regeneration, transcendence, suffering, sacrifice, redemption, damnation, death, grief, the afterlife, apocalyptic, etc).

Fearless (Peter Weir, 1993)

In the Name of the Father (Jim

Sheridan, 1993)

In welter Feme, so nah! (Faraway, So

Close) (Wim Wenders, 1993)

Little Buddha (Bernardo Bertolucci,

1993)

My Life (Bruce Joel Rubin, 1993)

Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993)

Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg,

1993)

Shadowlands (Richard Attenborough,

1993)

Tombstone (George P. Cosmatos, 1993)

Butterfly Kiss (Michael Winterbottom,

1994)

Death and the Maiden (Roman

Polanski, 1994)

Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis,

1994)

Holy Matrimony (Leonard Nemoy,

1994)

Interview with a Vampire. The

Vampire Chronicles (Neil Jordan,

1994)

Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone,

1994)

Nell (Michael Apted, 1994)

Priest (Antonia Bird, 1994)

Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino,

1994)

Sirens (John Duigan, 1994)

Stargate (Roland Emmerich, 1994)

The Addiction (Abel Ferrara, 1994) The Client (Joel Schumacher, 1994)

The Shawshank Redemption (Frank

Darabont, 1994)

Tom and Viv (Brian Gilbert, 1994)

Angels (William Dear, 1995)

Antonia’s Line (Marleen Gorris,

1995)

Big Night (Stanley Tucci, Campbell

Scott, 1995)

Casino (Martin Scorsese, 1995)

Dead Man Walking (Tim Robbins,

1995)

Eye for an Eye (John Schlesinger,

1995)

La Haine (Matthieu Kassovitz, 1995)

Land and Freedom (Ken Loach, 1995)

Leaving Las Vegas (Mike Figgis,

1995)

Moonlight and Valentino (David

Anspaugh, 1995)

Mr Holland’s Opus (Stephen Herek,

1995)

Nixon (Oliver Stone, 1995)

Secrets and Lies (Mike Leigh, 1995)

Seven (David Fincher, 1995)

Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995)

The Brothers McMullen (Edward

Burns, 1995)

The Confessional (Robert Lepage,

1995)

The Crossing Guard (Sean Penn,

1995)

The Last Supper (Cynthia Roberts, 1995)

The Last Supper (Stacy Title, 1995)

The Neon Bible (Terence Davies, 1995)

The Scarlett Letter (Roland Joffe, 1995)

Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (Gary Fleder, 1995)

A Time to Kill (Joel Schumacher, 1996)

Before and After (Barbet Schroeder,

1996)

Box of Moon Light (Tom DiCillo,

1996)

Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier,

1996)

Carla’s Song (Ken Loach, 1996)

Entertaining Angels The Dorothy Day Story (Michael Ray Rhodes, 1996)

Ghosts from the Past (Rob Reiner,

1996)

In Love and War (Richard Attenborough, 1996)

Kissed (Lynn Stopkewich, 1996)

Kolya (Jan Sverak, 1996)

La Vie de Jesus/The Life of Jesus

(Bruno Dumont, 1996)

Mary Reilly (Stephen Frears, 1996) Michael (Nora Ephron, 1996) Phenomenon (Jon Turteltaub, 1996) Ponette (Jacques Doillon, 1996)

Shine (Scott Hicks, 1996)

Sleepers (Barry Levinson, 1996)

Some Mother’s Son (Terry George,

1996)

The Crucible (Nicholas Hytner, 1996) The Day of the Beast/El dia de la bestia (Alex de la Iglesia, 1996)

The Funeral (Abel Ferrara, 1996) The Myth of Fingerprints (Bart

Freundlich, 1996)

The People vs. Larry Flynt (Milos Forman, 1996)

The Preacher’s Wife (Penny Marshall,

1996)

The Winter Guest (Alan Rickman,

1996)

Touch (Paul Schrader, 1996)

A Life Less Ordinary (Danny Boyle,

1997)

A Price above Rubies (Boaz Yakin,

1997)

Affliction (Paul Schrader, 1997)

Alien Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jcunet,

1997)

Amistad (Steven Spielberg, 1997) Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997)

Devil’s Advocate (Taylor Hackford,

1997)

Fairytale A True Story (Charles

Sturridge, 1997)

Going All the Way (Mark Pellington,

1997)

Heart (Charles McDougall, 1997)

Kundun (Martin Scorsese, 1997)

L’Arche du desert (Mohamed

Chouikh, 1997)

Lawn Dogs (John Duigan, 1997)

Life is Beautiful/La vita e bella

(Roberto Benigni, 1997)

Monk Dawson (Tom Waller, 1997)

Mother and Son/Mat I syn/Mutter und

Sohn (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1997)

Mrs Brown (John Madden, 1997)

Oscar and Lucinda (Gillian

Armstrong, 1997)

Paradise Road (Bruce Beresford,

1997)

it (Darren Aronofsky, 1997)

Photographing Fairies (Nick Willing,

1997)

Regeneration (Gillies MacKinnon,

1997)

Savior (Peter Antonijevic, 1997)

Seven Years in Tibet (Jean-Jacques

Annaud, 1997)

Something to Believe In (John Hough,

1997)

The Apostle (Robert Duvall, 1997)

The Blackout (Abel Ferrara, 1997)

The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, 1997)

The Fifth Element/La Cinquiem

Element (Luc Besson, 1997)

The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo,

1997)

The Game (David Fincher, 1997)

The Governess (Sandra Goldbacher, 1997)

The Kingdom [series II]/Riget II (Lars

von Trier, 1997)

The Peacemaker (Mimi Leder, 1997)

The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan,

1997)

Turbulence (Robert Butler, 1997)

Under the Skin (Carine Adler, 1997)

A Civil Action (Steven Zaillian,

1998)

After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1998) Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998) Beloved (Jonathan Demme, 1998) Blast from the Past (Hugh Wilson,

1998)

Central Station (Walter Salles, 1998) City of Angels (Brad Silberling, 1998) Deep Impact (Mimi Leder, 1998)

Eternity and a Day (Theo

Angelopoulos, 1998)

Fallen (Gregory Hoblit, 1998)

Hands/Ladoni (Artur Aristakisyan,

1998)

Hideous Kinky (Gillies MacKinnon,

1998)

Holy Man (Stephen Herek, 1998)

Jack Frost (Troy Miller, 1998)

Les Miserables (Bille August, 1998)

Love is the Devil (John Maybury,

1998)

Meet Joe Black (Martin Brest, 1998) Mercury Rising (Harold Becker, 1998) My Name is Joe (Ken Loach, 1998) Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998) Pourquoi pas Moi? (Stephanie Giusti,

1998)

Prometheus (Tony Harrison, 1998)

Simon Birch (Mark Stephen Johnson,

1998)

Solomon and Gaenor (Paul Morrison,

1998)

Stepmom (Chris Columbus, 1998)

The Acid House (Paul McGuigan,

1998)

The Horse Whisperer (Robert Redford, 1998)

The Loss of Sexual Innocence (Mike Figgis, 1998)

The Prince of Egypt (Brenda Chapman, Steven Hickner, Simon Wells, 1998)

The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick,

1998)

The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) What Dreams May Come (Vincent

Ward, 1998)

Bicentennial Man (Chris Columbus,

1999)

Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Peirce,

1999)

Bringing Out the Dead (Martin Scorsese, 1999)

Broken Vessels (Scott Ziehl, 1999)

Dogma (Kevin Smith, 1999)

El Mar (Agusti Villaronga, 1999) End of Days (Peter Hyams, 1999) Holy Smoke (Jane Campion, 1999) Joan of Arc (Luc Besson, 1999) Kadosh (Amos Gitai, 1999) Liberty Heights (Barry Levinson,

1999)

Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson,

1999)

Play It to the Bone (Ron Shelton,

1999)

Sacred Flesh (Nigel Wingrove, 1999) Simon Magus (Ben Hopkins, 1999) Star Wars Episode I The Phantom

Menace (George Lucas, 1999) Stigmata (Rupert Wainwright, 1999) Sunshine (Istvan Szabo, 1999) The Big Kahuna (John Swanbeck,

1999)

The Cup (Kyentse Norbu, 1999)

The Darkest Light (Simon Beaufoy and Bille Eltringham, 1999)

The End of the Affair (Neil Jordan,

1999)

The Green Mile (Frank Darabont,

1999)

The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999)

The Miracle Maker (Derek Hayes,

1999)

The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz (Ben Hopkins, 1999)

The Ninth Gate (Roman Polanski,

1999)

Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999)

Apocalypse Now Redux (Francis Ford

Coppola, 2000)

Bedazzled (Harold Ramis, 2000) Bless the Child (Chuck Russell, 2000) Cast Away (Robert Zemeckis, 2000) Chocolat (Lasse Hallstrom, 2000) Divided We Fall (Jan Hrebejk, 2000) Dracula 2001 (Patrick Lussier, 2000) Finding Forrester (Gus Van Sant,

2000)

Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)

Keeping the Faith (Edward Norton,

2000)

Liam (Stephen Frears, 2000)

Little Nicky (Steven Brill, 2000)

Lost Souls (Janusz Kaminski, 2000) O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel

Coen, 2000)

Offending Angels (Andrew Rajan,

2000)

Original Sin (Michael Cristofer, 2000) Pay It Forward (Mimi Leder, 2000) Songs from the Second Floor (Roy

Andersson, 2000)

The Body (Jonas McCord, 2000)

The House of Mirth (Terence Davies,

2000)

The Man Who Cried (Sally Potter,

2000)

The Pledge (Sean Penn, 2000)

Time of Favor (Joseph Cedar, 2000) Unbreakable (M. Knight Shyamalan,

2000)

Under the Sand (Francois Ozon,

2000)

Very Annie-Mary (Sara Sugarman,

2000)

What Women Want (Nancy Meyers,

2000)

40 Days and 40 Nights (Michael Lehmann, 2001)

A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard,

2001)

A.L Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)

Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)

Ash Wednesday (Edward Burns,

2001)

Asoka (Santosh Sivan, 2001)

Brotherhood of the Wolf (Christophe Gans, 2001)

Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001) Dust (Milcho Manchevski, 2001) Hannibal (Ridley Scott, 2001) Heaven (Tom Tykwer, 2001) Kandahar (Mohsen Makhmalbaf,

2001)

K-PAX (Iain Softley, 2001)

Late Marriage (Dover Kosashivili,

2001)

Monster’s Ball (Marc Forster, 2001) Revelation (Stuart Urban, 2001) The Believer (Henry Bean, 2001) The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del

Toro, 2001)

The Last Castle (Rod Lurie, 2001)

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001)

The Man Who Sued God (Mark Joffe,

2001)

The Others (Alejandro Amenabar,

2001)

The Son’s Room (Nanni Moretti,

2001)

Twenty-Four Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom, 2001)

What Time is It There? (Tsai Ming-

Liang, 2001)

Amen (Costa-Gavras, 2002)

City of God (Fernando Meirelles,

2002)

Dragonfly (Tom Shadyac, 2002) Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes,

2002)

Northfork (Michael Polish, 2002) Road to Perdition (Sam Mendes,

2002)

Signs (M. Knight Shyamalan, 2002) Solaris (Steven Soderbergh, 2002) Star Wars Episode II Attack of the

Clones (George Lucas, 2002)

The Crime of Padre Amaro (Carlos Carrera, 2002)

The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002) The Lord of the Rings: The Two

Towers (Peter Jackson, 2002) The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan,

2002)

The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002)

The Three Marias (Aluizio Abranches,

2002)

Whale Rider (Niki Caro, 2002)

Windtalkers (John Woo, 2002)

21 Grams (Alejandro Gonzalez Iharritu, 2003)

A Thousand Months (Faouzi Bensai’di,

2003)

Bruce Almighty (Tom Shadyac,

2003)

Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003)

House of Fog and Sand (Vadim

Perelman, 2003)

Man Dancin’ (Norman Stone, 2003)

Osama (Siddiq Barmak, 2003)

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter . . . and Spring (Kim Ki-Duk, 2003)

Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines (Jonathan Mostow, 2003)

The Barbarian Invasions (Denys

Arcand, 2003)

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003)

The Matrix Reloaded (Andy and Larry

Wachowski, 2003)

The Matrix Revolutions (Andy and

Larry Wachowski, 2003)

The Missing (Ron Howard, 2003)

The Sin Eater (Brian Helgeland, 2003)

Ae Fond Kiss (Ken Loach, 2004)

Bad Education (Pedro Almodovar,

2004)

Exorcist The Beginning (Renny

Harlin, 2004)

My Summer of Love (Pawel

Pawlikowski, 2004)

Saved! (Brian Dannelly, 2004)

The Passion of the Christ (Mel

Gibson, 2004)

Appendix 2
Christ-Figures in Film

In a recent paper (as yet unpublished) for the St Deiniol’s Theology and Film conference (16-18 April, 2004), entitled ‘Searching for Jesus: Recognizing or Imagining Christ-Figures in the Movies’, William Telford reviewed the Christ-figures claimed to have been recognized in films and explored the question of what constitutes genuine ‘recognition’ and what constitutes mere ‘imagination’ in the alleged detection of such figures. Below is a filmography incorporating a list of suggested Christ-figures from recent literature. For further reading, the following will be found useful:

Baugh, L., Imaging the Divine. Jesus and Christ-Figures in Film, Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1997.

Detweiler, R., ‘Christ and the Christ Figure in American Fiction’ in M. E. Marty and D. G. Peerman (eds), New Theology No. 2, New York: Macmillan, 1965, pp. 297-316.

Fraser, P., Images of the Passion. The Sacramental Mode in Film, Trowbridge, Wilts: Flicks Books, 1998.

Hurley, N. P., ‘Cinematic Transformations of Jesus’ in J. R. May and M. S. Bird (eds), Religion in Film, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982, pp. 61-78.

Malone, P., Movie Christs and Antichrists, New York: Crossroad, 1990.

Malone, P., ‘Jesus on our Screens’ in J. R. May (ed.), New Image of Religious Film, Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1997, pp. 57-71.

Tatum, W. B., Jesus at the Movies: A Guide to the First Hundred Years, Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 1997, Appendix.

Ziolkowski, T., Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972.

Accattone (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961)

{Accattone}

Alien Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet,

1997) {Ripley}

Antonia’s Line (Marleen Gorris,

1995. {Antonia}

Au hasard, Balthazar (Robert Bresson,

1966) {Balthazar}

Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987) {Babette Hersant}

Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979)

{Chauncey Gardener/Chance}

Ben Hur (William Wyler, 1959) {Ben

Hur}

Box of Moon Light (Tom DiCillo,

1996. {the Kid}

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford

Coppola, 1992) {Vlad/Dracula}

Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995)

{Wiliam Wallace}

Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier,

1996. {Bess}

Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991) {Max Cady}

City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931) {The Tramp}

Cool-Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967) {Luke}

Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972.) {Agnes}

Dead Man Walking (Tim Robbins, 1995) {Sister Helen Prejean}

Dead Poet’s Society (Peter Weir,

1989. {John Keating}

Destination Unknown (Tay Garnett, 1933) {the Stranger}

Diary of a Country Priest (Robert

Bresson, 1950) {the Priest}

Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988) {John McClane}

Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton,

1990. {Edward Scissorhands}

The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) {John Merrick}

End of Days (Peter Hyams, 1999) {Jericho Cane}

ET-the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven

Spielberg, 1982) {E.T.}

The Face (Ingmar Bergman, 1958) {the Mesmerist}

Fearless (Peter Weir, 1993) {Max Klein}

The Fifth Element (La Cinquieme

Element) (Luc Besson, 1997) {Leeloo}

The Fugitive (John Ford, 1947) {the Priest}

The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo,

1997. {Gaz, the Robert Carlyle character}

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966) {the Clint Eastwood character}

The Green Mile (Frank Darabont, 1999) {John Coffey}

Hannibal (2001) {Hannibal Lecter}

He Who Must Die (Jules Dassin, 1956) {Manolis}

High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) {Will Kane}

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (William Dieterle, 1939) {the deformed bellringer}

Interview with a Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994) {Louis, the Brad Pitt character}

In the Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993) {Guiseppe Conlon}

Jesus of Montreal (Denys Arcand, 1989) {Daniel Colombe}

Kolya (Jan Sverak, 1996) {the child, Kolya}

La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954) {Gelsomina}

Lawn Dogs (John Duigan, 1997) {Trent Burns}

Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987) {Martin Riggs}

Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) {Frank Mackey}

Man Facing Southeast (Eliseo Subiela, 1986) {Rantes}

The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicholas

Roeg, 1976) {Newton}

The Mask of Zorro (Martin Campbell, 1998) {Zorro}

The Matrix (Andy 8c Larry

Wachowski, 1999) {Neo Anderson}

Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Terry

Jones, 1979) {Brian}

Nell (Michael Apted, 1994) {Jerry Lovell}

Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1957) {Cabiria}

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975) {Randle P. McMurphy}

On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) {Terry Malloy}

Ordet (The Word) (Carl Dreyer, 1957) {Johannes}

The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint

Eastwood, 1976) {Josey Wales}

Out of Rosenheim (Bagdad Cafe) (Percy Adlon, 1988) {Jasmin Miinchgstettner}

Pale Rider (Clint Eastwood, 1985) {Preacher}

The Passing of the Third Floor Back

(Berthold Biertel, 1935) {the

Stranger}

Patch Adams (Tom Shadyac, 1998)

{Patch Adams}

Phenomenon (John Turteltaub, 1996)

{George Malley}

Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)

{Chris}

Powder (Victor Salva, 1995)

{Jeremy Reed/Powder}

Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino,

1994) {Jules Winnfield}

Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)

{Jake La Motta}

Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven

Spielberg, 1981) {Indiana Jones}

Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976)

{Rocky Balboa}

Romero (John Duigan, 1989)

{Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo

Romero)

The Ruling Class (Peter Medak, 1972)

{Jack, 14th Earl of Gurney}

The Saint of Fort Washington (Tim

Hunter, 1994) {Matthew}

Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg,

1993) {Oskar Schindler}

Serpico (Sidney Lumet, 1973) {Frank

Serpico}

The Seventh Sign (Carl Schultz, 1988) {David}

Shane (George Stevens, 1953) {Shane}

The Shawshank Redemption (Frank

Darabont, 1994) {Andy Dufresne}

A Short Film about Love (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1988) {Tomek}

The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 2000) {Cole}

Sling Blade (Billy Bob Thornton, 1996) {Karl Childers}

Some Mother’s Son (Terry George, 1996) {Bobby Sands}

Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, i960) {Spartacus}

The Spitfire Grill (Lee David Zlotoff, 1996) {Percy Talbott}

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) {Obi- Wan Kenobi}

Strange Cargo (Frank Borzage, 1942) {Cambreau}

Superman (Richard Donner, 1978) {Clark Kent/Superman}

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) {Travis Bickle}

The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) {Truman}

The Year of Living Dangerously (Peter Weir, 1982) {Billy Kwan}

Whistle down the Wind (Bryan

Forbes, 1961) {Arthur Blakey/ The Man}

Index of Names: Actors, Authors
and Directors

Aaron, David H. 163, 166 n.44

Ahlstrom, Sydney E. 241, 251 nn.7, 8,12

Aichele, George 29,30,31,37

Allen, Woody 82,176

Alsford, M. 29, 41 n.45

Alter, Robert 199, 211 n.3, 212 n.19

Ambler, Eric 129, 130, 131, 135, 136 n.5

Anderson, Carl 230

Anderson, Wes 82

Andersson, Bibi 3 6

Aquinas, Thomas 3, 101, 104

Arendt, Hannah 263

Aristotle 66, 152

Audran, Stephane 36, 107

Augustine 169, 180 n.7

Aulen, Gustav 314, 330 n.3

Axel, Gabriel 36, 39

Babington, Bruce 30, 42 n.54, 233 n.i, 235 n.31, 279, 288 nn.27, 28, 34, 289, 301, 308 n.i, 309 nn.io, 13, 14

Bacall, Lauren 152

Bal, Mieke 239, 250 n.i

Barclay, William 274,291, 295, 306, 308 n.5

Barker, Martin 46, 47, 58, 59 nn.4, 5

Barthes, Roland 81, 147 n.2

Baugh, Lloyd 10 n.2, 31, 42 n.59, 69, 77 n.15, 181

Baxter, Anne 47,48, 50

Baxter, John 108 nn.6, 7, 8, 109 nn.22, 25, 27, 28, 29, 20, 32

Bazin, Andre 19,21,151

Bellucci, Monica 318

Bennett, Joan 160

Bennett, Rodney 126

Benz, Wolfgang 267, 287 nn.i, 2

Bergesen, A. 34,36,43 n.71,198 n.19

Bergman, Ingmar 9, 304

Bernink, Mieke 25, 35 n.8, 40 nn.16, 21, 25, 41 nn.31,32

Besserman, L. 219, 221, 233 n.2, 234 nn.13, 14, 23, 24

Blake, R.A. 28, 41 n.43

Bogart, Humphrey 151,156,158, 161

Borde, Raymond 157, 165

Bordwell, David 19, 46, 53, 58, 68, 76 n.8, 77 nn.14, 23

Bottoms, Sam 36

Boulting, John 126

Bowen, Marjorie 124

Brando, Marlon 36,111,115,

118, 121

Brentano, Clemens 6, 7

Bresson, Robert 8, 9, 28

Brettler, Marc 204, 211 n.3, 212

n.20

Bridges, Lloyd 160

358

Brown, Raymond E. 216, 233 nn.2, 5

Browne, D. 40 nn.8, 16, 19, 21, 24, 27

Browne, Nick no, 121 n.2, 122

Browning, Robert 132

Bruce, Sally Jane 257

Brynner, Yul 45, 47, 48, 51, 52, 296

Buchanan, G.W. 217, 233 n.8 Bukatman, Scott 58, 148 n.13 Bunuel, Luis 9, 94-108, 108 nn.i, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 109 nn.13, 14, 15, 17, 20, 22, 24, 26, 31, 32

Burgess, Anthony 80, 221, 306

Caan, James 111,119

Cagney, James 112

Cain, James M. 153

Callow, Simon 257-8, 264, 264 n.2, 265 nn.3, 7

Camon, Alessandro 118,122 nn.14, 15, 123 n.31

Campbell, Alexander 242, 249

Campbell, Joseph S. 192, 198 n.20

Campbell, Thomas 242,245, 249, 251 n.io

Camus, Albert 157

Capra, Frank 28,161

Carradine, John 299

Carriere, Jean-Claude 104

Carter Cash, June 243

Cartwright, Peter 244, 251 n.12, 252 nn.15-19

Castellano, Richard 119 Cavalcanti, Alberto 126 Caviezel, Jim 6,318,327 Cawelti, John 207, 212 nn.24, 34

Celentano, Rosalinda 6

Chabrol, Claude 7

Champion, Pierre 65, 67

Chandler, Raymond 153, 156, 162

Chapin, Billy 257

Chaumeton, Etienne 157

Chodorov, Jerome 130

Clark, Kenneth 103, 109 n.18

Clarke, Arthur C. 80

Clements, William M. 75, 77 n.28

Clooney, George 245

Cobb, Humphrey 79

Coen, Ethan and Joel 9, 82, 245

Cohan, Steven 49, 51, 54, 55, 58, 59 nn.i, 7, 8, 60 nn.14, T5, T8, 23, 25

Coixet, Isabel 9

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 250

Connery, Sean 227

Conrad, Joseph 36

Cook, Pam 25, 35 n.8, 40 nn.16, 21, 25, 41 nn.31, 32, 46, 53, 58, 59 n.3, 60 nn.17, 19

Cooper, Gary 183

Coppola, Francis Ford 9, 28, 36, 37, 39, no, 114, 117-21

Corliss, Richard 312, 330 n.i

Corrigan, Timothy 16, 35 n.3, 40 nn.8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 19, 27, 29, 41 n.31

Costner, Kevin 184

Cotten, Joseph 155

Cowie, Peter 121 n.i, 122 nn.n, 12, 19, 123 n.24

Cullmann, Oscar 216, 233 nn.2, 4

Cupitt, Don 167, 168, 178, 179 n.i

Currie, Finlay 221, 223, 226

Curtis, Barry 270, 271, 272, 273, 287 nn.7, 11, 14, 288 nn.18, 19, 20

Dafoe, Willem 232

Dali, Salvador 94, 107

Dante, A. 220

Davies, Margaret 267, 287 n.3

Davis, Delmer 187

Davis, T. 223, 233 n.1, 235 nn.29, 30, 32, 274, 297, 308 n.8

De Carlo, Yvonne 48

De Concini, Barbara 84, 92 n.9

De Niro, Robert in

De Palma, Brian 28

De Sica, Vittorio 98

Deacy, Christopher 31,34,42 n.61, 161, 162, 165 n.27, 179 n.3, 234 n.25

Debona, G. 30, 31, 42 n.53, 231, 233 n.i, 235 nn.28, 33, 288 n.31

Deleuze, Gilles 19, 70, 76 n.5, 77n.i7, 145, 146, 147 n.3, 148 nn.15, 17, 18

Delteil, Joseph 65,67

DeMille, Cecil B. 6, 44, 45, 47, 52-4, 55-7, 222, 225-6, 227, 274, 278-9, 280, 285, 286, 296, 2-97, 299, 3OIs 302., 306, 308, 316, 321

Denby, David 118, 119, 122 nn.21, 23, 123 n.26

Derek, John 48,300

Di Porto, Settimo 229

Diaz-Plaja, Fernando 104, 108, 109 n.19

Dick, Philip K. 139,140,143,

148 nn.n, 14

Dietrich, Marlene 158

Dika, Vera 115, 116, 122 n.13

Disney, Walt 172

Dmytryk, Edward 151

Donfreid, Karl 216, 233 nn.2, 5

Douglas, Lloyd, C. 221

Douglas, Mary 83, 92 nn.6, 15

Drazin, Charles 128,132,135, 135 n.i, 136 nn.4, 6, 8, 9

Dreyer, Carl Theodore 8, 28, 63,

64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72., 73,74,75

Duffell, Peter 126

Duvall, Robert 9, 36, 243, 246

Dyer, Richard 51, 59, 60 n.13, 164 n.io

Eastwood, Clint 9, 182, 184, 186, 188-97, T99, 2.02, 203, 207, 210

Ebert, Roger 118, 122 n.20, 173

Eckhart, Meister 91-2

Edison, Thomas 52

Edwin, V. 32, 42 n.65

Eichenberger, A. 23, 35 n.2, 40 nn.8, 14, 18, 43 n.70

Eisenstein, Sergei 19, 21, 72

Eliade, Mircea 170, 180 n.i 1

Emmerich, Anne Catherine 6, 323, 324, 330 n.8

Eusebius 47

Evans, Peter 30, 42 n.54, 233 n.i, 235 n.31, 279, 288 nn.27, 28, 34, 289, 301, 308 n.i, 309 nn.io, 13, 41

Exum, J.C. 25, 161, 165 n.29, 212 n.37, 213 n.42

Falconetti, Marie 70, 74, 75

Farmer, D.H. 220

Fast, Howard 80

Federspiel, Birgitte 36

Figueroa, Gabriel 107

Fincher, D. 8

Foch, Nina 48, 299

Ford, John 28, 183

Foreman, Carl 183

Forrest, Frederic 36

Foucault, Michel 137, 148 n.6

Frank, Nino 156, 164 n.13

Fraser, F. 32

Fraser, Ian 185, 198 n.8

Fraser, N. 32, 4211.65

Fraser, Peter 32, 33-4, 37, 4 2 n.65, 43 nn.69, 70

Frayling, Christopher 188, 198 n.16, 202, 209, 211 nn.4, 5, 6, 8, 212 nn.29, 30, 213 nn.38, 39,43

Frears, Stephen 256

French, Philip 129, 130, 135, 186, 198 n.io, 202, 211 nn.7, 9

Freud, Sigmund 19, 23, 49

Friedkin, William 6

Garrett, Greg 199, 211 nn.i, 2

Gaut, Berys 120

Geertz, Clifford 90, 93 n.i 6

George, Peter 80

Gere, Richard 8

Giannetti, Louis 84

Gibson, Mel 5,7,286,311,312, 313, 314, 3T5, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 324, 325, 327, 328, 329, 330

Gish, Lilian 258-9, 262, 264, 265 n.12

Godard, Jean-Luc 7

Godawa, Brian 32, 42 n.64

Gordon, A. 271, 287 nn.12, 13, 288 n.26

Graham, David G. 32, 41 n.37

Grahame, Gloria 155, 158

Grant, Cary 163

Graves, Robert 221

Greeley, A.M. 34, 36, 43 n.71, 191, 198 n.19

Greene, Graham 124, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131,132, 133, 134, 135, 135 n.i, I36nn.2, 3, 10, 11, 153, 156

Greenstreet, Sidney 153

Griffith, D.W. 222, 258, 259, 273, 274, 2.76, 277, 2.78, 279, 280, 286, 321

Guardino, Harry 228

Guest, Christopher 82

Gunning, Tom 52, 53, 54

Hackman, Gene 194

Hall, James 218-19

Halpern, Baruch 199, 211 nn.3, 10

Hammett, Dashiel 156

Harlan, Jan 80

Harris, Richard 195

Hasford, Gustav 81

Hatch, Nathan O. 244, 246, 247-8, 251 nn.n, 13, 14, 2-1-33

Hatfield, Hurd 279

Hawks, Howard 261

Hayden, Sterling 118

Hayles, Katherine 137,144,147 n.i, 148 nn.7, 8, 12

Hemingway, Ernest 153,156, 157

Herr, Michael 81

Heston, Charlton 45, 47, 48, 51, 52,158, 296, 299, 305, 309 n.9

Higashi, Sumiko 52, 53, 54, 58, 60 nn.16, 24

Higham, Charles 263, 264, 265 nn.2, 5, 6, 7, 13

Hitchcock, Alfred 28, 260, 260, 261, 262

Hoffman, Dustin 306

Holden, William 159

Hopkins, Anthony 37

Hopper, Dennis 36

Horace 152

Houlden, J. Leslie 218, 233 n.9

Hunter, Jeffrey 228,303

Huston, John 153

Hutton, Lauren 9

Hyman, Gavin 4, 10 nn.12, 13

Ibsen, Henrik 66

Irazoqui, Enrique 229, 280

James, Nick 11

Jasper, David 1, 10 n.i, 3, 4, 26, 2-9, 37

Jefford, C.N. 30,31,4211.53, 231, 233 n.i, 235 nn.28, 33, 288 n.31

Jewett, Robert 29, 30, 35 n.i, 36, 42 n.51, 192, 197, 198 nn.21, 27, 28

Jewison, Norman 6, 223, 297, 305, 306

Johnson, Diane 80

Johnson, Samuel 100

Jordan, Neil 126

Josephus 47

Joyce, James 256

Katz, Ephraim 18, 21, 40 nn.8, 9, 12, 14, 16, 19, 21, 25, 108, 287 n.9

Kazantzakis, Nicos 221, 223, 231

Keaton, Diane in

Keitel, Harvey 232

Kermode, Mark 6, 11 nn.17, 19

Kerr, Deborah 223, 226

King, Geoff 54, 60 nn.21, 22

King, Stephen 80, 87

Kinnard, R. 223, 233 n.i, 235 nn.30, 32, 274, 297, 308 n.8

Kjer, Bodil 36

Klassen, William 218, 219, 233 n.2

Klein, Lillian R. 208, 211 n.i8, 212 n.36

Koosed, J.L. 207, 212 nn.26, 35

Korda, Alexander 128

Kracauer, Siegfried 19, 21

Kreitzer, Larry 29, 30, 36, 37, 42 nn.49, 50, 309 n.8

Kubrick, Stanley 9, 57, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91,92

Kulle, Jarl 36

Kurosawa, Akira 184,186

Kutsko, John 205, 212 n.22

Lacan, Jacques 19,23,86,240, 250 n.3

Ladd, Alan 183

Lafont, Jean-Philippe 36

Lancaster, Burt 154,159

Landon, Brooks 53, 54, 60 n.20

Lang, Fritz 126, 160, 271

Larkin, Philip 264

Laughton, Charles 9, 253, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264

Lawrence, John Shelton 192,198 nn.21, 28

Lean, David 55, 227

Lenihan, John 209, 213 nn.40, 41

Leone, Sergio 184, 186, 189, 190, 199, 202, 206, 207, 209

LeRoy, Mervin 223, 226, 227, 261

Levi-Strauss, Claude 19, 29

Levine, Donald 162, 163, 165 nn.36-43

Lewis, C.S. 240

Linafelt, T. 207, 212 nnz6, 35

Lindvall, Terry 3,10 nn.6, 7

Lloyd, Danny 88

Losey, Joseph 160

Louvish, Simon 277, 288 n.25

Lovejoy, Frank 159, 160

Lubitsch, Ernst 271

Lumiere, Louis and Auguste 5 2

Lussier, Patrick 221

Lyon, Sue 86

Lyotard, Jean-Francois 138

Maccoby, H. 219, 233 n.2, 234 n.16

MacGregor, Geddes 219, 234 nn.11, 17

MacIntyre, A. 4, 10 n.i 3, 156

MacKinnon, Kenneth 51,59 n.io, 60 nn.11, 12

MacMurray, Fred 157

Maher, Ian 32, 42 n.63

Maisto, M.C. 36

Malcolm, Derek 189, 198 n.17

Malpezzi, Frances M. 75, 77 n.z8

Man, Glenn 115, izz nn.9, 10

Mann, Anthony 57, 80

Marsh, Clive 31, 3Z, 37, 41 n.37, izo, IZ3 nn.z9, 30, 180 n.4

Martin, J.W. Z7-8, 36

Martin, R.P. zi6, Z33 n.7

Mason, James 86, Z84

May, J.R. 3Z, 34

McCay, Winsor 17Z

McGovern, Jimmy Z56

McKenzie, J.L. Z05, ziz nn.18, zi

McLuhan, Marshall 83, 9Z n.7

McNulty, E. 33,4zn.6y

Metz, Christian 19, zz, 8z, 9Z n.3

Micciche, Lino Z09

Miles, Margaret Z5, z6, 41 n.34, i8z, 198 nn.z, 5

Mills, Michael 157,164 n.6, 165 n.18

Milton, John 161

Mitchell, Lee Clark 186, 198 nn.6, 9, z6, Z05, ziz nn.z4, 30, 33

Mitchum, Robert 154, 159, i6z, 163, Z57, Z58, z6o, z6z

Monaco, James 18, 40 nn.8, 10, iz, 16, 17, 41 n.30, 58, 81, 9Z n.z

Moore, George zzi

Moore, S.D. Z5

More O’Ferrall, George iz6

Morgenstern, Maia 318, 3Z7

Morin, Edgar 7

Mulvey, Laura 19, 49, 50, 51, 5Z, 59 n.6, 60, 86, zyz, z88 n.16

Nabokov, Vladimir 80, 85,86 Naremore, James 155, 160, 164 nn.i, 8, 11, iz, 14, 15, 165 nn.z3, z8

Nash, Mark 75, 76 n.4, 77 nn.16, zi, zz, Z7

Neale, Steve 49, 5Z, 58, 59 n.9

Neeley, Ted Z30

Nelson, Tim Blake Z45

Newman, Paul 187

Newsom, Carole 161

Nicholson, Jack 89

Niditch, Susan zn n.17, 212 n.18

Niebuhr, H. Richard 169, 178, 180 nn.5, 6

Nietzsche, Friedrich 137, 148 n.5

Noyce, Phillip iz6

Nyby, Christian z6i

O’Brien, Edmund 154

Oldman, Gary 37

Olivier, Laurence Z84

Ortiz, G. 31, 3Z, 36

Ostwalt, C.E. Z7-8, 36

Otto, Rudolf 83, 9z n.5

Ozu, Yasujiro z8

Pacino, Al m, nz, 119, 306

Pajaczkowska, Claire Z70, Z71, Z7Z, Z73, Z87 nn.7, 11, 14, z88 nn.18, 19, zo

Pasolini, Pier Paolo ZZ3, ZZ9-30, Z74, z8o, z8i, z8z, Z83, z86, 3ZI

Paul 91

Pechter, William 119

Peckinpah, Sam 184, 186

Penn, Arthur 187

Philibert, Nicholas 9

Philo 47

Pippin, Tina 30,37

Plate, S.B. z6, Z9, 37

Pleasance, Donald 316

Poole, Mabbie IZ9

Porfirio, Robert 160, 164 nn.z, 7, 165 n.17

Potter, Philip 185, 198 n.7

Powell, Dilys 99, 2.62.

Powell, Robert 306,312

Pudovkin, V.I. 19,21

Puzo, Mario 118

Quigley, Martin 112

Quigly, Isabel 98

Quinn, Anthony 284

Randell, Ron 280

Raphael, Frederic 81

Ray, Nicholas 156, 158, 223,

227, 274, 279, 280, 281, 285,

2-86, 297, 303, 315, 316, 321

Rebello, Stephen 261, 264, 265 n.8

Reed, Carol 19, 26, 127, 129, 155

Reeves, Keanu 37

Rennie, Michael 221

Reumann, John 216, 233 nn.2, 5

Richardson, Ralph 283

Riefenstahl, Leni 330

Rivette, Jacques 7

Robinson, Edward G. 56, 159, 160

Rohmer, Eric 7

Roncace, Mark 31, 42 n.62

Rosenthal, F. 204

Rouch, Jean 7

Ryder, Winona 3 7

Sackler, Howard O. 78

Sacks, Jonathan 291, 308 n.6,

309 nn.n, 12, 16, 17, 18

Sanders, T. 29, 41 n.44

Sartre, Jean-Paul 144, 148 n.16, 250-1 n.3

Saussure, Ferdinand de 19, 22

Schildkraut, Joseph 225

Schrader, Paul 7, 8, n nn.23, 25, 12 nn.26, 27, 28, 33, 41 n.22, 72, 77 n.20, 164 n.4, 285

Scorsese, Martin 1, 6, 8, 9, 28,

31, 34, 162, 186, 198 nn.n,

23, 222, 223, 231, 274, 285, 2-86, 297, 307, 315, 321

Scott, B.B. 28, 29, 30, 41 n.44

Scott, Martha 48

Scott, Ridley 9, 57, 139, 140, 143,221

Selznik, David O. 128

Sheen, Martin 3 6

Shelden, Michael 134,135,136 nn.9, 12

Siegel, Don 189

Sienkewicz, Henry 220, 221, 226

Singer, Claude 270, 272, 287

n.io, 288 nn.15, 17

Siodmak, Robert 157

Smith, Harry Nash 187, 198 n.13

Smith, Jeff 88, 92 n.12

Soderberg, Steven 8

Southern, Terry 80

Spicer, Andrew 154, 159, 162,

164 nn.5, 9, 165 nn.22, 25, 34

Spielberg, Steven 78

Staiger, Janet 53

Stam, Robert 40 nn.8, 28, 41

n.30, 215

Stanwyck, Barbara 157

Stern, R.C. 30, 31, 42 n.53, 231, 233 n.i, 235 nn.28, 33, 288 n.31

Sternberg, Meir 204, 211 n.12

Stevens, George 183,297,304,

316, 321, 329

Stewart, James 161

Stone, B.P. 25, 33,43 n.68

Stone, B.W. 242, 249, 251 n.9

Stone, Oliver 191

Strindberg, August 66

Sturges, John 184,186

Swift, Jonathan 100

Tarantino, Quentin 8,110

Tarkovsky, Andrei 2, 8, 10 nn.5,

12, 12

Tatum, W.B. 31, 42 n.57, 232, 233 n.i, 235 n.34, 276, 281-2, 288 nn.21, 22, 23, 24, 30, 32, 33

Taylor, Robert 223, 226

Telford, William R. 35 nn.4, 7, 42 nn.52, 56, 58, 60, 287 n.5, 308 n.2, 309 n.8

Thackeray, William Makepeace 80

Thompson, Jim 79

Thompson, Kristin 53

Tillich, Paul 86, 87, 92 nn.io, 11, 168-9, 178, 2.40, 2.51 nn.4,

Tocqueville, Alexis de 241, 244, 251 n.7

Tompkins, Jane 187, 198 n.14, 205, 212 nn.23, 25, 28

Tookey, Christopher 98, 108, 109 n.12, 198 n.17, 264, 265 n.io

Torn, Rip 228

Torrance, Ernest 225

Tourneur, Jacques 154

Truffaut, Francois 7, 82

Trumbo, Dalton 80

Turner, Frederick Jackson 184, 198 n.5

Turturro, John 245

Twain, Mark 264

Tyler, Parker 98, 108, 108 nn.9, 11, 109 n.12

Tynan, Kenneth 261

Ustinov, Peter 223, 226

Valli, Alida 155

Van Cleef, Lee 199

Varnet, Marc 45, 58, 59 n.2

Von Sydow, Max 304

Walker, J. 35, 36, 37

Walsh, Richard 29,31,37

Warm, Hermann 71

Warner, H.B. 225,228,302

Waugh, Evelyn 100

Wayne, John 161, 183, 190

Weil, Simon 89, 92 n.13

Welles, Orson 107, 129, 153, 154, 155, 158, 259

Wellman, William 183,186

West, Morris 221

White, Lionel 79

Whitman, Walt 276

Wilder, Billy 271

Wilder, Thornton 220

Willingham, Calder 79

Willis, Gary 187-8,198 n.15

Winters, Shelley 86, 263

Wright, Melanie J. 31, 42 n.5 5, 287 n.6

Zeffirelli, Franco 222, 274, 283, 284, 285, 286, 297, 306, 316, 321, 326

Zinnemann, Fred 183

Index of Subjects

Abelard 314

Action Franqaise 72 ambiguity 69, 112, it8, 121,

143. 151, I52.-3, 155, T57, 162-6, 164, 208, 261-2, 285, 309-10

American church history 239, 241,247-8, 249-50

American dream 155, 160, 162, 270, 271-2

American monomyth 192, 196, 197

American Restoration Movement

2-49,

see also Radical Reformation

American west 185-6, 196-7, 199, see also westerns

androids 139-40,141,142,144 animation 171-3, 178

Anselm 314,320 anti-heroes 187,188,199 anti-Judaism see antisemitism antisemitism 133, 134, 219, 266-7, 273, 282, 283, 286, 312, 32.5-7

apocalypse 92, 137, 138, 143,

144. 318

atheism 102, 107, 137 auteur theory 20,22,28,37,

45-6, 57, 82 authenticity 66, 321-4, 326

Basement Room, The 127 belief 137, 145-7 betrayal 124-8,129,131, see also Judas, Peter biblical epics 214-215,272-3 biblical studies approach 29 ‘Bishop Bloughman’s Apology’

132

Blade Runner (novel) 139, 140-1,

M3

blasphemy 101, 102, 104 body, the 138,143

female 49-50, 51

male 50-1

Breen, Joseph 155,156

Brighton Rock 127,132

Bunuel and Christianity 94, 98-9, 104, 105-8

Burnt Out Case, A 132

camera angle of vision 84-5, 87, see also lenses of film reading,

camera shots; Steadicam

Capone, Al 113

Catholic Church 71, 74, 282

Catholic Legion of Decency 223, 228,274,297

Catholic technical terms 102

Catholicism 125, 131,132

in Franco’s Spain 106 chaos 90

chiaroscuro 153, 154, 259 childhood 124-5

Christ 169, 189, 190, 296, 301-2, see also Christ-figures, Christology

Christ-figures 31, 34, 174, 192,

3T7, see also American monomyth

Christ film 315-16, see also biblical epics

Christianity 7, 90, 106, 179, 255, 264

American 243-4, 245-6, 254 evangelical 255 revivalist 255, 263

Christology 26, 284, 285, 305, 306

Church, the 27, 245-6, 281, see also Catholic Church,

Christianity cinema verite 7, 8 cinematography 118, 132 classic Hollywood style 46 cognitive film theory 22 context-based theories 20 contextual analysis 22-3,55-6 Cortez, Stanley 259 critical approach to film 3,15, 16-35, 44-58, 84-5, 178-9, 207, 290

crucifixion 69, 277-8, 279, 312, 313, 322

cultural approach 15, 23, 25-6, 30, 71, 239, 289

cultural formation 240 cyberpunk fiction 13 8-9

Deady, Bruce 3 29 declaration of principle 239, 240 Deschanel, Caleb 312-13 desire 49, 50-1, 86-7

Devil, the 313,314,316,318 diachronistic approach 20-1 divine 87, 188, 189

encounter with 91-2, 168, 170, M5

Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? 139, 140-1,

see also Blade Runner (novel)

Ehud 199, 202, 2.03-5, 2,06-8, 210

empathy 140,141,143,323,324 End of the Affair, The 124, 132 epics 52, 53, 54, 57, 301,

see also biblical epics; Romano- Christian epics •

ethnicity 276-7, 285, 300, 307 evangelistic approach 3 2

evil 113, 135, 157, 170, 192, 226, 263, 327

existentialism 156-7, 158, 160, 162

Exodus, Book of 276, 290, 292-3, 300, 302, 307

expressionism 21

Fallen Idol, The 125-7 family 171,317,318-19 femininity 24, 323 feminist film criticism 24 film noir 151-64

film theory 15, 18, 20, 21, 83, 290,

see also critical approaches to film

Fitzgerald, Benedict 7, 321

Flight from Ambiguity, The 162 formalism 21, 28, 37, 46, 68, 69, 70, 251 n.4

framing 70, 240, 250 n.2

Franco, General 96, 98, 104

French nationalism 74, see also Action Fran^aise

Friedmann, Litzi 130

Gabriel, Peter 307 gaze 24, 49, 50, 51, 52, 86, 240, 250-1 n.3, 313

gender 49, 50-2,

see also femininity; homophobia; masculinity

genre 22, 56-7, 152

Germinal (poem) 124

God 87, 137, 167-8, 172, 173, 178, 190, 191, 256, 315

Grade, Lew 274, 297, 306

Hallelujah Chorus, The 97, 99, 101, 104

hand-washing 133,134,279, 282, 300

Hays Production Code 112-14

Hebrew Bible 162, 163, 185, 186 heroes 192, 205,

see also anti-heroes

Western 188, 193, 195, 203, 205, 212 n.24, 213 n.43

noir 157, 161, 162 historical criticism 21 homophobia 327

humanity 83, 86, 89-90, 140, 143, 146,

see also posthumanity

iconoclasm 83,94, IO2- iconography 66, 168, 200, 316, 320

icons 151, 220, 323 ideology 2, 17, 23, 28, 38, 71, ii5, 12.7, 12.8, 137, 138, 210, 267, 290, 301-2, 306

imagery 83-4, 85, 142, 168, 170, 2-58

In Search of the Third Man 128 individualism 176, 177, 243, 267 intertextuality 22, 29, 30, 215, 226, 227, 267, 276, 304, 314-15

Jeanne d’Arc 63, 64, 67, 71-3, 74 Jesus biopics see Christ films Jesus in the movies 31

Jews and Judaism

in the Christ film 267, 273-86 in cinema 266, 270-3

in the New Testament 268-70

Nostra Aetate 282-3

Judas 124,135

in art 220

betrayed by Jesus 232 betrays Jesus 228

in film 221-2, 225-6, 230-1 in history and tradition 219-20 and Jews 219

in literature 221

in the New Testament 217-18 judgement 148, 190, 191, 200, 242, 243

Judges, Book of 162, 199, 200, 202-8, 210,

see also Ehud

kingdom of God 145, 147

laity 242-3, 244, 247-8

Last Supper 225

in the Bible 290-6 in film 296, 301-3, 304-8

Last Supper (da Vinci) 97,98, 301, 304

Last Supper, The (Barclay) 291, 292-5

legend 199, 207

lenses of film reading 16-17, 24-6 angle 87-90

camera shots 90-2 framing 85-7

liberation 173-4, 177 liberation theology 177,185

Lost Childhood, The 124

McCarthyism 160 madness 257, 258, 260, 261-2 mafia 117, 119, 120, 121 Manichaean heresy 225 marxism 23, 38, 75, 223, 229, 274,281

masculinity 49, 50, 51, 155, 183, 187, 188, 191, 193, 195, 196, 197, 206, 207, 317, 324

Mask of Dimitrios, The 129, 130 Mercerism 141, 143, 145

methodological approach 215, 267, 290

metonymy 85

mise en scene 21, 37, 44-6,153-4 misogyny 255,257,258

morality 16, 27, 113, 121, 127, 130, 134-5, 154, 155, 157, 170, 182, 187, 207-8, 209, 210, 324

myth 28, 75, 168, 178,179, 182, 186, 206, 207, 300

mythological approach 28, 115-17

narrative 33-4, 44-8, 51, 52, 53-4, 56, 64, 65-9, 78, 91, 96, 112, 138, 154, 155, 215

narrative theory 24-5, 40 n.26, 46

national cinema 73

Nausea 144

Newman, Alfred 304 non-realism 170, 171, 173, 174, 178-9

Osservatore Romano, L’ 98,101, 107

parable 94, 98, 99, 102, 145, 146

Passover 45,314

Passover Meal 239, see also Passover in the Bible 290-1, 292-5, 296 in cinema 299-300, 303-4, 305, 306, 307

pedagogy 328

Pesah Seder see Passover Meal

Peter

apocryphal literature 218 in art 200

betrays Jesus 227,229-30 characterization 216

in film 221, 225, 226, 227 in history and tradition 218-19 in literature 220-1 in the New Testament 215-17 and the Quo Vadis legend 218-19, 227

Philby, Kim 130, 131

Pilate 133, 269, 321, 322, 323,

324, 325> 327

and Jesus 278-6

poetics 52, 66, 239-40

Poetics 66, 152

point of view 18, 20, 25, 40-1 n.29, 70, 84, 85, 116, 126, 184, 200, 201, 301, 312, 313,

see also camera angle of vision political context

film noir 160

Jesus Christ Superstar 231

Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, La 72

Ten Commandments, The 55-6

Viridiana 96

Westerns 169, 209 posthumanity 137, 143, 144, 147 postmodern eclecticism 24 postmodernism 137, 138, 172,

208, 231, 242, 248 preachers 255, 246, 247, 249,

254,

see also laity

proleptic potency 202-4 promised land

and American values 272

the west as 183,184-5,197 psychoanalysis 23,67, 75, 76

queer theory 24

Qoheleth 162

Quiet American, The 127

Radical Reformation 239, 240-2,

243, 244, 245-6, 247, 248, 249 realism 21, 66-8, 75, 245,

see also non-realism; surrealism reception 20, 23, 65, 73-5 redemption 162, 174 redemptive approach 34

regard, la see gaze

rehabilitation 216, 217, 219 religion 90,140-1,143, 179,

2-55, 2 5^-7

religious art 45, 72, 301, 316, see also Last Supper (da Vinci);

The Twelve Year Old Jesus in the Temple

religious context 72-3, 322 religious studies approach 27-9 repentance 143-4, 145,146, 147 revivalism 254, 255, 256, 257,

263

Romano-Christian epics 226

Rosza, Miklos 228

sacramental approach 33-4

sacrilege 101, 102

salvation 185

Sandburg, Carl 305

Satan 6, 134, 135, 142, 217, 313,

314, 318

satire 98, 100, 102, 209, 310

semiotics 22, 146

simulacrum 137, 138, 143, 144,

145. 147

Smolka, Peter 130,131

Smollett, Peter see Smolka, Peter social context 209, 210, 246, 267,

300-1, 306

social science approach 72

Societe General des Films 63,73 sociology and ethnography 23 son of man 145,147,302,305

Sopranos, The 112

Spain 94, 98-9, 105, 106, see also Catholicism spectacle 52-5, 57 spectatorship 23-4, 46-7, 49 spiritual approach 33,47

Steadicam 87-8 stereotyping 50, 189, 191, 219, 267, 273, 285, 323

surrealism 94, 102, 103, 145, 257

synchronic approach 20-1

text-based theories 20

textual analysis 21 thematic criticism 22, 68, 69-71 theological approaches 27,32-4,

168-71, 182

theology 15, 26,168-9, 246, 311 atonement 313-14, 320 and film 27, 169

and Passion of The Christ, The

328

practical 182

transcendence 28, 168, 169, 170, 171, 308

Twelve Year Old Jesus in the

Temple, The 101

Vatican II 328,329

Via Vecchia 115,116, 117

Vienna, post-war 131 violence no, 194, 199, 206, 207-8, 209, 319-21

Viper of Milan, The 124

voyeurism 23,49, 86, see also gaze

Wallace, William 317

westerns 183-97, 199-210 motifs 202, 203

World Council of Churches 185

Index of Films: Title, Director and Year

Age d’Or, L’ (Bunuel, 1930) 95

Antz (Darnell, Johnson, 1998) 173, 176-7, i78

Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979) 36, 39

Apostle, The (Duvall, 1997) 239, 240-4, 246, 247, 248, 249

Babette’s Feast (Axel, 1987) 36, 39

Bad Seed, The (LeRoy, 261) 261

Barry Lyndon (Kubrick, 1975)

78, 80

Beauty and the Beast (Trousdale,

Wise, 1991) 173

Belle de Jour (Bunuel, 1967) 95

Big Sleep, The (Hawks, 1946)

152, 161

Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915)

259,276

Blade Runner (Scott, 1982)

139-47

Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1967) no, 208

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Coppola,

I992-) 37,39

Braveheart (Gibson, 1995) 317

Brighton Rock (Boulting, 1947)

126, 127

Broken Arrow (Davis, 1950) 187

Bug’s Life, A (1998) 173, 177

Cape Fear (Scorsese, 1991) 31

Chicken Run (Lord, Park, 2000)

173-4, 178

Clockwork Orange, A (Kubrick, 1971) 78, 80, 87, no

Conspiracy Theory (Donner, 1997) 317

Crossfire (Dmytryk, 1947) 151, 155, T59

Dances With Wolves (Costner, 1990) 184

Day of the Fight (Kubrick, 1951) 79

Diary of a Chambermaid (Bunuel, 1964) 95

Discreet Charm of the

Bourgeoisie, The (Bunuel, 1972) 95

Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944) 153,157

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Kubrick, 1964) 78, 80

Dracula (Lussier, 2001) 221

End of the Affair, The (Jordan, 1999) 126

England Made Me (Duffell, 1973) 126

Exorcist, The (Friedkin, 1973) 6

Exterminating Angel, The (Bunuel, 1962) 95

Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999) 78, 81, 92

Fallen Idol, The (Reed, 1948) 125-7, 128

Fatal Attraction (Lyne, 1987) 161

Fear and Desire (Kubrick, 1953) 78, 79

Fistful of Dollars, A (Leone, 1964) 186

Flying Padre (Kubrick, 1951) 79

For a Few Dollars More (Leone,

1965) 199-202

Force of Evil (Polonsky, 1948) i57, 159, 160

Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick, 1987) 78, 81

Gertie the Dinosaur (McCay, 1914) 172

God, the Devil and Bob (DeGrandis, Fausett, Pollack, Ressel, Scott, 2000) 173

Godfather, The (Coppola, 1972) 53, no—12, 113-21

Gospel According to St. Matthew,

The (Pasolini, 1964) 223, 229-30, 274, 280-2

Great Expectations (Lean, 1946) 227

Greatest Story Ever Told, The (Stevens, 1965) 222, 229-30, 297, 304-5, 315

Gun Crazy (Lewis, 1949) 157,

159,160

Hannibal (Scott, 2001) 221

Heart of the Matter, The (More

O’Farrall, 1953) 126

High Noon (Zinnemann, 1952) 183,184

High Plains Drifter (Eastwood, 1973) 188, 189-90, 191, 192, 197

In a Lonely Place (Ray, 1952) 158-9, 160

Intolerance (Griffith, 1916) 222, 273-8, 286

It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946) 161

Jesus Christ Superstar (Jewison, 1973) 6, 222, 223, 230-1, 297,

305. 6,315

Jesus of Nazareth (Zeffirelli, 1977) 222, 274, 283-4, 285, 297,

306. 7, 326

Killers (Siodmak, 1946) 157, 159, 161

Killer’s Kiss (Kubrick, 1955) 78, 79

Killing, The (Kubrick, 1956) 79

King of Kings, The (DeMille, 1927) 222, 225-6, 274, 278-9, 297, 301-3, 308

King of Kings (Ray, 1961) 57, 222, 223, 228-9, 274, 279-80, 281, 286, 297, 303-4, 305, 315, 316

Kiss of Judas, The (Gaumont, 1909) 221

Last Temptation of Christ, The (Scorsese, 1988) 6, 7, 222, 223, 231-2, 274, 284-6, 297, 307-8, 315

Left Handed Gun (Penn, 1958) 187

Lethal Weapon (Donner, 1978) 317

Little Caesar (LeRoy,i93i) 112

Lolita (Kubrick, 1962) 80, 85-7, 92

Mad Max (Miller, 1979) 317

Mad Max 2 (Miller, 1981) 317

Magnificent Seven, The (Sturges, i960) 184, 186

Maltese Falcon, The (Huston, 1941) 153,157

Milky Way (Bunuel, 1969) 95, 106-7

Ministry of Fear, The (Lang, 1943) 126

Monsignor Quixote

(Bennett, 198 5) 126

Nazarin (Bunuel, 1959) 95,96, 106

Night of the Hunter, The (Laughton, 1955) 253-64

O Brother Where Art Thou?

(Coen, Coen, 2000) 239, 240, 2-45-6, 2.48, 249

Olivados, Los (Bunuel, 1950) 95

Once Upon a Time (Dreyer, 1922) 71

Once Upon a Time in The West (Leone, 1968) 184,208

Ordet (Dreyer, 1955) 63

Our Man in Havana (Reed, i960) 126

Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947) 154,159

Outlaw Josie Wales, The (Eastwood, 1976) 188,192-4, 197

Ox-Bow Incident, The (Wellman, 1943) 183, 187

Pale Rider (Eastwood, 1985) 188, 190-1, 192,197

Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, La (Dreyer, 1928) 63-4, 65-76

Passion of the Christ, The (Gibson, 2004) 5-6, 7, 286, 311-30

Paths of Glory (Kubrick, 1957) 79

Patriot, The (Emmerich, 2000) 312, 317

Pickpocket (Bresson, 1959) 8, 9

Prowler, The (Losey, 1951) 160 Psycho (Hitchcock, i960) 260, 261-2

Public Enemy, The (Wellman, 1931) 112

Quiet American, The (Noyce, 2002) 126, 127-8

Quo Vadis? (LeRoy, 1951) 2.2.3, 226-7

Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980) 31

Red River (Hawks, Rosson, 1948) 205

Samson and Delilah (DeMille, 1949) 57j 161, 301

Scarface (Hawks, 1932) 112

Scarlet Street (Lang, 1945) 159, 160

Seafarers, The (Kubrick, 1953) 79

Searchers, The (Ford, 1956) 183

Seven Samurai, The (Kurosawa, 1954) 184, 186

Shane (Stevens, 1953) 183

Shawshank Redemption, The

(Darabont, 1994) 120

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Ford, 1949) 183

Shining, The (Kubrick, 1980} 80, 87-90

Signs (Night Shyamalan, 2002) 317

Simon of the Desert (Bunuel, 1965) 95

Sinking of the Lusitania (McCay, 1918) 172

Sling Blade (Childers, 1996) 31

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Walt Disney Studios, 1937) 172

Spartacus (Kubrick, Mann, i960)

57, 80, 86

Stagecoach (Ford, 1939) 183

Star Wars (Lucas, 1977) 139,221

Steamboat Willie (Disney, Iwerks, 1928) 172

Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976) 31

Ten Commandments, The (DeMille, 192.3) 296, 299

Ten Commandments, The (DeMille, 1956) 44-57, 296, 299-301, 306

Terminator, The (Cameron, 1984) 321

That Obscure Object of Desire (Bunuel, 1977) 95, 107

Thing, The (Nyby, Hawks, 1951) 261

Third Man, The (Reed, 1949) 124, 125, 128-35

Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958) 153, 154,157

Toy Story (Lasseter, 1995) 172, 173,175

Toy Story II (Lasseter, 1999) 173, 175

Tristana (Bunuel, 1970) 95

Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl, 1935) 33°

2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick,

1968. 78,80,88,89,90-2

Try and Get Me (Endfield, 1950)

157, 159, 160

Un Chien Andalou (Bunuel, 1928)

95

Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992)

188, 194-7, 207-8, 210

Viridiana (Bunuel, 1961) 96-108

Wall Street (Stone, 1987) 191

We Were Soldiers (Wallace, 2002)

317

Went the Day Well (Cavalcanti,

1940) 126

Wild Bunch, The (Peckinpah,

1969. no, 184, 186

Year of Living Dangerously, The

(Wier, 1982) 317

Yojimbo (Kurosawa, 1961) 186

“Th is book is a veritable cornucopian feast for anyone interested in film. From case studies of key directors to discussions of cinematic classics, from explorations of time-honoured genres to investigations of the theological heart of many contemporary favourites, there is something for everyone's tastes here. This will help put to rest any suggestion that religion, theology and the Bible have nothing to do with the cinema - rather, these studies demonstrate that such matters are at the centre of our modern love-affair with the moving image."        Dr Larry j Rrenzeri

Tutor of New Testament and Tutor for Graduates, Regents Pak College, Oxford University, UK

“From this fascinating collection, readers will learn that “biblical" movies reflect not only the biblical stories they tell but also the issues and trends that are important to the filmmakers who created them, while films that are not explicitly about the Bible may nonetheless be built around biblical themes, characters and stories. A stimulating and far-ranging addition to the growing literature on the intersections among the Bible, theology and cinema, this book is a must-read for all who love watching movies and talking about them."        *Meje RejnhartZi

Dean Graduate Studies and Research, Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario

The interdisciplinary study of theology and film requires a responsible engagement on the part of religious studies experts, biblical scholars and theologians, with film studies. Cinema Divinite first of all sets out various critical approaches to the study of film and theology such as formalism, expressionism, realism, textual analysis, contextual analysis, postmodern eclecticism, narrative criticism and cultural studies. The early chapters also look at the major concepts in film studies such as cinema spectatorship and the nature and application of film theory to theology.The book takes a case-study approach as it examines specific films, including The Godfather, Blade Runner, 0 Brother Where Art Thou? , specific filmmakers such as Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrik and Luis Bunuel, and finally genre, including everything from film noir to animantion and the western.The book closes with a lively and often far-sighted discussion of the recently released The Passion-of Christ.        »

Eric S. Christianson is Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies, University College Chester.

Peter Francis is Warden of the St Deiniol's Library. William R Telford is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Durham.

Cover photo: George Stevens'The Greatest Story EverTold, 1965; photo Ernst Haas

Cover design:Leigh Hurlock

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[1]        Westerns

[2]This chapter will begin by looking at the Western genre4 to identify certain key themes. It will then look specifically at the Western films that

[3]        Scene-by-Scene

[4]For reasons that will become apparent, the bulk of my analysis deals with

[5]one Western sequence. It is from the second of Sergio Leone’s ‘dollars

[6]        The Radical Reformation in America

[7]As Christian traditions sought to be rooted in the American soil after the

[8]Revolutionary War in the late 1700s, questions with regard to the free-

[9]        The Passover and the Last Supper in the Bible

[10]Where the biblical texts are concerned, Exodus 12.1—13.16 is the major

[11]
2. Notes on the Films Selected

The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1923/1956)

For sheer pageantry and spectacle, few motion pictures can claim to equal the splendour of C. B. DeMille’s 1956 remake of his epic The Ten Commandments (1923). Filmed in Egypt and the Sinai with one of the biggest sets ever constructed for a motion picture, this version tells the story of the life of Moses (Charlton Heston), once favoured in the Pharaoh’s (Yul Brynner) household, who turned his back on a privileged life to lead his people to freedom.