Graeme Burk
Jesus of Cinema – Part 1: Visual Aids
Posted on: 04/08/2009 11:10
[A two-part series. See Part 2 here.]
Committing the stories of Jesus as they appear in the Gospels to a medium like film is nothing less than a reverse miracle: turning wine in to water. The stories told in the scriptures are partial, even fractal, in nature. They convey nothing and everything and that’s ignoring the fact there is often more than one account in scripture of what happened. Putting this into a medium like film which often expects a clear narrative structure (and one that’s understood visually) is asking a lot.
There have always been enacted forms of the Jesus story: paintings, the mystery plays, icons. When narrative filmmaking came into being in the late 19th century, it was natural that Jesus would figure in the new medium.
Certainly not the first, but probably the best known of the early films about Jesus was director Sidney Olcott’s 1913 film From the Manger to the Cross. This was, for its time, a sprawling little epic of a film, clocking in at over an hour. It was filmed on location in Egypt (Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus are seen by the Sphinx which has been anachronistically been defaced by Napoleon’s troops) and what was then known as Palestine. It was made with the camera fixed in a single position and film editing was practically non-existent.
It is an innocuous movie, full of mimed tableaux and famous scenes from the Bible. The only intertitles are in fact scriptural quotes from the King James Version. Olcott was wise in the way of Mammon as well as the Lord and offered Protestant and Catholic versions of the film. Which seems appropriate since From the Manger to the Cross is little more than a visual aid to the Gospels going through the major plot points of the story of Jesus with earnest gravitas.
The tone for most Jesus films for the next three-quarters of a century took followed Olcott’s example. Hollywood, in particular, embraced this method. Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings contrasts the spectacle of Roman-occupied Palestine with a highlight reel of the life of Christ played in sober fashion. Three decades later, when Nicholas Ray remade DeMille’s film, now titled simply King of Kings (1961), he was using the same approach. Ray was more interested in Jesus’ teachings than his miracles but it nonetheless lugubriously checks off the events of the life of Christ off the list of required scenes. Jeffrey Hunter, better known in geek circles for being the captain of the Enterprise in the original pilot for Star Trek, plays a Jesus that looks more at home as a member of the Beach Boys than giving the Sermon on the Mount and sounds wholesomely Midwestern to boot.
King of Kings has a lovely Technicolor, epic sweep to it but it highlights two of the big problems with Jesus films. The first is that the life of Jesus in the Gospels is characterized what Lloyd Baugh in his book Imaging The Divine defined as ellipses. Events happen with no connection between them, time is telescoped and the circumstances of Jesus’ preaching and narratives are rarely described. There is no motivation for what happens and film is all about the motivation.
Look at Judas in most films and you’ll see the problem. Judas is often characterized as a zealot or a revolutionary who betrayed Jesus because he saw Jesus as part of the means to usurp the Romans, or a victim of political machinations, or jealous of Jesus’ friendship with Mary Magdalene, or even a conspirator with Jesus—none of which are in the Gospels at all. It’s just the expectations that come with the medium demand that they explain why someone would betray their friend.
Most films have a clear ‘through line’ which connect the viewer from A to B to C to D. Syd Field, who literally wrote the textbook on Screenwriting, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, popularized the idea that most scripts have a classic three-act structure and turn on revelatory plot points that occur at the end of each act and in the middle of each film. This is almost impossible when the action occurs as a series of unconnected events without motivation as the Gospels have it. (It’s not surprising that so many films about Jesus don’t actually use the Gospels but novels about Jesus).
As a result many Jesus films spend a lot of time building a plot that bridges the gaps and motivates the action, often historical romances and melodrama. With King of Kings, there are Masada-like revolts and a whole plot line devoted to the zealots and a series of soap operas that fills out the epic running time. The melodrama doesn’t really work though. It’s hard to believe this is the same man who directed Rebel Without a Cause. Then again, no one would confuse Jeffrey Hunter for James Dean.
Which brings us to the other problem with Jesus films. The Gospels are free of introspection and (with rare exceptions) a sense of tone, so filmmakers and actors are free to interpret Jesus in any number of ways. Only, in these types of films, they don’t. If there’s one word to sum up how Christ is portrayed in these movies, anodyne is as good as any. Jesus doesn’t ruffle feathers. He soothes and calms. Banal and dull might be better words, though. The soul of character in film is conflict: Rick wants Ilsa but knows she’s better off with Laszlo in Casablanca; Scarlett wants to be never to be poor again and will do anything to see that happen of in Gone With The Wind. But with Jesus, that’s a problem in literal-minded films because Jesus is, well, the Son of God, capital S, capital G.
Which may be why—with some notable exceptions—over the next twenty years, films with Jesus came up with a workaround for this problem. I call it the ‘Red Letter Edition’ Jesus. Just as reading the words of Jesus in red in some editions of the Bible gives a weird, unworldly feel to the text, several filmmakers cast and direct an ethereal Jesus. Ben Hur stops the sword-and-sandal epic in progress every time to show a haloed-in-light, shot-from-behind, arriving-to-choral-fanfare Jesus. The Greatest Story Ever Told (1964) cast Max Von Sydow as Jesus and the Swedish actor makes an odd looking Jesus (especially if you’ve ever seen him play Ming The Merciless in Flash Gordon). Even while suffering on the cross, there’s an affected quality that seems somewhat aloof. Perhaps he realizes that John Wayne is doing the celebrity cameo (one of many that litter this movie) as the Centurion who proclaims Jesus’ divinity.
The zenith of this approach, and indeed of the ‘Visual Aid’ school of Jesus movies is Franco Zeffirelli’s TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth. At 6 hours, it was the longest look at the life of Christ yet. This miniseries was all the rage in Christendom when it aired on NBC in 1977. For the first time since the days of Sidney Olcott, it was filmed in the Middle East with a cast of thousands, a score of top shelf actors (James Mason! Lawrence of Arabia! James Farentino!), a script co-written by Anthony Burgess, and an overall aesthetic that looks as though they set out to bring DaVinci and Michelangelo’s paintings of Christ to life.
All these things seem so right and yet are not sufficient. British actor Robert Powell plays the epitome of a western vision of Jesus and its at once mystical and off-putting. Powell never blinks., making his blue eyes all that more apparent.. Between the eyes and the classical speech patterns, Powell’s Jesus is downright alien. Which is both disconcerting and calming. On the the one hand, you want to applaud Zeffirelli’s bravura, but on the other hand, it’s frustrating because even in death and resurrection, Jesus seems so bloodless. In none of these movies does he seem like a guy you’d want to share a joke with.
Zeffirelli pretty much travels the middle course, taking the Gospel stories and gluing them together narratively with swathes and swathes Shakespeare-ish drama. The result is the baseline of ‘serious’ adaptations of the Gospels.
Most films about Jesus follow the ‘Visual Aid’ approach that Jesus of Nazareth uses, including 2004’s The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson’s attempt to teach the crucifixion story. Though heavy-handed, Gibson deserves points for having the characters use Aramaic rather than English.
Gibson is more influenced by the Catholic tradition of the Stations of the Cross and conservative teachings on the glory of the suffering of the passion, but the approach is nonetheless what Sidney Olcott did in 1912: teach through illustration.
There is another route. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about that.
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