Graeme Burk
Jesus of Cinema – Part 2: Flirting with Heresy
Posted on: 04/09/2009 11:04
Yesterday (see Part 1 here), I talked a little bit about the tradition in adaptations of the Jesus story toward literal, illustrative versions that often have either dull or ethereal portrayals of Jesus.
But there’s another, equally important, movement in Jesus films. I call it, even though I don’t believe this to be true, the Flirting With Heresy school of thought. Probably the best known of this grouping is Martin Scorcese’s adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ 1960 novel, The Last Tempation of Christ. It’s difficult in an age where the average episode of Family Guy is happy to make Jesus the obscene punchline of a cutaway gag to comprehend the amount of controversy this movie caused during its 1988 release. It’s even more difficult to understand why it even merited such controversy. The greatest sin of this film is that it’s 45 minutes too long. Its least sin is that Scorcese and Kazantzakis have a different idea about Jesus than others.
Yesterday I spoke of how the problem with in the ‘Visual Aid’ school of Jesus films is that the heart of any dramatic character is conflict and Jesus trumps all internal conflict by being the Son of God. The Flirting With Heresy approach asks “Why can’t Jesus have doubts? Or conflict? Was he not God in human forms? Don’t humans have doubt and conflict?” And so, with The Last Temptation of Christ we have a Jesus (played by Willem Defoe) who struggles with his divinity and agonizes over his decisions. A Jesus who seems vulnerable. The result is that the most interesting moments in the Gospels become hard fought.
It is far from being a perfect film (though it does have a perfect film score by Peter Gabriel): tt gets muddled in Jesus plotting his betrayal with Judas (who is best buds with Jesus here and is played by Harvey Keitel) and the sturm and drang of Jesus’ angst with Mary Magdalene gets a bit thick. But what stuck in the craw of many back in 1988 is the idea that it would depict the Devil’s temptation of Jesus on the cross with a dream of an ordinary life. Much of the ire is because Jesus in this dream has sex with his now-wife, Mary Magdalene, but the conflict boils down to a novelist and a filmmaker’s interpretation of Jesus being different to others. Neither Scorcese nor Kazantzakis ever set out to do an ‘accurate’ account of scripture but rather a personal meditation on the duality of God living as a man. Of course, all this ignores the fact that Jesus ultimately rejects this dream when it becomes clear it will lead to the destruction of the world.
The key here is interpretation. The “Visual Aid” school interprets the Jesus story just as much as Scorcese does; it just pretends to be more neutral. Probably the greatest abstraction of this idea is in Quebecois director Denys Arcand’s 1989 film Jesus of Montreal. For two decades this film has been the darling of campus chaplaincy film nights because it attempts to retell the story of Jesus, stripped down to the essentials and recast in the culture of 1980s Montreal. Lothaire Bluteau plays Daniel, an actor who directs an unorthodox passion play on Mount Royal which becomes the talk of the town while setting the Catholic Church sets out to stop it. As it unfolds, we have the story of Jesus happening in the lives of Daniel and his fellow actors who become his apostles, who commit themselves to Daniel’s cause.
It becomes a fun-house mirror distorition of the ‘Visual Aid’ Jesus film as familiar events happen with a modern spin: the temple that is cleansed is the set of an exploitive beer commercial; crucifixion happens in an overworked downtown Montreal hospital; temptation happens with an agent atop a skyscraper overlooking the city. What liberal Christians who adore this movie tend to ignore is that the allegory is there to serve a typical Arcand satire of culture. It’s a stirring film, but it now seems quite dated—it plays like an ‘80s period piece these days, it is so much of its own time.
These two films aren’t alone but they’re two great examples of a tradition that can be reverent and meditative like Last Temptation (or the Dennis Potter’s 1969 BBC Drama Son of Man) or satirical like Jesus of Montreal, or exuberant and visceral like Godspell or full-on crazy like Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter or an atheist polemic like Russell T Davies’ The Second Coming. It’s not that these films are actually heretical, either. They’re films made with a particular point of view, with an actual authorial intent instead of pretending differently. In many ways they’re more honest. In other ways they’re more troubling.
Which begs the question, does it have to be either ‘Visual Aid’ or ‘Flirting With Heresy’? Can’t you take a little from column A and a little from column B: an auteur-driven film about Jesus with a distinctive point of view that tries to depict the Gospel story as written? An adaptation that doesn’t let Jesus be dull but doesn’t let him be neurotic either?
The answer is yes. Behold, Pier Paulo Pasolini’s 1964 film, The Gospel According to Saint Matthew.
Pasolini, a devotee of Italian neo-realism, is probably the most unlikely candidate to direct a film about Jesus. He was a homosexual and a communist and his films tend toward the racy end of the spectrum. But when he made a movie using Matthew’s Gospel, he concentrated on the text, making no effort to bridge the short episodes that comprise it, nor bothering to explain or motivate the characters.
It sounds like a ‘Visual Aid’ style pictorial but Pasolini does something far from that. He goes at the text with the sort gusto only an outsider could bring, saying he wanted to do the film from a “believer's point of view,” approaching it with a sense of if this were real how would it be?
The gaps in the text become a virtue for Pasolini: they are not negative spaces which require a screenwriter to motivate things; they are the motivation itself. They emphasise the breakneck pace of Jesus’ ministry—the constant motion of preaching, miracles and railing prophetically at the status quo.
The beauty of this work is its roughness. The entire film is performed by non-actors, many from the southern Italian region where Pasolini shot it. Playing Jesus was a 19 year-old Spanish student, Enrique Irazoqui. Get past the unibrow that looks like it came from Maggie’s rival on The Simpsons and we have a totally full-blooded portrayal of Jesus. It’s part trade union boss, part revolutionary. It’s totally compelling. Pasolini gets that Jesus preaches to the crowds and understands the playful and serious dynamic between Jesus and the Pharisees. The result is unheard of in cinema: a Jesus with actual charisma.
Iarzoqui often makes Jesus a difficult figure, even downright hostile. But one could argue that’s not a problem with the film but our expectations of how Jesus should appear in a film in a culture where Robert Powell in Jesus of Nazareth is the norm.
The Gospel According to Saint Matthew is a film that’s as eclectic as its soundtrack (which takes from classical music, negro spirituals and Italian folk music). It doesn’t try to sentimentalize or explain or do anything other than take the Gospel text and interprets it as best as one can. It’s far from pretty but it’s also deeply compelling as well. You can see this in the final scenes. (They’re not subtitled in this clip but you don’t need them to understand it).
Two years after the invention of the motion picture camera by the Lumiere Brothers in 1895, Oscar Wilde, disgraced and imprisoned, wrote a letter to his ex-lover which was published some twenty years later under the title De Profundis. In it, Wilde talks about his own identification with the figure of Christ and the qualities that made Christ so compelling. Wilde conjures Christ as a romantic artist. “It is the imaginative quality of Christ’s own nature that makes him this palpitating centre of romance. The strange figures of poetic drama and ballad are made by the imagination of others, but out of his own imagination entirely did Jesus of Nazareth create himself… This is why he is so fascinating to artists. He has all the colour elements of life: mystery, strangeness, pathos, suggestion, ecstasy, love. He appeals to the temper of wonder, and creates that mood in which he alone can be understood.”
Writing on the cusp of the era of the motion picture, Wilde articulates the appeal of the Jesus story to filmmakers but also its problems. Jesus is a figure that excites human imagination, human emotion and human wisdom and yet film is ultimately a clumsy, incomplete and ultimately incompatible medium to try and capture that very experience of Jesus. And yet, they try. And so they should. For in these incomplete views of Jesus we occasionally get glimpses of mystery, strangeness, pathos, suggestion, ecstasy and love.
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