Jesus, the Gospels, and Cinematic Imagination

Introducing Jesus Movies, Christ Films, and the Messiah in Motion

Richard Walsh, Jeffrey L. Staley

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780567693877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Jesus films arose with cinema itself. Richard Walsh and Jeffrey L. Staley introduce students to these films with a general overview of the Jesus film tradition and with specific analyses of 22 of its most influential exemplars, stretching from La vie du Christ (1906) to Mary Magdalene (2018). The introduction to each film includes discussion of plot, characters, visuals, appeal to authority, and cultural location as well as consideration of the director's (and/or other filmmakers') achievements and style. Several film chapters end with reflections on problematic issues bedeviling the tradition, such as cultural imperialism and patriarchy. To assist teachers and researchers, each chapter includes a listing of DVD chapters and the approximate "time" (for both DVDs and streaming platforms) at which key film moments occur. The book also includes a Gospels Harmony cataloging the time at which key gospel incidents appear in these films. Extensive endnotes point readers to other important work on the tradition and specific films. While the authors strive to set the Jesus film tradition within cinema and its interpretation, the DVD/streaming listing and the Gospels Harmony facilitate the comparison of these films to gospel interpretation and the Jesus tradition.

1

La vie du Christ or La naissance, la vie et la mort du Christ (The Birth, the Life, and Death of Christ)

Alice Guy, director, Gaumont, 1906

PLOT SUMMARY: THE WOMEN AROUND JESUS

Alice Guy’s film is a series of twenty-five scenes (listed in DVD). While harmonizing material from all the gospels, the film’s episodic nature and passion focus resemble Mark. In fact, Guy’s film emphasizes the passion (nineteen scenes) even more than Mark. Her Palm Sunday scene, which begins the passion, appears a little after the nine-minute mark in the thirty-three-minute film. By contrast, the same incident does not appear in Mark until Mk 11:7-10 (cf. its similar placements in Mt. 27:7-9; Lk. 19:35-38; Jn 12:12-19). Similarly, while Mark devotes little more than a verse to the Via Dolorosa (Mk 15:20b-21; cf. the similar treatments in Mt. 27:31b-32; Lk. 23:26-32; Jn 19:17),¹ Guy’s film devotes more scenes to the way to the cross than to either the nativity (three) or the ministry (three). Given the cross’s importance in Western Christianity and the Stations of the Cross (and thus the Via Dolorosa) in Roman Catholic Christianity, this passion focus is not surprising.² After all, passion plays were Jesus films’ immediate artistic forerunners, and the first Jesus films were filmed passion plays, not “historical” treatments of Jesus (see Shepherd 2013: 11–34; Gaudreault 2016).

Intertitles, held by three girls dressed as angels, introduce the twenty-five scenes (all capitalized in this discussion). Except for the Sleep of Jesus, Jesus Falls the First Time, and Saint Veronica, the intertitles refer to recognizable gospel moments. However, only the Ecce Homo (Jn 19:5) intertitle “quotes” scripture. An accompanying lecturer, a commonplace in the exhibition of early biblical silents, may have supplied biblical/gospel quotations.³

Most scenes are single shots. Saint Veronica is a notable exception, with its cut-in of Veronica holding up the true icon (see also the Resurrection). Aspiring to a “historical look,” Guy carefully stages each scene’s mise-en-scène,⁴ often relying on the notes and watercolors of James Tissot’s illustrated The Life of Our Savior Jesus Christ for scene construction and costuming (particularly in the triumph, trial, and Via Dolorosa scenes, and in the presence of women in the latter).⁵ Her insistence on “natural” acting⁶ makes her film more “realistic” than other early silents (Foster 2013).

Guy’s reliance on Tissot, as well as the passion play tradition’s influence, renders her film a series of tableaux vivants. But, unlike the deposition tableau mocked by La ricotta (1963), Guy’s tableaux are vibrant. Her scenes have action and depth. Characters enter and exit throughout individual scenes (see the Miracle of Jairus’s Daughter). Action takes place in the foreground, background, and margins.

Consequently, Jesus is not always the center of attention.⁷ Several other families seek entry at the inn before the holy family arrives. Jesus enters the Miracle of Jairus’s Daughter and Palm Sunday late. During the Miracle of Jairus’s Daughter, Jesus eventually takes center stage, but the scene focuses on the family’s post-miracle celebration. The daughter never approaches Jesus, although other women worship Jesus in the left foreground. In Palm Sunday, a wall hides much of Jesus’s triumph while women and children prepare his way.

Jesus is frequently lost in the crowd or at the back of a scene. In the Denial of St Peter, Peter sits in the middle of the frame at a charcoal fire. As the action ensues, one catches various glimpses of Jesus through archways in the rear as Jesus passes and repasses on his way to his Roman trial. The focus is on the anguished Peter seeing Jesus, and Jesus seeing Peter’s denials. At times, in the Via Dolorosa scenes, Jesus is lost in the crowd or dwarfed, sometimes rendered unseeable, by his gigantic cross. In the Crucifixion, soldiers drop Jesus onto the cross and nail him to it. But the focus is the crowd in the foreground that, like the audience, has come to see Jesus’s death.

By contrast, the Jesus film tradition makes Jesus the static center of a scene’s composition, and Guy’s film sometimes follows this pattern too (e.g., in the Nativity, the Sleep of Jesus, the Samaritan, Mary Magdalene, the Last Supper, the Agony, and Descending from the Cross). Guy’s Jesus, however, is typically in motion—whether carried by others (Arrival in Bethlehem, the Descent from the Cross, and Committed to the Tomb), led passively to trial and suffering (Judas’s Betrayal, Jesus before Caiphus [sic], the Denial of St Peter, Jesus before Pontius Pilate, the Torment, and the various Via Dolorosa scenes), or moving under his own volition (the Miracle of Jairus’s Daughter, Palm Sunday, the Olive Garden, the Night Watch, and Judas’s Betrayal).

Guy’s Jesus is “passer-by” (Mk 6:48; Gospel of Thomas 42) and the film is a ritualistic/imperial procession. In this, the film echoes Luke’s travel narrative, where Jesus “sets his face” to go to Jerusalem (Lk. 9:51). The treks to Bethlehem and to the tomb bookend the film, but the lengthy Via Dolorosa scenes also bespeak procession. These processional stretches, as well as the fact that Jesus often enters scenes late, make the camera wait for Jesus (particularly in Climbing Golgotha).

The film pauses, as it processes, for the spectacle of the child in the manger (emphasized by the Sleep of Jesus), the risen Jesus, Veronica’s true image (see Figure 1.1),⁸ and most importantly (the spectacle of everyone gathering to see) Jesus’s agony on the cross. A previous scene confirms the cross’s centrality as Jesus “climbs Golgotha” with a cross so large that it dwarfs and obscures him.⁹ Similarly, at the Last Supper, the (three female) angels suddenly present Jesus transfigured, already attired (in loincloth) for the cross.

One of Guy’s striking innovations vis-à-vis the gospels and other early Jesus silents is the Sleep of Jesus. The incident stands in the place of the slaughter of the innocents (although no European film had yet presented that scene; Shepherd 2016a: 62) and stresses Jesus’s angelic protection and amusement (by an angelic choir). The angels who appear at the Last Supper and in the Olive Garden are different. They foreshadow and facilitate Jesus’s crucifixion.

These angels, and the angelic intertitles, represent the (preordained) story that everyone knows. Despite the attention these special-effect angels draw, Guy adds angels to the gospels only at the supper. The resurrected Jesus who appears and disappears in the empty tomb (following the order of Mk 16:6: “he is risen, he is not here”) is another special effect highlight.

While critics often remark on Guy’s realism (see Foster 2013), the angels and Jesus’s transfigurations indicate her equal fascination with the supernatural. She displays no post-Enlightenment leeriness of miracle. For Guy, if one could pull back the curtain of the everyday, one would see angels everywhere.

In contrast, the ubiquitous women gesture at the everyday, the household, or even the real(istic). In the Jesus film tradition, Guy’s film stands out because of these women.¹⁰ While women are always present in nativities, it is rare for the magi to have (exotic) women with them. It is even rarer for Jesus’s entire ministry to consist only of acts with women—the Samaritan woman, Jairus’s daughter, and Magdalene. In the passion, women are absent only from the Last Supper, the Olive Garden, the Night Watch, and the Bearing of the Cross.¹¹ They and children are quite troublingly present in Jesus before Caiphus and in the Torment.

Clearly, Guy’s Jesus belongs to these women. They press forward to be with him while men constantly push them away in the trials, on the Via Dolorosa, at the cross, and at the tomb.¹² Even in the film’s first scene, a Roman soldier rudely sends a weeping, exhausted Mary from the street,¹³ and the public ministry ends with men dismissing Magdalene from the house where she seeks Jesus.¹⁴

Film often invents characters not in the gospels. And Guy adds women to the Jesus story so liberally that the film almost becomes a Jesus adjacent film. But, perhaps, these women simply realize the story hinted at by Lk. 8:2-3.¹⁵

MEMORABLE CHARACTERS

1 The women who support Jesus and establish his community.

2 The angels who protect, amuse, and worship Jesus, but who also “call” him to his sufferings as well as presenting the film (as revelation) to the audience.

3 Jesus as passer-by.

MEMORABLE VISUALS

1 Medium shot of Veronica hold...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Digitalizing Jesus
• 1 La vie du Christ or La naissance, la vie et la mort du Christ (The Birth, the Life, and Death of Christ) Alice Guy, 1906
• 2 La vie et passion de notre seigneur Jésus Christ (The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ) Ferdinand Zecca, 1907
• 3 From the Manger to the Cross Sidney Olcott, 1912
• 4 Intolerance: Love’s Struggle throughout the Ages D. W. Griffith, 1916
• 5 The King of Kings Cecil B. DeMille, 1927
• 6 King of Kings Nicholas Ray, 1961
• 7 Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew) Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964
• 8 The Greatest Story Ever Told George Stevens, 1965
• 9 Godspell David Greene, 1973
• 10 Jesus Christ Superstar Norman Jewison, 1973
• 11 Il messia (The Messiah) Roberto Rossellini, 1975
• 12 Jesus of Nazareth Franco Zeffirelli, 1977
• 13 Monty Python’s Life of Brian Terry Jones, 1979
• 14 The Jesus Film John Krish and Peter Sykes, 1979
• 15 The Last Temptation of Christ Martin Scorsese, 1988
• 16 Jésus de Montréal Denys Arcand, 1989
• 17 Jesus Roger Young, 1999
• 18 The Miracle Maker Derek W. Hayes and Stanislav Sokolov, 2000
• 19 The Gospel of John Philip Saville, 2003
• 20 The Passion of the Christ Mel Gibson, 2004
• 21 Son of Man Mark Dornford-May, 2006
• 22 Mary Magdalene Garth Davis, 2018
• A Gospels Harmony of Select Jesus Films
• References
• Film Index
• Topic Index
• Imprint