Lent film evenings

Tomorrow evening we will begin the first of five Lent film evenings at the St John's Vicarage at which we will show four controversial Jesus films before having a discussion about all four films on the final evening:

The Gospel According To St Matthew

“[Pier Paulo] Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew was made in 1964 by a Marxist who was frequently accused of blasphemy by the Catholic church and whose attitude to religion was ambivalent.

Its portrait of the Messiah - played by Enrique Irazoqui, a young Spanish economics student with a scraggy beard - is far harsher than the usual soft saint that passes for Jesus. He is, as screenwriter and director Paul Mayersberg has suggested, "a procurer for God". The actor wears no make-up and nor does the rest of the cast. Judas is played by a truck-driver from Rome (Otello Sestili), and Pasolini's own mother is the Virgin Mary. They are all amateurs, and the close-ups of their faces make the story seem more real than usual. The bleak hillside scenery of Calabria, where the film was made, gives the film a primitive feel that is augmented by grainy cinematography. The soundtrack - Prokofiev, Bach, Mozart and even Billie Holiday - surprises us … What Pasolini clearly wanted was a believable gospel, armed with real people … He did say … that he was not interested in deconsecrating: "That is a fashion I hate. I want to 'reconsecrate' as much as possible."

It is a stark film (someone has described it as one-dimensional), but with clear-headed interpretative qualities that avoid the usual cliches. This Christ was a political animal, angry at social injustice. The silent cry from the cross is believable and the miracles avoid any kind of underlining comment - they just happen, with not a special effect in sight.” (The Guardian, November 2000)

The Last Temptation of Christ

“This is a life-of-Christ story unlike any other … In adapting this epic tale, [Martin] Scorsese has stripped away the familiar epic trappings to concentrate on the human dimension, and except for the central character and the basic outline of the story, the film has nothing in common with the more conventional accounts.

The most radical departure is Jesus Himself. There is no plaster saintliness here. When we first see Him, Christ is a cross-maker, collaborating with the Romans in their persecution of the rebellious Israelites. His reason for this, He says, is to make God hate Him: "God loves Me and I can't stand the pain." And He goes as far in His efforts to alienate His Father as to hold the feet of the rebels as the nails are driven in and their blood spurts into His face.

Scorsese takes a huge risk in these early moments. He succeeds in conveying Christ's pain, but at the same time he alienates us from his hero. Scorsese's specialty is souls in torment. In ‘Mean Streets,’ his protagonist stuck his finger in an open flame and speculated on the pain of Hell. In ‘Taxi Driver,’ Travis Bickle's Hell was the streets of New York, and for Jake La Motta in ‘Raging Bull,’ it was a boxing ring.

The Saviour here is on a direct line with these characters. But these men were outside God's circle. Being chosen by God and having His divinity within Him are the cause of Christ's suffering. This Christ is wracked with doubt over his destiny. He can't be certain if the voices He hears are those of God or the Devil. Hating His own weakness and cowardice and susceptibility to temptation, Jesus excoriates His flesh, wearing a nail-studded belt around His waist.

It is this conflict - the struggle between the spirit and the flesh - that Scorsese and his screen writer, Paul Schrader (who wrote ‘Taxi Driver’ and co-wrote ‘Raging Bull’), take as their subject. In this they attempt to strike a universal chord -- to place Christ not above us, and above our weaknesses, but on a level with us, and prone to the same doubts and temptations.” (Washington Post, 1988)

Jesus of Montreal

“The action of this movie is set in motion by a theatre-loving priest who decides to commission a contemporary Passion Play. He engages Daniel, a young actor played by the androgynously ethereal Lothaire Bluteau, who conscripts a group of unemployed Montréal actors to carry out this commission. Their performance, which makes use of Mount Royal as an outdoor theatre, dazzles the audience even while it offends the priest …

Jesus of Montreal has the audacity to take institutional religion and spiritual questing seriously and still call itself a comedy. The device of history as a play within a film permits Denys Arcand to move seamlessly from one line of narrative continuity to another, so that eventually the film moves towards a unifying and credible answer to the implicit question: what would Jesus look like if he walked among us today? Daniel becomes so identified with the character of Jesus that the line between ancient narrative and the contemporary life in which he is deeply immersed becomes deliberately blurred. Daniel rails against crass corporate culture like Christ among the money-changers, cultivates a sublime asceticism and ultimately transforms the material world through his struggle and suffering. So it is that we see how life among troubled and searching actors in modern-day Montréal might be marked by halo-traces of a time-honoured story of death and rebirth. Arcand has created a brilliantly witty allegory for a commercial age in which doubt is not merely conceived as an antithesis to faith; it is the permanent fact of our postmodern condition.” (The Canadian Encyclopedia)

The Passion of the Christ

“Well before the commercial release of his film, Mel Gibson had organized private showings for important journalists and religious leaders. If he was counting on assuring the goodwill of those he invited, he badly miscalculated; or perhaps he instead manifested a superior Machiavellianism.

The commentaries quickly followed, and far from praising the film or reassuring the public, there were only terrified vituperations and anguished cries of alarm concerning the anti-Semitic violence that might erupt at the cinema exits ... Nothing justifies these accusations. For Mel Gibson, the death of Christ is a burden born by all humanity, starting with Mel Gibson himself. When his film strays a bit from the Gospel text, which happens only rarely, it is not to demonize the Jews but to emphasize the pity that Jesus inspires in some of them: in Simon of Cyrene for example, whose role is amplified, or in Veronica, the woman who, according to an ancient tradition, offered a cloth to Jesus during the ascent to Golgotha on which the features of his face became imprinted.

The more things calm down, the more it becomes clear in retrospect that the film precipitated a veritable tantrum in the world’s most influential media that more or less contaminated the entire atmosphere in its wake. The public had nothing to do with the controversy, since it had not seen the film. It wondered with evident curiosity what was it in this Passion that could create such a panic among those who are normally so difficult to shock. What ensued was easy to predict: instead of the 2600 screens originally planned, The Passion of the Christ opened on more than 4000 screens on Ash Wednesday - a day evidently chosen for its penitential symbolism.

The charge of anti-Semitism has receded somewhat since the film’s release. But the film’s detractors have rallied around a second complaint, the excessive violence that they see in the film. There is indeed great violence, but it does not exceed, it seems to me, that of many other films that Gibson’s critics would not dream of condemning. This Passion has shaken up (no doubt only provisionally) the chessboard of media reactions concerning violence in the movies. All those who are normally accustomed to spectacular violence, or even see in its constant evolution so many victories of freedom over tyranny, find themselves condemning it in Gibson’s film with extraordinary vehemence. On the other side, all those who see it as their duty to denounce cinematic violence (without their criticisms ever having the slightest impact) not only tolerate this film, but frequently admire it.” (René Girard, Anthropoetics 10, no. 1, Spring / Summer 2004)

We will be using the following questions on the final evening of the series when we will be discussing the four films:

1. What surprised you about the depictions of Jesus seen in these films?
2. Did you find any aspects of the films particularly moving? What and why?
3. Was your understanding of who Jesus is and what he did challenged in any way by seeing these films? What and why?
4. Several of these films were controversial when released, why do you think that was the case? Do you think people were right to protest against the making or distribution of these films?

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Peter Gabriel - Passion.