Superstar

The world of western art is full of the figure of Jesus Christ. The art form that is film is no exception. I’m influenced to write a post about this now I guess because of how we have been immersed this month in the incredible media hype surrounding the election of the new Pope; or maybe because Holy Week is around the corner and this is that time of year when we, who have been raised Catholic, begin a period of silent mourning, and turn to our favorite forms of art for company and solace.

Unlike some of the spectacular paintings and music made about Christ, the art of cinema is unfortunately not filled with many great movies about Jesus. Many movies have been made about Him, some of them have gone on to become “classics”, like Ben Hur, The Robe,  The Greatest Story Ever Told (the fabulous Max Von Sydow as a… Swedish Christ?), but few really stand out as works of art. Since in this case, with religion in the midst, it is everyone’s opinion what constitutes a work of art, I’m going to write about three films about Christ that   I feel come closer to the mark in one way or another: Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew) by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jesus Christ Superstar by Norman Jewison, and The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson.

The Gospel According to Matthew , The Passion of the Christ, Jesus Christ Superstar

 

My favorite among the three is the one made by the Marxist, atheist Pasolini.  When The Gospel According to Matthew was released in 1964, it was criticized by both the Marxists on the left and the extreme conservative religious right; the former because they felt betrayed by a great Marxist filmmaker who would make a film about a religious hero, including his miracles; the latter because of this amazingly eclectic, unusual, and very down-to-earth vision of the Christ. Pasolini’s response to the criticism from the left (probably the only ones that he really cared about) was that his film was "A reaction against the conformity of Marxism. The mystery of life and death and of suffering — and particularly of religion ... is something that Marxists do not want to consider. But these are and have always been questions of great importance for human beings.”

The film is made in the fabulous style of Italian neorealism, and most of the actors that appear in the movie were non-professional. As an interesting fact, the cast included Italian intellectuals, poets and philosophers, and I’ve read that Pasolini was even considering casting the poets Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg as Christ for his movie. He finally cast a Spanish student in the role.

The Gospel According to Matthew

 The result is a movie that, without romanticizing the story, without making Christ appear “heavenly” and preachy, captures the essence of Christ, his teachings and his gentleness, but also his anger at injustice; Christ is shown in some scenes, movie critics have pointed out, with the furor of  a union organizer or a war protester. Visually, the movie, filmed in black and white, is fascinating because it contains elements from different time periods and places; Jesus wears his hair short and doesn’t have much of a beard, as Jewish men of his time did, but the Roman soldiers wear costume influenced by art from the Renaissance. Pasolini himself later said of his film that it was "The life of Christ plus 2,000 years of storytelling about the life of Christ”.

The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film festival, was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Art Direction, but singularly also won the first prize of the International Catholic Office of the Cinema, which screened the film inside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

Another interesting fact is that The Gospel According to Mathew was mostly filmed in the poor, desolate Italian district of Basilicata and its capital city Matera, with its famous ancient cave dwellings (the Sassi di Matera). Forty years later, Mel Gibson returned to this district and used some of the very locations to film The Passion of the Christ.

The criticism that Mel Gibson received for his film The Passion of the Christ were directed not at the film as art form but, like with Pasolini’s film, at its content and depiction of the story of Christ. The movie has been called anti-Semitic and was condemned for being so extremely violent, to the point that at the movie theatre where I saw it for the first time, in Minnesota, there was actually a sign on the counter where one purchased the tickets with  a bizzare warning about the violence in the film, something I’d never seen before and haven’t seen since.
 

The Passion of the Christ

I do not like gory, grisly violence in films, but I tolerate it when I feel the director had no other choice but to use it (for example, the opening battle among gangs scene in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York or the scenes in the Roman circus in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator). I don’t think this was the case with The Passion of the Christ. The extreme violence could have been avoided. Unlike Pasolini’s Gospel that focuses on Christ’s teachings and his meaning, Gibson has chosen to focus on Christ’s physical suffering and the violence surrounding his death.  In what I find kind of ironic, the Marxist atheist captures Christ’s spirituality and the conservative Catholic, that is Gibson, captured the materialistic realism of his death.

The violence and shocking gruesomeness is what I do not like about The Passion of the Christ. I do, however, understand Mel Gibson’s wish to be truthful to the story to the extreme detail of every wound inflicted, and I understand he did extensive research on the instruments of torture used by the Romans in those times. It is this fidelity to the materialistic aspects of the story that make the movie unique overall. What I like about the movie is some of this fidelity; this is a movie that is well directed, well-acted and has some very beautiful scenes, like the one between Jesus and his mother when he is still a carpenter making her a table, or the scene of the last supper with his apostles; it is also a movie in Aramaic and Latin. We finally have a movie where the Roman soldiers aren’t speaking English and don’t have British accents! But it is hard to watch this movie more than once because of its gore.

Jesus Christ Superstar has none of the pretentions of the other two films I’ve written about. It does not begin to try to be a faithful representation of the time or place of the story of Christ, and it doesn’t want to focus on his teachings. It is a lovely metaphor of the meaning of Christ and his passion.  The movie was shot in Israel, in the ruins of Advat, but any fidelity to the times stops there.

Norman Jewison, a protestant Christian notwithstanding his last name, has always made films with strong social justice content.  He is also a wonder of a director for taking musicals to the screen, having also directed the award winning Fiddler on the Roof.  In taking Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera to the screen, he fills it with dynamism and modern symbolism, bringing the story closer to the youth of the time when it opened in 1973, myself included. It also is non-temporal, but in a symbolic way.

 

Jesus Christ Superstar

 

The Roman soldiers are wearing army fatigues, military tanks and war machinery drive Judas to betray Christ; drug and guns dealers are the ones thrown out of the temple by Jesus.  And his followers are in bell bottom jeans, and they dance in joyous celebration with Simon singing : “you’ll get the power and the glory, forever and ever and ever”. It seems that these movies will guarantee just that, they will ensure, in this modern day art form,  that Jesus Christ continues to be a superstar.