The Passion of Christ (the film)
The film "The passion of the Christ" opened in South Africa yesterday, and most newspapers published reviews. A frriend send this objection to one of the reviews, and my reply follows,
From: Phillip Pare
I have never seen such blasphemy, inaccuracy and bigotry towards religion in a review before. What do other people say about this review from South Africa's Mail and Guardian?
Perhaps the fact that the critic uses the same expletives for "The Titanic" that he uses for "The Passion of the Christ" says something about the critic's mindset.
I have copied it from the Newspaper's web site which can be found at:
http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/art/2004/2004mar/040326-motw.html
Maybe a bit of the critic's background could help. In searching the web I came across the following at:
http://ascweb.usc.edu/news.php?storyID=10
Shaun de Waal, Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, South Africa. De Waal is the weekly newspaper's literary editor and film critic. He has also served as
the paper's arts editor. Co-editor of two anthologies of journalism and founder of South Africa's first gay talk radio program, de Waal has been covering the arts for 15 years.
And a response:
From: "Steve Hayes"
On 28 Mar 2004 at 0:16, Chris_Soc wrote:
> From: Phillip Pare
>
> I have never seen such blasphemy, inaccuracy and bigotry towards
> religion in a review before. What do other people say about this review
> from South Africa's Mail and Guardian?
> Notably, too, Gibson is so excited by the violence and pain of Jesus's
> death that he glides over the Resurrection as if it were a footnote to
> all that guignol, instead of the whole point of the thing. As Jesus
> himself knew, to really betray someone, it takes a disciple.
Hi Phillip,
Thanks for posting that.
The review I heard on the radio was even less sympathetic. I still didn't
catch who wrote it, even though it was rebroadcast yesterday on SAFM.
I left in the last paragraph of the M&G review, where at least the author
recognises that the resurrection was "the whole point of the thing". The
broadcast review was just heavy sarcasm the whole way through, and the
only comment it made about the resurrection scene was that it looked like
an ad for a sequel, "coming soon to a cinema near you".
Will you be going to see it?
It would be interesting to have your comments when you have.
I'm not sure that I will be going to see it, for several reasons.
The main one is that I'm not too keen on films where actors portray
Christ.
A second one is perhaps summed up in the last paragraph of the M&G review:
one of the differences between Orthodox and Western theology is that
Western theology seems to place far more emphasis on the crucifixion, and
less on the resurrectrion; on Good Friday, rather than Pascha. It seems to
me that this film isolates the sufferings of Christ, and in so doing would
distort them.
I say that not having seen it, which is probably not a good way of judging
a film. But I haven't gone out of my way to see other "Jesus" films
either.
Another reason for my reluctance to see it is similar to my reluctance to
see the "Lord of the Rings" films. In that case, I don't want seeing the
film to disturb the pictures in my head when I read the book. Reading the
gospels is slightly different from that because in the Orthodox Church
having "pictures in one's head" is discouraged when one is praying. But
the underlying reason is related. In both "The Lord of the Rings" and "The
passion of the Christ" one is getting one man's interpretation of what it
means.
I quote from a paper by an Anglican priest (now a retired bishop), John
Davies, on "Christian art":
'So if we are to have Christian art, as Christians we must reject anything
that does not bear witness to the gospel in some way, and as artists we
must refuse any interpretation that suggests that its only purpose is to
give us what we would have seen if we had been present on the spot.
Now we can see a first basic concord: the gospels themselves are not a
record of what we should have seen if we had been present on the spot,
alive in our Lord's time. The gospel is not biography or history or any
such thing. It reveals, not what people saw, but what most of them could
not see. It is a witness to faith, not merely to so-called facts. Even
Mark, the first and apparently plainest gospel, is definitely not a
chronicle. The events it records are nonsense without the faith that makes
them worth recording. It is not to be read for its historic evidential
value, but as a witness to the faith implanted in the minds of the
disciples by the events of the gospel, the experience of knowing Jesus.
They are saying, "This is what convinced us".
Here is one essential tension that makes the gospel come close to an art
form itself. It is attempting to make visible something that is invisible
to most eyes in the events recorded -- that God was in Christ.
But artists say that art cannot be propaganda, propaganda cannot be art.
True. Lots of art is ruined by the artist's concern for a cause. Dickens,
for instance, and the moralism of "Adam Bede". Certainly a work should not
be dominated by such things, but it is also unlikely that good art will
come from a mind that it not dominated. If the artist is not involved, how
can he produce something that speaks to us in our human situation? On the
other hand, if he does care, how can he avoid making his work propaganda?
This is a permanent problem, certainly not limited to the tensions of our
own time. The answer is that art ceases to be art unless it is free in the
impact it makes, whether that impact be propaganda or not. Art ceases to
be art if it says, "This must mean for you what it means for me -- if it
doesn't do exactly this, then it has failed, or you're just prejudiced".
Such an approach fixes art, stops it being free to speak in depth. All
great artists are prepared for their art to live its own life, to some
extent beyond their control.
A dramatist or novelist should never be judged by the characters he
creates. Shakespeare couldn't care less about the character of Mark Antony
as such. What he is concerned about is the living developing
uncontrollable relationship between Antony and Brutus, or Antony and
Cleopatra.
In contrast, Shaw is much easier to read, much less demanding, because
each of his characters is splendid and individual, never really involved
with another character, always fully under control.
Shakespeare lets his producers and actors have freedom to understand and
present his play in any way that is coherent. There are as many Hamlets as
there are actors to play Hamlet. Shakespeare is not prepared to say, "I
know all there is to know about this thing -- it has got to mean to you
what it means to me".
Shaw insists that he does know -- right down to the colour of the eyes.
Either your production is as Shaw intended it to be, or it is wrong. It is
this fixedness which is the enemy of art, the reason why the artist is
suspicious about propaganda.
Delius once heard a passage of his music played a dozen times by a great
executant, each time in a completely different way. Each time the player
asked, "Is this what you intended?" And each time Delius replied, "Yes".
Vaughan Williams was once asked about a queer-looking note during the
rehearsal of one of his works. Checking it, he replied, "It looks wrong
and sounds wrong, but it's right." This sort of thing is the sign of great
artists, to be compared, for instance, with Elgar, with his exact and
rigid expressions marks which give the impression that the composer knows
all there is to know about his composition.
T.S. Eliot was once asked if a certain interpretation of a poem of his was
correct, and he replied, "Yes, if it is consistent". Contrast this with
Yeats, who seems to throw his emotions at me and insist that I share them.
This must mean to you what it means to me.
But some Christians feel obliged to say just this. They feel it is their
duty to persuade others to accept the faith that has convinced them. Is
this the point where art and Christianity are irreconcilable?
On the contrary, here is a second basic concord. The gospel is always God
meeting man. God is constant, but man is inconstant. God meets man where
he is - that is the essence of the incarnation. The terms in which God
meets man are constantly changing. Where a church or Christian insists on
a prefabricated formula, a universal set of words, a uniform attitude of
mind, the acceptance of one special slogan, anything more than the basic
creed, there is the chance of idolatry. We say, in effect, "I am the
master of this thing. I know all there is to know about it".'
And that is what makes me wary of going to see either "The Lord of the
Rings" or "The passion of the Christ". It is that I'm wary of having my
nose rubbed in Peter Jackson's or Mel Gibson's interpretation of it.
I think Zefirelli made a film of the life of Christ too. I didn't see that
either. He also made one of Francis of Assissi, "Brother Sun, Sister
Moon", which I *did* see, and rather liked. Unfortunately because of some
copyright dispute one can't get it on video, and it's disappeared from
human ken. But that didn't have actors portraying Christ.
At the riskof putting in a plug for Orthodox ikonography, I quote Davies
again:
If there is a distinctively Christian art, its distinctive characteristic
will be this characteristic of the gospel: bearing two values in one set
of terms. It will have an essential bipolarity, an inherent ambivalence,
that is a simultaneous presentation of opposites in one set of terms. In
art, as in theology, the temptation is to avoid the clash and tension and
to be monophysite, unipolar. This unipolarity can be directed either to
the divine or to the human. Before the Renaissance it was directed to the
divine. During and after it, the tendency has been towards the human,
especially in the graphic arts.
The post-Renaissance humanists say that man is a suitable image in himself
-- the divine is on our plane, and needs no translation to be made
visible. This is the kind of art on which most of us have been brought up,
and is the standard of most of our religious pictures. If we want to show
the Holy Trinity we paint a human family. If we want to depict God, we
draw a man, and count it most successful when the result looks natural,
most like the human anatomy and epidermis, as when the local paper
reported that the parish church was having a wall painting "which depicts
the Almighty fully life size".
They say God's world is this world: everything is to be vital, natural,
free- flowing, rejoicing in activity and flux. The other kind of painting
that came before the Renaissance, the "primitive", laymen are inclined to
class a archaeology, not art. But the reason for this "primitive" type of
work was not that the artists could not do any better -- their distortions
were deliberate, to get away from the flux and impermanence of this plane,
to represent the divine as beyond this world in the spiritual world of
permanence. So they kept away from the free-flowing line, they stiffened
their figures, distorted proportions, and even reversed perspectives. They
knew that a massive job of translation has to be done to convey anything
permanent, eternal, in terms of this world's ephemera. The Renaissance
created a god in the image of man, concerned for the human realm only, and
for visual likeness.
The humanist heresy has tended to destroy any real sense of the different
world of God, and Christian art has very nearly died in the last three or
four hundred years. A few have broken through, because either by their
psychological make up or by their deep understanding of the gospel, they
become dissatisfied with themselves as artists on only one plane. Others
have maintained their affinities with traditions other than the humanism
of the Western European Renaissance -- El Greco is an obvious example, and
Michelangelo and Mantegna.
To all accounts, Gibson's portrayal of Christ is in the Western humanist
tradition -- it shows only the human pole, not the divine. Perhaps I
should not say that without having seen the film.
Orthodox theologians tend to be deeply suspicious of this tendency in
Western religious art. My daughter Bridget was asked to give a lecture on
ikons to a group of Anglicans, and to illustrate the Western one-sidedness
and humanism, she refered to the Isenheim altarpiece of Gruenewald. That,
like Gibson's film, seems to concentrate on the goriness of the
crucifixion, and seems quite unipolar. Orthodox ikonographers take that an
example of ikonographic heresy.
I pointed out that it was not quite as unipolar as it looks, and referred
to Davies's paper:
In Christianity we speak about two worlds, two poles, two values, in one
set of terms. This is something more vigorous than mere contrast. In
Leonardo's "Virgin of the Rocks" there is contrast: between the peaceful
Virgin and Child, and the rugged landscape behind. There is also a
masterly contrast of light and shade. But there is not this essential
Christian ambivalence or bipolarity, because the two sets of values or
poles are not in the same terms. One is human (the divine pole), the other
is merely geological. Contrast this with Breugel's "Adoration of the
kings" where the calm dignity of the baby and his companions clashed
violently with the incomprehending, half-witted, earthy character of the
crowd. Here are the opposites in one set of terms. God and man, and the
earthiness of man is very earthy. Contrast almost any peaceful Italian
Renaissance crucifixion -- Perugino, for instance, or Raphael, with the
Isenheim altar piece of Gruenewald, where the Christ is obviously a human
in extreme agony, and the whole being of St John is concentrated in one
extruded finger, held rigid in a reverse curve, pointing at the Crucified,
as if to say, "That is the Son of God -- believe it if you dare!"
So it's not that the goriness of Gibson's film that is objectionable per
se, but the question whether it is unipolar and humanist, or whether it
does in some way present Christ as the incarnate Son of God.
Perhaps that might be a reason for going to see it -- to see for myself if
it is there.
An interesting sidelight: about 40 years ago a Jewish artist, Harold
Rubin, had an exhibition in Johannesburg, and among the works exhibited
was once called "My Jesus", which was rather like Gibson's film ot
Gruenewald's crucifixion. It showed a human being in extreme agony.
It caused some controversy, and Rubin was formally charged with blasphemy.
An Anglican monk, Brother Roger of the Comunity of the Resurrection, was
hauled off the train to Durban to give evidence at the trial (he had
actually opened the exhibition).
I wonder what people would have thought of Gibson's film in those days.
From: Phillip Pare
I have never seen such blasphemy, inaccuracy and bigotry towards religion in a review before. What do other people say about this review from South Africa's Mail and Guardian?
Perhaps the fact that the critic uses the same expletives for "The Titanic" that he uses for "The Passion of the Christ" says something about the critic's mindset.
I have copied it from the Newspaper's web site which can be found at:
http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/art/2004/2004mar/040326-motw.html
Maybe a bit of the critic's background could help. In searching the web I came across the following at:
http://ascweb.usc.edu/news.php?storyID=10
Shaun de Waal, Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, South Africa. De Waal is the weekly newspaper's literary editor and film critic. He has also served as
the paper's arts editor. Co-editor of two anthologies of journalism and founder of South Africa's first gay talk radio program, de Waal has been covering the arts for 15 years.
And a response:
From: "Steve Hayes"
On 28 Mar 2004 at 0:16, Chris_Soc wrote:
> From: Phillip Pare
>
> I have never seen such blasphemy, inaccuracy and bigotry towards
> religion in a review before. What do other people say about this review
> from South Africa's Mail and Guardian?
> Notably, too, Gibson is so excited by the violence and pain of Jesus's
> death that he glides over the Resurrection as if it were a footnote to
> all that guignol, instead of the whole point of the thing. As Jesus
> himself knew, to really betray someone, it takes a disciple.
Hi Phillip,
Thanks for posting that.
The review I heard on the radio was even less sympathetic. I still didn't
catch who wrote it, even though it was rebroadcast yesterday on SAFM.
I left in the last paragraph of the M&G review, where at least the author
recognises that the resurrection was "the whole point of the thing". The
broadcast review was just heavy sarcasm the whole way through, and the
only comment it made about the resurrection scene was that it looked like
an ad for a sequel, "coming soon to a cinema near you".
Will you be going to see it?
It would be interesting to have your comments when you have.
I'm not sure that I will be going to see it, for several reasons.
The main one is that I'm not too keen on films where actors portray
Christ.
A second one is perhaps summed up in the last paragraph of the M&G review:
one of the differences between Orthodox and Western theology is that
Western theology seems to place far more emphasis on the crucifixion, and
less on the resurrectrion; on Good Friday, rather than Pascha. It seems to
me that this film isolates the sufferings of Christ, and in so doing would
distort them.
I say that not having seen it, which is probably not a good way of judging
a film. But I haven't gone out of my way to see other "Jesus" films
either.
Another reason for my reluctance to see it is similar to my reluctance to
see the "Lord of the Rings" films. In that case, I don't want seeing the
film to disturb the pictures in my head when I read the book. Reading the
gospels is slightly different from that because in the Orthodox Church
having "pictures in one's head" is discouraged when one is praying. But
the underlying reason is related. In both "The Lord of the Rings" and "The
passion of the Christ" one is getting one man's interpretation of what it
means.
I quote from a paper by an Anglican priest (now a retired bishop), John
Davies, on "Christian art":
'So if we are to have Christian art, as Christians we must reject anything
that does not bear witness to the gospel in some way, and as artists we
must refuse any interpretation that suggests that its only purpose is to
give us what we would have seen if we had been present on the spot.
Now we can see a first basic concord: the gospels themselves are not a
record of what we should have seen if we had been present on the spot,
alive in our Lord's time. The gospel is not biography or history or any
such thing. It reveals, not what people saw, but what most of them could
not see. It is a witness to faith, not merely to so-called facts. Even
Mark, the first and apparently plainest gospel, is definitely not a
chronicle. The events it records are nonsense without the faith that makes
them worth recording. It is not to be read for its historic evidential
value, but as a witness to the faith implanted in the minds of the
disciples by the events of the gospel, the experience of knowing Jesus.
They are saying, "This is what convinced us".
Here is one essential tension that makes the gospel come close to an art
form itself. It is attempting to make visible something that is invisible
to most eyes in the events recorded -- that God was in Christ.
But artists say that art cannot be propaganda, propaganda cannot be art.
True. Lots of art is ruined by the artist's concern for a cause. Dickens,
for instance, and the moralism of "Adam Bede". Certainly a work should not
be dominated by such things, but it is also unlikely that good art will
come from a mind that it not dominated. If the artist is not involved, how
can he produce something that speaks to us in our human situation? On the
other hand, if he does care, how can he avoid making his work propaganda?
This is a permanent problem, certainly not limited to the tensions of our
own time. The answer is that art ceases to be art unless it is free in the
impact it makes, whether that impact be propaganda or not. Art ceases to
be art if it says, "This must mean for you what it means for me -- if it
doesn't do exactly this, then it has failed, or you're just prejudiced".
Such an approach fixes art, stops it being free to speak in depth. All
great artists are prepared for their art to live its own life, to some
extent beyond their control.
A dramatist or novelist should never be judged by the characters he
creates. Shakespeare couldn't care less about the character of Mark Antony
as such. What he is concerned about is the living developing
uncontrollable relationship between Antony and Brutus, or Antony and
Cleopatra.
In contrast, Shaw is much easier to read, much less demanding, because
each of his characters is splendid and individual, never really involved
with another character, always fully under control.
Shakespeare lets his producers and actors have freedom to understand and
present his play in any way that is coherent. There are as many Hamlets as
there are actors to play Hamlet. Shakespeare is not prepared to say, "I
know all there is to know about this thing -- it has got to mean to you
what it means to me".
Shaw insists that he does know -- right down to the colour of the eyes.
Either your production is as Shaw intended it to be, or it is wrong. It is
this fixedness which is the enemy of art, the reason why the artist is
suspicious about propaganda.
Delius once heard a passage of his music played a dozen times by a great
executant, each time in a completely different way. Each time the player
asked, "Is this what you intended?" And each time Delius replied, "Yes".
Vaughan Williams was once asked about a queer-looking note during the
rehearsal of one of his works. Checking it, he replied, "It looks wrong
and sounds wrong, but it's right." This sort of thing is the sign of great
artists, to be compared, for instance, with Elgar, with his exact and
rigid expressions marks which give the impression that the composer knows
all there is to know about his composition.
T.S. Eliot was once asked if a certain interpretation of a poem of his was
correct, and he replied, "Yes, if it is consistent". Contrast this with
Yeats, who seems to throw his emotions at me and insist that I share them.
This must mean to you what it means to me.
But some Christians feel obliged to say just this. They feel it is their
duty to persuade others to accept the faith that has convinced them. Is
this the point where art and Christianity are irreconcilable?
On the contrary, here is a second basic concord. The gospel is always God
meeting man. God is constant, but man is inconstant. God meets man where
he is - that is the essence of the incarnation. The terms in which God
meets man are constantly changing. Where a church or Christian insists on
a prefabricated formula, a universal set of words, a uniform attitude of
mind, the acceptance of one special slogan, anything more than the basic
creed, there is the chance of idolatry. We say, in effect, "I am the
master of this thing. I know all there is to know about it".'
And that is what makes me wary of going to see either "The Lord of the
Rings" or "The passion of the Christ". It is that I'm wary of having my
nose rubbed in Peter Jackson's or Mel Gibson's interpretation of it.
I think Zefirelli made a film of the life of Christ too. I didn't see that
either. He also made one of Francis of Assissi, "Brother Sun, Sister
Moon", which I *did* see, and rather liked. Unfortunately because of some
copyright dispute one can't get it on video, and it's disappeared from
human ken. But that didn't have actors portraying Christ.
At the riskof putting in a plug for Orthodox ikonography, I quote Davies
again:
If there is a distinctively Christian art, its distinctive characteristic
will be this characteristic of the gospel: bearing two values in one set
of terms. It will have an essential bipolarity, an inherent ambivalence,
that is a simultaneous presentation of opposites in one set of terms. In
art, as in theology, the temptation is to avoid the clash and tension and
to be monophysite, unipolar. This unipolarity can be directed either to
the divine or to the human. Before the Renaissance it was directed to the
divine. During and after it, the tendency has been towards the human,
especially in the graphic arts.
The post-Renaissance humanists say that man is a suitable image in himself
-- the divine is on our plane, and needs no translation to be made
visible. This is the kind of art on which most of us have been brought up,
and is the standard of most of our religious pictures. If we want to show
the Holy Trinity we paint a human family. If we want to depict God, we
draw a man, and count it most successful when the result looks natural,
most like the human anatomy and epidermis, as when the local paper
reported that the parish church was having a wall painting "which depicts
the Almighty fully life size".
They say God's world is this world: everything is to be vital, natural,
free- flowing, rejoicing in activity and flux. The other kind of painting
that came before the Renaissance, the "primitive", laymen are inclined to
class a archaeology, not art. But the reason for this "primitive" type of
work was not that the artists could not do any better -- their distortions
were deliberate, to get away from the flux and impermanence of this plane,
to represent the divine as beyond this world in the spiritual world of
permanence. So they kept away from the free-flowing line, they stiffened
their figures, distorted proportions, and even reversed perspectives. They
knew that a massive job of translation has to be done to convey anything
permanent, eternal, in terms of this world's ephemera. The Renaissance
created a god in the image of man, concerned for the human realm only, and
for visual likeness.
The humanist heresy has tended to destroy any real sense of the different
world of God, and Christian art has very nearly died in the last three or
four hundred years. A few have broken through, because either by their
psychological make up or by their deep understanding of the gospel, they
become dissatisfied with themselves as artists on only one plane. Others
have maintained their affinities with traditions other than the humanism
of the Western European Renaissance -- El Greco is an obvious example, and
Michelangelo and Mantegna.
To all accounts, Gibson's portrayal of Christ is in the Western humanist
tradition -- it shows only the human pole, not the divine. Perhaps I
should not say that without having seen the film.
Orthodox theologians tend to be deeply suspicious of this tendency in
Western religious art. My daughter Bridget was asked to give a lecture on
ikons to a group of Anglicans, and to illustrate the Western one-sidedness
and humanism, she refered to the Isenheim altarpiece of Gruenewald. That,
like Gibson's film, seems to concentrate on the goriness of the
crucifixion, and seems quite unipolar. Orthodox ikonographers take that an
example of ikonographic heresy.
I pointed out that it was not quite as unipolar as it looks, and referred
to Davies's paper:
In Christianity we speak about two worlds, two poles, two values, in one
set of terms. This is something more vigorous than mere contrast. In
Leonardo's "Virgin of the Rocks" there is contrast: between the peaceful
Virgin and Child, and the rugged landscape behind. There is also a
masterly contrast of light and shade. But there is not this essential
Christian ambivalence or bipolarity, because the two sets of values or
poles are not in the same terms. One is human (the divine pole), the other
is merely geological. Contrast this with Breugel's "Adoration of the
kings" where the calm dignity of the baby and his companions clashed
violently with the incomprehending, half-witted, earthy character of the
crowd. Here are the opposites in one set of terms. God and man, and the
earthiness of man is very earthy. Contrast almost any peaceful Italian
Renaissance crucifixion -- Perugino, for instance, or Raphael, with the
Isenheim altar piece of Gruenewald, where the Christ is obviously a human
in extreme agony, and the whole being of St John is concentrated in one
extruded finger, held rigid in a reverse curve, pointing at the Crucified,
as if to say, "That is the Son of God -- believe it if you dare!"
So it's not that the goriness of Gibson's film that is objectionable per
se, but the question whether it is unipolar and humanist, or whether it
does in some way present Christ as the incarnate Son of God.
Perhaps that might be a reason for going to see it -- to see for myself if
it is there.
An interesting sidelight: about 40 years ago a Jewish artist, Harold
Rubin, had an exhibition in Johannesburg, and among the works exhibited
was once called "My Jesus", which was rather like Gibson's film ot
Gruenewald's crucifixion. It showed a human being in extreme agony.
It caused some controversy, and Rubin was formally charged with blasphemy.
An Anglican monk, Brother Roger of the Comunity of the Resurrection, was
hauled off the train to Durban to give evidence at the trial (he had
actually opened the exhibition).
I wonder what people would have thought of Gibson's film in those days.