The dust of reviews has settled on this film and so: the time has come, perhaps, for a more dispassionate, a more considered, a more reflective, little review---but no less provocative than the most provocative you’ve read thusfar.... THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: A Film Review by Ron Price This film is not intended to be a masterful historical documentary as, say, Ken Burns' work on the Civil War or one of many others done in the first century of the existence of the cinema. Gibson's work is far from possessing what some might call an intellectual poverty in its pretensions at historical documentary. Shawn Rosenheim says all TV documentaries possess an intellectual poverty. If Rosenheim is right the visual media are simply incapable of producing historical documentary.1 Even if Rosenheim is wrong historical documentary of an event 2000 years ago is impossible. We simply do not know enough. We all know that Gibson did not take his camera crew to downtown Jerusalem in some kind of time-warp to produce an anti-Jewish, anti Roman clip for the evening news. Even if he had and he then produced for us all an evening two hour special, spectacle, called "the crucifixion," there would still be questions about visual manipulation and the program's service in the name of directing popular thought toward a new religious movement. New reliigous movements have always had trouble getting popular exposure. No one would claim that Gibson's is a neutral recording of objective events. It is a construct operating from a certain point of view. It is a rhetorical argument achieved through the selection and combination of elements that both reflect and project a world, a world view, a cosmology if you like. It is achieved by certain cinematic conventions that try to erase any signs of cinematic artificiality. An ideology is promoted by linking the effect of reality to social values and institutions in such a way that these values seem natural and self-evident. In the case of Mel Gibson's work, a work that I found quite stimulating in its own way, the ideology is simply and strongly: fundamentalist Christianity. I've never been attracted to Christianity in any of its fundamentalist forms. But I liked this film. Film can often get to people in ways that words, ideas and simple beliefs cannot. It was not because of its historical accuracy that I liked it. I liked All the Presidents Men and a number of other films based on and rooted in some historical theme. Rarely are historical films accurate; the main reason they seem so is that the people watching them know so little about the theme, the event, that it seems plausible to them. Sadly, but truly, we know so little about the events of the life of Jesus of Nazereth that a good script writer, a good cinematographer and a big band of men and women can bring something to life that may never have happened at all. Bertrand Russell wrote in his Why I'm Not a Christian that, in a court of law, there is little evidence for even the existence of Jesus let alone his manner of death. Historicity simply does not exist when it comes to the events in the life of a man who has had a profound affect, I believe, on history. But what I believe and what I know; what you believe and what you actually know about Jesus are in two different worlds. The distance between the pulpit and the academic chair of religion has been widening for at least two centuries. In fact for millions of men and women these days historicity is irrelevant to their beliefs. History has become, for those millions, what it was for Henry Ford: bunk or was it bunkum? Mel, you've given us a thriller. To hell with history! 5 out of 5. As a sort of epilogue to this brief comment on the film: one of the main reasons I am a Baha'i is that historicity is important to me. In a religion that has grown up in the modern age historicity does not present major issues. At least not yet. The revelation of Baha'u'llah, confined as it is to only 6 million adherents, has grown slowly since the mid-nineteenth century. The originating impulse for each of the major religions of history, an impulse that led to the phenomenon of revelation or some defining religious experience has receded so far into history as to be accessible to us in only a very limited and unsatisfactory degree. Far otherwise with the work of the Founder of the Baha'i Faith. The details of His life are massively documented. And one day film-makers will make films about this Life that draw on historical facticity, historical reality. But history has a thousand faces, a thousand forms, and Mel Gibson has given us some very stimulating ones in his film ‘The Passion of the Christ.’ They will serve for some of the millions who watched it to bring them closer to One whom Baha'u'llah said: when Christ was crucified the world wept with a great weaping. 1 The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, editor, Marcia Pandy, the Athone Press, London, 2001.
This was a great workshop in how not to make a film!! I actually decided to watch this because I thought I would find the subject itself interesting, The events on the nights of Christs death, the very idea made it sound like a good watch. I was pretty pissed off to find that the film had nothing to do with Christ at all and was more a Jew bashing lasting a couple of hours. The central character in the film could have been anyone as Christ and his life had no place in the film at all apart from a few passing references making up about 20 mins in total. Could have been great but ended up being amongst my list of worst films ever seen
I fin dthis review to be somewhat interesting, but I will only focus on this one paragraph. Bertrand Russell was right. But I'm not quite sure what you mean by saying "historicity simply does not exist..." Certainly you don't mean to say that well, even though there's no evidence for Jesus Christ, the fact that a fabricated individual by the name of "Jesus Christ" was believed to have existed, and hence had a profound impact on the course of human history, that the fact that it is mostly likely that he never existed (which appears to be the case) is irrelevant. This is quite absurd, in my opinion. You then go on to say that knowing and belief are two seperate things when it comes to Jesus; so, even if we know that Jesus didn't exist, the fact that we believe he did, and believe in his message, is still more important; hence, fact is not better than fiction, and fiction is much more acceptable when it provides us comfort in the face of cold, hard reality. Religion, therefore, is as Marx said, the opiate of the masses--not a means of understanding our place in the word as some would have us believe, rather a means of escaping reality. Academic and popular interpretations of Christianity have always existed, and this gap has always been wide; the fact of the matter is, is that the masses neither have the time, intelligence or courage to study Christianity--for the reasons that I stated in the previous chapter. For the masses, history has never mattered at all, not just with religion; to understand the past, the truth about what happened before our time is often unsettling. History is not bunk as Henry Ford would have it (who cares what he thinks, though), and is fundamentally important to our civilization. To ignore it, distort it, or reject it outright, is crassly ignorant; people who do so in the name of religion are fools, unworthy or respect or sympathy. The Passion of the Christ is a massive distortion of the truth, and therefore a horrible movie. -5/5
The Passion of the Christ: A Second Look There has been so much reaction to my first review, critique, comment on Mel Gibson’s film ‘The Passion of the Christ’ that I felt a need to write a second statement. This statement will deal with some, but not all, of the main threads of response that I received. The responses, the postings at internet sites, of most people were responses not so much to what I wrote but, rather, responses to issues raised by the film itself--not necessarily my article in particular. The first concern was the violence in the film. That seemed to be the most generalized concern, although there were many cryptic responses that gave vent in sometimes creative and often puzzling ways to various conspiracy theories, to a range of anti-Jewish or government sentiments and a host of other passionate and not-so-passionate worries of the respondents such as the lack of character development in the person of Jesus. The literature on violence in cinema and society is burgeoning. That was a major concern more than 25 years ago when I taught media studies at what became a university in Ballarat, an old gold mining town, in Australia. So, too, is the concern with real violence. The violent image has been extraordinarily preeminent in the visual media as is the profound concern about the culture of violence in general. There has been, what you might call, a hyperviolence in post-1960s cinema. I was only 19 when Kennedy was shot in 1963. I have lived in a society filled with real violence and hyperviolence for more than 40 years. Gibson’s film in some ways is just one of 1000s that have a violent base. The media is now both scapegoat and cause, explanatory framework and rational for the violent society. Of course, religion and politics have been intertwined with violence since the days of universal animism in 6000 to 8000 BP. One writer whom I read over twenty years ago, Guy Murchie, wrote that we’ve had 14,400 wars in recorded history. Violence is as human, it appears, as apple pie or should I say potatoes, pasta or pumpkins? In The Passion we are exposed to Gibson’s serious effort to represent a particular conflict, a crucial event, in the history of Christianity and its accompanying emotional sensibilities. Can we arrive at a historical account faithful to the evidence when we move from prose, from books, to film? Poets like Homer(750 BC ca) and historians like Thucydides(420 BC) exaggerated and invented what they wrote to please and engage the audience. It became a convention of historians to insert made-up, but appropriate, speeches for 2000 years, until at least the sixteenth century.1 Just as poetry can enhance the power of history to convey aspects of the past so, too, can film. But poetry and film can also be creatures of invention with little connection with the experienced world or the historical past. Film has had only a century to find its way as a medium for history. It’s future, I think, suggests some exciting possibilities. But along the way there will be many false starts. For many, Gibson's film was down that road of false starts. No single view holds "the truth." Our eyes and ears are different than those of 2000 years ago. Small fragments are inevitably incomplete and this film contained, at best, a small fragment. There is a final unknowability, as Spielberg said in discussing the efforts of film makers to capture the lives of great men. Freud(1.1) said the same of biography in print. A movie blends fiction with true events.2 Considerable artistry, ingenuity and money went into giving "an overall impression of what it really would be like to be transported back into that time"3 of the life of Jesus of Nazereth. For millions, if not for all, Gibson achieved this effect. For millions, too, he did not. But there remains, it seems to me, too cavalier an attitude to the evidence about lives and attitudes in the past. This evidence is all we have to go on and the imagination must work from there. The danger is that the audience is left with the false impression of "a true story." Considerable dramatic license is taken by directors. The truth status of historical films often remains unclear, obscure. In this film, the story comes from the New Testament. And the evidence in the New Testament is far from clear. It may be clear to those with a more fundamentalist theology, but it has not been clear for at least two hundred years to literally millions of students of the New Testament, liberals, agnostics, atheists, non-Christians, ex-Christians, et cetera. History is not a closed venture, fixed and still, but open to new discovery and reinterpretation. Spectators don’t just look in at the events of history becoming in the process all-knowing. They look at and engage with the ideology of the director and make their assessments partly in terms of their own ideology, often conscious and unconscious, that they themselves espouse. It is this, among other things, that gives rise to the varied reactions to a film like Gibson’s. Then, too, cultural historians generally acknowledge that there is a time lag between the moment a new technology like film is invented(1895) and when a full understanding and utilization of the potential of that technology emerges. After one hundred years, I often think we have just begun to utilize the power of cinema. I wonder how long it took civilization to begin to use the wheel with dramatic effect after its invention in about 3500 BC? The flow of images in our lives is increasingly torrential. Film images often cloud reality with pseudo-events. We are often adrift in an illusion that seems real. Peter Weir’s 1998 film "The Truman Show" illustrated what is often called ‘the cultivation effect.’ Put another way, cinema transforms the world into a spectacle. There is a mysterious energy in the swirl of shadows and light in film that is sometimes called mise en scene and it often produces a vain and empty show, a show that bears the mere semblance of reality. It is this mise en scene that captures our attention, or repels it, although often we are looking at a vapour in the desert which we dream to be water but, when we try to taste it, we find it is but illusion. We often get moved and satisfied as much, though, by illusion as by reality. In the last decade there has seen the beginning of a demise of the cinephiliac. The love-affair with movies in western society is in decline, or so say some analysts.4 Millions of us have also developed a stimulus shield to protect ourselves from cinema’s neurological shocks. But the story has an up and a down-side. In cinema we also recover our own sensuous experience; history is disclosed to us in unique ways. The upside of that vaporous illusion is a sense of the real. Proust referred to this as memoire involuntaire, being seized by memories, by mixtures of the past and present which flow into a strange no man’s land. What was once ignored by us in our daily lives often becomes registered with a striking, sensuous clarity because of film. Movies often grip us in a way that life does not. It is not so much the illusion of reality that movies create as the construction and organization of reality that goes on, an order and identity not found in daily life. Movies tend to be easily grasped, accessible in a way not present in daily life especially with complex aspects of history and psychology. Such cinematic experience must be countered by some voluntary memory in the service of the intellect. The Passion was Gibson’s third movie as a director. All his movies involve a culminating spectacle where the doomed hero faces death agonies. His movies, as director, all employ the sufferings of the title character to critique the social structures imposed on them. They all present decadent societies that have lost contact with traditional patriarchal values. Gibson is a champion of conservative and vanishing social orders.5 He is also a champion of Christianity. You might not like what he does, but he has electrified and annoyed millions for both good and ill. Perhaps, in the long run, it will just be another movie from the movie mill. Surely not! _____________________________________ FOOTNOTES__________________________ 1 N.Z. Davis, Film as Historical Vision, Harvard UP, Cambridge, Mass., 2000, p.4. 1.1 One reader of this my second review had such a vehement anti-Freud bias that half his comments were concerned with undermining my reference to Freud and anything that existed in Freud's 28 volumes of writings. 2 ibid., p.126. 3 ibid, p.127. 4. Christian Keathley, "the Cinephiliac Moment," Framework: the Journal of Cinema and Media, 2000. Attendance at movie houses was highest in the USA in 1936(or was it 37?). 5William Luhr, "Mutilating Mel: Martyrdom and Masculinity in Braveheart," Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media, editor, Chistopher Sharrett, Wayne State UP, Detroit, 1999, p.229.
