Ecce movie
Apr. 5th, 2004 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saavedra77I went to see The Passion recently with MJ, a friend from work. I'd been geekily curious to see this movie ever since I heard that the dialogue would all be in Latin and Aramaic; on the other hand, I was ambivalent about devoting eight bucks and two hours of my life to a reportedly violent, possibly anti-semitic picture whose biggest fans seemed to be conservative Christians.
In the end, however, curiosity and my friend's invitation won out ...
Much has been said about this film's violence. Personally, I didn't think that this was altogether out of place: the Gethsemane - Golgotha story has always been about someone getting tortured and executed. Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John refrain from describing this violence in detail, and their texts (at least, in the Revised Standard English translation) often use terms that sound deceptively mild (for example, "chastise" to mean "scourged" or "whipped"). I can see how Gibson's explicitness could be devotionally significant to someone who believes that Jesus suffered for them--not as pure shock value, but as a dramatization and reminder of what their tradition says that the man underwent, what he sacrificed for their sake.
Regarding the charges of anti-semitism, my sense after seeing the film was that these were fueled more by historical expectations or by scenes taken out of context than by consideration of the film as a whole:
Anyone familiar with the history of Christian anti-semitism understands that the passion narrative has frequently been used as a pretext for communal hatred--and one can detect at least a certain anti-semitic potential in the canonical Gospel accounts, themselves: All four evangelists portray the Jerusalem temple leadership as persecutors & instigators of the crucifixion; all four subsequently portray a Jerusalem mob--presumably whipped up by the temple leadership--demanding Jesus' crucifixion; much more disturbingly, however, the Gospel of Matthew goes so far as to suggest that Jews might bear some kind of pervasive colllective blame, saying: "And all of the people answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children!'" (See Matt.25). Generations of xenophobes have used these sources--particularly in the sense of collective guilt implied by Matthew--to incite hatred and violence against Jews.
Gibson's The Passion follows the canonical story in portraying a Jerusalem temple leadership determined to eliminate the heretical Jesus and a Jerusalem mob demanding his crucifixion. But Gibson's script doesn't portray Jerusalem's Jewish community as monolithically hostile or cruel: one Sanhedrin elder loudly dissents during Jesus' trial, calling it unjust; the Via Dolorosa is lined with Jews protesting Roman treatment of Jesus and his fellow prisoners; and the film portrays Simon of Cyrene, the Jew who bears Jesus' cross for him, as a kind of reluctant hero. (As in the Gospels, Roman soldiers press Simon into bearing a bleeding, exhausted Jesus' cross; uniquely to the film, Simon is moved by Jesus' suffering to risk his life by demanding that the Romans stop beating the condemned "King of the Jews".) To my secular eye, at least, this seems like a big improvement on Matthew's version of the passion story.
As for the language, I was impressed by how well the filmmakers managed to render Latin and Aramaic as natural speech. No one knows what classical Latin actually sounded like, so people often recite things in Latin without any accent or inflection. As it happened, the actors used vaguely Italian- or Spanish-sounding accents to make the Latin dialogue flow, and vaguely Hebrew- or Arabic-sounding accents for the Aramaic, which both made sense (because these are closely related languages) & sounded fairly natural.
Afterwards, MJ and I spent about an hour talking about the film--which was pretty impressive considering that she's a pretty serious (albeit denominationally ambiguous) Christian and all I believe in is history ... All in all, not a bad experience, for a movie that seemed to carrying so much cultural baggage.
In the end, however, curiosity and my friend's invitation won out ...
Much has been said about this film's violence. Personally, I didn't think that this was altogether out of place: the Gethsemane - Golgotha story has always been about someone getting tortured and executed. Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John refrain from describing this violence in detail, and their texts (at least, in the Revised Standard English translation) often use terms that sound deceptively mild (for example, "chastise" to mean "scourged" or "whipped"). I can see how Gibson's explicitness could be devotionally significant to someone who believes that Jesus suffered for them--not as pure shock value, but as a dramatization and reminder of what their tradition says that the man underwent, what he sacrificed for their sake.
Regarding the charges of anti-semitism, my sense after seeing the film was that these were fueled more by historical expectations or by scenes taken out of context than by consideration of the film as a whole:
Anyone familiar with the history of Christian anti-semitism understands that the passion narrative has frequently been used as a pretext for communal hatred--and one can detect at least a certain anti-semitic potential in the canonical Gospel accounts, themselves: All four evangelists portray the Jerusalem temple leadership as persecutors & instigators of the crucifixion; all four subsequently portray a Jerusalem mob--presumably whipped up by the temple leadership--demanding Jesus' crucifixion; much more disturbingly, however, the Gospel of Matthew goes so far as to suggest that Jews might bear some kind of pervasive colllective blame, saying: "And all of the people answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children!'" (See Matt.25). Generations of xenophobes have used these sources--particularly in the sense of collective guilt implied by Matthew--to incite hatred and violence against Jews.
Gibson's The Passion follows the canonical story in portraying a Jerusalem temple leadership determined to eliminate the heretical Jesus and a Jerusalem mob demanding his crucifixion. But Gibson's script doesn't portray Jerusalem's Jewish community as monolithically hostile or cruel: one Sanhedrin elder loudly dissents during Jesus' trial, calling it unjust; the Via Dolorosa is lined with Jews protesting Roman treatment of Jesus and his fellow prisoners; and the film portrays Simon of Cyrene, the Jew who bears Jesus' cross for him, as a kind of reluctant hero. (As in the Gospels, Roman soldiers press Simon into bearing a bleeding, exhausted Jesus' cross; uniquely to the film, Simon is moved by Jesus' suffering to risk his life by demanding that the Romans stop beating the condemned "King of the Jews".) To my secular eye, at least, this seems like a big improvement on Matthew's version of the passion story.
As for the language, I was impressed by how well the filmmakers managed to render Latin and Aramaic as natural speech. No one knows what classical Latin actually sounded like, so people often recite things in Latin without any accent or inflection. As it happened, the actors used vaguely Italian- or Spanish-sounding accents to make the Latin dialogue flow, and vaguely Hebrew- or Arabic-sounding accents for the Aramaic, which both made sense (because these are closely related languages) & sounded fairly natural.
Afterwards, MJ and I spent about an hour talking about the film--which was pretty impressive considering that she's a pretty serious (albeit denominationally ambiguous) Christian and all I believe in is history ... All in all, not a bad experience, for a movie that seemed to carrying so much cultural baggage.
