Modern and Postmodern Jesus Films

Posted on March 1, 2012 by
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini

“Could these also be reasons why God has given us two creation stories and four versions of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus?” - Merold Westphal

Pasolini, a dedicated Marxist, might seem like one of the last people to make a reverent film about the life of Christ.  But, his 1964 The Gospel According to St. Matthew is a landmark in the genre, and marks a bridge between two traditions of putting Jesus on screen.

We’ll split the two traditions into modern and postmodern.

Modern tellings usually combine material from all four gospels, and takes a comprehensive approach.  The Greatest Story Ever Told is a part of this tradition.  Despite its Hollywood epic flair, it essentially attempts to re-create the story “as it happened,” more-or-less, from a third-person, omniscient point of view.

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ also falls into this pattern.  Passion is so concerned with historical accuracy, its characters speak in Aramaic.  This isn’t how Mel Gibson sees Jesus; this is “how it happened.”

Pasolini’s Gospel breaks away in many ways with this tradition.  By using only Matthew as a source, Pasolini acknowledges the individual perspective he has of God.  He uses contemporary music to locate his film within a particular time and place, giving it context.  And, he acknowledges his politics by giving Christ a bit more of a bite when talking about social justice.  Although Pasolini used the text as the script, he also consciously made the film The Gospel According to Matthew According to Pasolini.

The neo-realist style; with matter-of-fact storytelling and non-professional actors; usually smacks of arrogant modernism.  It plays of purity of style to find ‘true cinema’ through a formula and through excising irrational flourish.  With Gospel, I’m not so sure.  For one, the actors aren’t especially good.  Is Pasolini using their lack of talent to break up the narrative?  Or am I just too harsh on untrained actors?

One way in which Pasolini’s Gospel stays well within the modern style is his emphasis on the divinity of Christ.

The two styles could just as easily be titled “God” and “Man.”  In films like The Greatest Story and Gibson’s Passion, Christ has a consistently dazed, ethereal look about him.  It’s like the Sunday School plays where Jesus’s microphone has the bass amped up and echoes. He speaks everything as a grand, Shakespearean pronouncement.

“Blessed be the peacemakers!”

In the “God” films, Jesus sticks out in Israel like a sore thumb.  Jesus never slouches, never engages in small talk and never scratches an itch.  If it were any other character in any other film, we would assume he was possessed or on drugs.  I get that feeling from Pasolini’s Jesus.  He’s more of a three-dimensional icon than a human being.

Our postmodern “Man” films about Jesus go far to the other direction.  Jesus Christ Superstar and The Last Temptation of Christ portray a Christ so human, that even he is unsure of his own divinity.  Scorsese’s Christ doesn’t just weep, but he also errs.

Of course, Scorsese intent isn’t to find the non-divine “historical Jesus” of the Jesus Seminar.  Rather, he’s exploring a particular angle on Christ in order to bring out views usually overlooked by previous films.  Scorsese’s particular focus on Christ’s humanity isn’t the “whole picture,” just as Matthew’s particular Gospel isn’t either.

It is difficult to imagine a film that would simultaneously portray both the human and divine natures of Christ in a compelling way.  A “definitive” Christ film seems to be impossible.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew is #182 on the 2012 edition of the TSPDT 1,000 list I’m blogging through.  I’ve now seen 429.

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The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Posted on February 15, 2012 by
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) dir. Luis Buñuel

The device of The Discreet Charm is the mirror of the one Buñuel used in The Exterminating Angel.  In Angel, the group of aristocrats gather to dine, but they cannot leave.  In Charm, they gather to dine, but they cannot eat.

In both, Buñuel’s aristocrats share the same stock traits as the upper crusts in his 1930 L’ Âge d’Or, and in other films through his career.  They are petty, vain, and oversexed.  They are polite and cordial to their cuckolds, and gracious in violence.  The scene where the well-mannered couple sneaks out the window to make love in the bushes as to avoid offended their guests with loud moans is the iconic critique of bourgeoisie values covering up animal nature.

But, Buñuel is too much of a thoroughgoing postmodernist to make his film a simplistic “rich people suck” screed.  He humanizes our aristocrats even while keeping his distance – and is careful to always remind his audience of exactly what he is doing.  This can be subtle; the ambassador moves his hand up the young terrorist’s thigh, doing exactly what the Buñuel’s camera has been enticing the audience’s eyes to do.  Or, it can be blatant; sticking our amusing characters on stage for us to see their amusement.  The obviousness of this Brechtian device adds even another layer of distance.

And, we have Buñuel’s dreams from his childhood, inserted at random points in the film, in order to break up the non-narrative.  And then more dreams.  Whose are they?

Buñuel is making a Buñuel film, and he’s proud of that fact.  Indeed, there is little more than Bourgeoisie than a deliberate exercise in Buñuelness.  He’s not indulging in parody; he’s engaging in the style he invented, and enjoying it.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is #192 on the 2012 edition of the TSPDT 1,000 list I’m blogging through.  I’ve now seen 428.

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Godard’s Musical Comedy

Posted on February 8, 2012 by
Une femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman) (1961) – Jean-Luc Godard

A Woman Is a Woman was Godard’s second released film, from 1961.  This is back with young, playful, happy Godard; decades before the grumpy, mean, ole crotchety Godard we have now.

Godard had reason to be happy.  He was in love with his star, Anna Karina, and the two were married during production.  Godard shared his joy with the world by creating his most delightful film.

Happy Godard can serve as a gateway to understand Sad Godard.  A Woman Is a Woman is almost a pastiche, but not quite.  It doesn’t directly parody anything from the American musical comedy genre; rather, it captures the style and the feel of those films without exactly fitting in line with them.

We don’t get the musical interludes we’d expect from a film “with Cyd Charisse!  And Gene Kelly!” but we do get the feeling of them.  We hear the newspaper song as Anna Karina walks out on the street in the morning.  We have her stripper “dance.”  If Audrey Hepburn’s heart had been broken in the cafe with her favorite sad song on the jukebox, Audrey would have sung along.  Anna simply weeps.

The musical effects go beyond simply punctuating an emotion or movement, (as in some Jerry Lewis movies, or TV sitcoms) and become the joke in their own right.  Think Looney Tunes. But once again, they’re not parodies – Godard isn’t making fun of the conventions, and is only deconstructing them in the gentlest of terms.  He’s *having* fun with them.

Even at his grumpiest, this is how Godard operates.  His jump cuts, his switches of frame stock, his random b-roll of people walking on the street played over the sound of our protagonists’ pillow talk… this isn’t Godard trying to make a specific political or artistic statement.  This is Godard messing around with the tools; putting them together in different ways like an overqualified construction worker using a Rube Goldberg machine to put up drywall.

A Woman Is a Woman is Godard at play.  Quentin Tarantino always reminds me of an overjoyed clever 12-year-old in the sandbox — here, Godard is a giggling lover tickling his new mate (both his new medium and his new muse) under the covers.

There is a warmth to A Woman Is a Woman that we just don’t get from the other Godard films.  Despite her beauty, this is the only movie where I’ve actually fallen a bit in love with Karina.  Godard’s textbook Brechtian techniques don’t necessarily create emotional distance between the viewer and Karina, but they do usually create romantic distance.  I sympathized with Karina in Vivre sa Vie, but I didn’t love her.

In all his movies, Godard’s women behave erratically, and frustrate his men.  In most of his films, a woman’s unpredictable behavior is part of the fragmented (and terrifying) fabric of existence.  He cannot understand her, so he consigns her to the void of confusion.  But for the moment of this film, he had accepted her separate identity with a smile and a shrug.  After all, a woman is a woman.

More good background is found in James Hoberman’s Criterion essay.

A Woman Is a Woman is #894 on the 2012 edition of the TSPDT 1,000 list I’m blogging through.  I’ve now seen 427.

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The Fly

Posted on January 25, 2012 by
The Fly (1986) dir. David Cronenberg

Like many of the best horror films, The Fly builds slowly.  Not much happens during the first half hour.  Boy meets girl, they awkwardly flirt, and we check the back of the DVD case to make sure this is a horror film.

We know what’s coming, and Cronenberg makes us wait for it.  He keeps the titular fly in the back of the story, just as Hitchcock kept his birds away from the focal point.  The audience is going to be thinking about the fly or the birds anyway, so there’s no reason to be obvious about it.

When I was a kid, there was this series of books about a school where supernatural creatures would show up and everyone would slowly start to figure out what they were.  Stuff like Vampires Don’t Wear Polka Dots.  The book would always assume you would be very surprised when new evidence for Mrs. Jeepers’s vampirism turned up, imagining that you hadn’t read the title of the book.

But as Jeff Goldblum transforms, The Fly quickly skirts through the necessary “Oh wow, these are insect hairs!  I wonder what could be going on!” scenes, and gets right to the good stuff – horrifying us with Cronenberg’s vision of what a man turning into a fly would look like.

Mutants and half-human creatures have become a Hollywood staple during the past 10 years, but not in the horror genre.  Usually, they’re played by underwear models wearing too much foundation.  That’s how Goldblum imagines Brundlefly at first.  But Brundlefly is not Spider-Man.

The Fly is #567  on the 2012 edition of the TSPDT 1,000 list I’m blogging through.  I’ve now seen 426.

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Monsieur Verdoux

Posted on January 17, 2012 by
Monsieur Verdoux (1947) dir. Charles Chaplin

Broadly, there are two types of black comedies.  One is black in topic, but has a light and happy tone.  Kind Hearts and Coronets, Death at a Funeral and Arsenic and Old Lace are examples.  You leave the film laughing and giggling at your naughtiness.  You play with the blackness, but you don’t take it seriously.  Death and destruction abound, but we are humans and we are charming, and so life is still good.  It’s a “grey” film.

Then, there are the real black comedies.  These are your Dr. Strangeloves, your Viridianas, and your Borats.  We laugh at the horrors of humanity, but don’t feel much better for it.  If Hobbes’s theory of laughter is correct — that it is our feeling of superiority to those who are the butt of the joke (or just don’t get it) — this black comedy allows us pessimists to assert our elevated position above those who see the world in a more favorable light.

The two categories can also be delineated by intent.  The first type reinforces the social order, and is primarily and entertainment vehicle.  The second type is subversive, and is meant to call attention to societal sins.

For example, take two stories from The Onion on the same subject:

“Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell” Sep 26, 2001
“U.S. Commemorates 9/11 By Toasting Stable Afghan Government From Top Of Freedom Tower” Sep 12, 2011

The first reassures Americans they are on the right side, and gives them a much-needed laugh.  The second criticizes American policies, and is designed to leave them depressed and cynical.

Most all of Charlie Chaplin’s work falls into the second category.  (The Great Dictator, intended for two different audiences, had a different function and different sense of humor depending on where a person lived at the time of release.)  Monsieur Verdoux is perhaps his darkest, and that’s saying something for a comedic actor whose most famous scene was inspired by the Donner Party.

The “Bluebeard” wife-murdering scheme isn’t necessarily so dark; Kind Hearts and Coronets kept a light tone on its serial killer.  Instead, it’s the Lord of the Flies outlook on life that gives Verdoux its bite.

From the very outset, we have trouble feeling empathy for any of Verdoux’s victims.  Their families are unlikeable, their faces ugly, their voices shrill, and their manner annoying.  We pretty much root for Verdoux to murder Martha Raye’s character.

Then, we learn that Verdoux is largely a victim of circumstance.  He’s a cog in the machine, essentially forced into murder by his wife’s disability and by economic turmoil.  In a conversation with a young prostitute he meets on the street, we learn that it is his very goodness and love that is causing his evil.

Marilyn Nash functions as the story’s Sonya Marmeladova.  The golden-hearted hooker forces Verdoux to recognize his feelings of guilt and gives him an opportunity to choose mercy instead.

But unlike Dostoevsky’s Christian Sonya, Nash’s reprieve from prostitution is only temporary, and she voluntarily falls back into it.  In fact, she falls into an even more insidious form, marrying an arms dealer and growing wealthy through killing on a larger scale than Verdoux.

It’s this realization that prompts both Verdoux’s confession and the stance he takes on his crimes.  Because there is no God and because Nash has failed as mediatrix, Verdoux cannot be a repentant Raskolnikov.

“Wars, conflict – it’s all business. One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good fellow!”

“As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing? Has it not blown unsuspecting women and little children to pieces? And done it very scientifically? As a mass killer, I am an amateur by comparison. However, I do not wish to lose my temper, because very shortly, I shall lose my head. Nevertheless, upon leaving this spark of earthly existence, I have this to say: I shall see you all… very soon… very soon.”

In 2012, we see think “Yes, Chaplin makes a good point, even if he does go on a bit.”  We’re fairly comfortable with criticizing many of the particulars of the Allies’ terror bombings on German and Japanese cities, and don’t necessarily see it as criticizing the Allies in general

Anti-HUAC cartoon published in Kino, 26 December 1947.

But given the context of 1947 and of Chaplin’s socialist sympathies, the film came across as too harsh of an indictment of the “military-industrial complex.”  The film conspicuously omits Russia from its montage of dictatorships.  Soviet puppets in Eastern Europe used Monsieur Verdoux as anti-American propaganda.  The film faced bans and boycotts, and helped galvanize anti-Chaplin opinion in the United States.

A closer look reveals more in Verdoux than ham-handed pacifism.  Unlike Chaplin’s wall-breaking benediction in The Great Dictator, his final speech in Verdoux is utterly without hope or appeals for love.  Killing is simply how the world works.

As Claude Chabrol says in an interview on The Chaplin Collection DVD release, Chaplin’s films are about survival, and Verdoux believes that man must kill to live.  It is no accident that Verdoux and Nash discuss her copy of Schopenhauer rather than Rasknolikov and Sonya’s famous reading of Lazarus.

Must the good guys, in certain occasions, murder their wives or drop bombs on sleeping children?  If so, Chaplin observes, we are in the darkest comedy there is.

Monsieur Verdoux is #202 on the 2012 edition of the TSPDT 1,000 list I’m blogging through.  I’ve now seen 425.

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My 2011 Razzies Ballot

Posted on January 16, 2012 by

The big loser is Sucker Punch.  I’m shocked it wasn’t nominated.  I wrote it in at least once in every category.

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Death in Venice

Posted on January 16, 2012 by
Death in Venice (1971) dir. Luchino Visconti

Luchino Visconti was an Italian communist who started his career as a pioneer of neorealism.  La terra trema follows the story of a working class fishing village on the Sicilian coast.  It is anti-fascist and anti-capitalist, with the impoverished villagers being thwarted at every attempt to maintain and increase their livelihood.  It tends to stay on the spartan side of neorealism, and feels closer to the Soviet pseudo-documentary Zemlya than Rosselini’s Paisan or Roma, città aperta.

The, Visconti began to veer away from the strictures of neorealism, and began to make some of the most lavishly shot films I’ve ever seen.  The Leopard, starring Burt Lancaster as 19th Century Sicilian royalty, is one of the best ways to show off a new Blu-ray player.

Visconti worked with cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis on Death in Venice.  It picks up the gorgeous visual style of The Leopard – the saturated oranges and the quietly contrasting pale blues – but it neglects any attempt to create a compelling story.

Perhaps Visconti counted on viewers to be familiar with Thomas Mann’s 1912 novel, and fill in the subtext for him.  The film looks very pretty, but feels very thin.  An old man visits Venice, notices everyone is sick, and stalks a nice-looking boy.

Randomly dispersed flashbacks give us background, but leave us thinking “so what?”  While the somewhat similarly themed (and also beautifully shot) A Single Man uses flashbacks to show us what our protagonist is feeling and thinking, Death in Venice‘s don’t have much emotional heft, and seem unrelated to the man we see now.

For example, we see our man after a failed concert decades ago.  His wife is consoling him, and a friend berates him.  Then, we return to the present, where he is watching someone play the piano and can’t find the boy.  There’s a missing link here that Visconti refuses to paint in.  It’s as if he’s counting on us to remember Mann’s novel, transpose Mann’s version of the character onto Visconti’s, and figure out what the man must be feeling from there.  In short, doing the screenwriter’s work for him.

Death in Venice is #200 on the 2012 edition of the TSPDT 1,000 list I’m blogging through.  I’ve now seen 424.

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