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Film Review:Passion of Christ:Provocative
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Ron Price
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Jun 29, 2004 19:00 PDT
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I am a Canadian who has been living in Australia for 33 years. I am
married to a Tasmanian and have been for 30 years after 8 years in a
first marriage. We have three children aged 38, 33 and 26. I am retired
and at 60 spend most of my time writing.
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: A Film Review by Ron Price
This is not intended to be a masterful historical documentary as, say,
Ken Burns' work on the Civil War. Nor can one say that Mel Gibson's
work possesses an intellectual poverty as an 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 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.
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. 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, 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. It was not because of its historical
accuracy that I liked it. I liked All the Presidents Men and a host 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. But, 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 not an issue with the
revelation of Baha'u'llah. The originating impulse in each case of the
phenomenon of revelation 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 that will serve for millions to bring them closer to One
whom Baha'u'llah said that when He 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.
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