Mel Gibson's 'Passion'
What makes this film different?
Jack Miles
The author dwells on some now familiar themes, e.g. the spectre of Bible-belt evangelicals enthusiastically endorsing a film that is "flamboyantly, counter-Reformationally Roman". Like Kermode he sees it as something of a horror movie. His main focus, though, is on the subtitles, both in general and in relation to one specific line:
As a cinematic matter, the boldest innovation in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ," is its use of language and subtitles to create, in a religious film, the illusion of documentary. Dialogue in a number of recent English-language feature films has fostered this kind of illusion by shifting into a second language plus subtitles for a few minutes at a time. “Dances With Wolves,” for example, shifted at several points into the Amerindian language Lakota. But no film that I know of unfolds in its entirety in subtitles beneath a language other than that of its primary audience.
Aramaic and Latin, the two languages in which the dialogue of “The Passion” is spoken, are not just foreign but dead. Aramaic survives only in a few remote corners of the Middle East. Latin is no longer spoken anywhere. The documentary illusion created by subtitles under ancient languages thus simulates a voyage not so much to a distant land as to a distant era. To the extent that any work of art derived from a classic must make it new by making it strange, this is a brilliant stroke. Yet the brilliance has a deeply regrettable secondary effect . . . .
. . . . . Rejecting the offer, a priest shouts a phrase in Aramaic that might or might not be intelligible in Tel Aviv. But then the Jewish crowd takes up the same cry in a slightly different grammatical form. They scream in unison a single, terrible word that happens to be identical in Israeli Hebrew and in Aramaic, and they scream it again and again as if it were a football cheer: Yitstalev! Yitstalev! Yitstalev! “Let him be crucified!” . . . .
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