David Bowie as Pilate in Last Temptation of Christ

The sad news today of the death of David Bowie has of course been all over the media, Facebook and Twitter. For fans of Jesus Films, Bowie gave us one of the most memorable, iconic characterisations of Pontius Pilate in Scorsese's uneven but at times inspired Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Here's the key clip:



It is a wonderfully understated, chillingly cool performance, all the better for the intimacy of the private conversation between Pilate and Jesus. There have been many outstanding and fascinating portrayals of Pilate, Rod Steiger in Jesus of Nazareth, Telly Savalas in The Greatest Story Ever Told, James Nesbitt in The Passion (BBC), but Bowie's is one of the most compelling.

(Thanks to Daniel Gullotta and Bible Films on Facebook for posting the above clip).

Spelling mistake in Last Temptation of Christ

The Last Temptation of Christ (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1988) begins with a quotation from Nikos Kazantzakis, but there is a spelling mistake -- it's the wrong "principle".  It should, of course, be "principal":

Myths of Mary and the Married Jesus on Youtube

The Cadbury lecture I gave in Birmingham just over a week ago is now available on Youtube here:



Or watch it on Youtube here.  The lecture is 48 minutes long.  It features much of the powerpoint, but some slides have been omitted for copyright reasons. All of the Q&A is also features, though under the veil of darkness.

Update (12 February 2013): I have now made the audio available as an extended episode of the NT Pod.  This version has the advantage of enabling you to hear the talk without seeing the speaker constantly waving his arms around.

Last Temptation and the Passion of the Christ

Tonight on Channel 4 they are showing The Last Temptation of Christ for the first time in ten years, and they are showing it as part of their "banned" season, and it had a good introduction by Tim Roth. It's a good excuse to watch the film again. High points remain: the Mary Magdalene in adultery / Sermon on the Mount scene and the first of the Temple cleansing scenes. I use both of those scenes in teaching. The latter is such a contrast to King of Kings. There is Jesus, confronting Caiaphas, saying "I have come to bring not peace but a sword". In King of Kings the very same line in the very same context is in the narrator's mouth (Orson Wells), and Jesus does not cleanse the temple, but in line with the pacifist tone of the film, goes in non-violent.

Anyway, what I wanted to comment on was the contrast between the Scorsese film and the recent Mel Gibson film. I made a little of this in my article on The Passion of the Christ but noticed two things tonight that I had not spotted for that article. First, Tim Roth's comment in the introduction, that the film deliberately used New York / Bronx accents to provide an approachable, understandable Jesus and disciples, pointed up to me an obvious contrasts with The Passion of the Christ since the latter famously avoids English altogether, let alone contemporary accents. Second, there is a moment when Jesus is discussing crucifixion with his disciples and Peter is pointing out that a crucified victim suffers extremely, and that a crow might suck out the victim's eyes. It reminded me of that horrid scene in The Passion of the Christ where that very thing happens to one of the robbers crucified with Jesus. I can't think of an ancient source for this, but may be forgetting.

The Gospel According to Spider-Man

There are some enjoyable reflections on the cinema and Christianity in the current issue of Time Magazine:

The Gospel According To Spider-Man
Christians have discovered a powerful new teaching tool, and it's playing at a cineplex near you
By RICHARD CORLISS

I admit that this strays a little from the NT theme of this blog, but it's only a little, and I wanted an excuse to use that marvellous headline. A couple of excerpts:

For decades, America has embraced a baffling contradiction. The majority of its people are churchgoing Christians, many of them evangelical. Yet its mainstream pop culture, especially film, is secular at best, often raw and irreligious. In many movies, piety is for wimps, and the clergy are depicted as oafs and predators. It's hard to see those two vibrant strains of society ever coexisting, learning from each other.

Yet the two are not only meeting; they're also sitting down and breaking bread together. The unearthly success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ helped movie execs recognize that fervent Christians, who spend hundreds of millions of dollars on religious books and music, are worth courting. Publicists hired by studios feed sermon ideas based on new movies to ministers. Meanwhile, Christians are increasingly borrowing from movies to drive home theological lessons. Clergy of all denominations have commandeered pulpits, publishing houses and especially websites to spread the gospel of cinevangelism.

The cinevangelists would say that the churches' appropriation of pop culture is nothing new. "Jesus also used stories," Johnston says. "In his day, parables were the equivalent of movies." Marc Newman, who runs movieministry.com, traces pop proselytizing back to the Apostle Paul. "In Acts there's a Scripture describing how he came to the Areopagus, the marketplace in Athens where people exchanged ideas. Paul speaks to the men of Athens and refers to their poets and their prophets. He used the things they knew as a way to reach out with the Gospel."

And you could also say that Paul (at least in Acts) was at his least successful in Athens! This paragraph is also worth mentioning:

Rarely, a Christian message is implicated in a Hollywood film. Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which an ordinary guy sees the light and travels far to make contact with extraterrestrials, was conceived by its original screenwriter, Paul Schrader, as Saul's transforming journey to become the Apostle Paul. The Matrix (the first one, not the sequels) was manna to hermeneuticians. In a recent Museum of Modern Art film series called "The Hidden God: Film and Faith," Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray comedy about a man who relives the same day over and over, was cited as a profound statement of faith, either Buddhist (rebirth), Jewish (acceptance) or Christian (redemption).

I didn't know that about Close Encounters and Paul Schrader, who also wrote the screenplay, with Scorsese, for The Last Temptation of Christ.

Mexico see Last Temptation

Apparently The Last Temptation of Christ (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1988) is only this week getting its release in Mexico, a week ahead of the release there of The Passion of the Christ, according to this Reuters story on Yahoo! News:

Christ Film Reaches Mexico 16 Years Later
By Elizabeth Fullerton

Heavily Catholic Mexico outlawed director Scorsese's film "The Last Temptation of Christ" for portraying a weak-willed Jesus Christ tempted to have sex with Mary Magdalene.

It will finally debut in cinemas here on Friday.

The film's distributor said this week it was launching "this work of art so the Mexican public can decide for itself and draw its own conclusions."

The film has been timed to open exactly one week before the March 19 Mexican premiere of Gibson's "The Passion"

Still more evidence of this interesting side effect of the popularity of The Passion of the Christ, that it is increasing interest in other Jesus films. Let's hope for a TV airing in the UK of some Jesus films over Easter. Perhaps even some of the rarities, The Day Christ Died or Son of Man?

New York Times on Jesus Films

There's a fine article in today's New York Times on Jesus films, triggered of course by The Passion of the Christ:

Enraged Filmgoers: The Wages of Faith?
By A. O. SCOTT

The obvious thing to say about the skirmishes over "Passion," which will either subside or intensify once the movie opens nationally on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 25, is that, since those earlier dust-ups, the sides have reversed. The conservative Christians who were so vocal in their condemnation of Mr. Godard, Mr. Smith and, especially, Mr. Scorsese, are now equally vocal in their defense of Mr. Gibson. An ugly undercurrent of anti-Semitism ran through some of the attacks on those supposedly sacrilegious movies, directed not at the filmmakers, none of whom were Jewish, but at the producers and studio heads who have periodically served as convenient targets for conspiracy-minded demagogues. Similar insinuations bubble beneath the surface of some of the defenses of Mr. Gibson's reportedly pious picture, which is itself accused of fomenting anti-Semitism by placing the blame for Jesus' death on the Jews.

This reversal is testimony both to the endlessness of the culture wars and to the changed landscape of battle. Those Catholics and evangelical Protestants who felt alienated from much of American commercial culture and who informed the earlier protests, have not only a powerful and glamorous Hollywood ally in Mr. Gibson but also a growing sense of cultural and political confidence. More and more it seems that religious expression — in the form of best-selling thrillers, pop music, movies and television programs — is entering the mainstream.

The article discusses Ben Hur, The Robe, King of Kings and how about this for a characterisation of The Greatest Story Ever Told?

In that film, Jesus, played by the young Max von Sydow, wanders through a Holy Land that resembles nothing so much as an endless showbiz talk show, populated by the likes of Shelley Winters, Telly Savalas and John Wayne, temporarily exchanging his cavalry badge for centurion's armor.

The article focuses specially on Last Temptation of Christ and Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew, both of which the author obviously admires.

Peter Gabriel and The Passion of the Christ

One interesting element from the review just mentioned:

Continuing his habit of working with the best cinematographers in the world, Gibson has collaborated here with Caleb Deschanel, whose lush, painterly aesthetic is a perfect match for the film’s almost otherworldly feel. His imagery is perfectly complemented by, unfortunately, the temp-tracked music of Peter Gabriel’s PASSION, which, honestly, works better here at times than it did in the Jesus film for which it was written, Scorsese’s THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. Combined, they have the power to put the viewer in a trance-like state.

I had blogged a month or so ago that Peter Gabriel scored The Passion. This information was taken from the Passion fan site FAQ; in fact they even included audio samples of the music. It was also clear from the on-line trailers that this was the music that was being used. But it now seems that the Peter Gabriel score was simply borrowed from The Last Temptation of Christ as a temporary measure. The new, official much shorter trailer (available on the official Passion of The Christ site) has different music. And the fan site has dropped the faq entry on Gabriel as well as all the audio samples they had available. So it seems pretty clear that Peter Gabriel is not responsible for scoring The Passion of The Christ.

Peter Gabriel does music for Passion

One other thing new to the Passion FAQ is that Peter Gabriel has done the music for The Passion of the Christ. There are some samples available. There is a major link here with The Last Temptation of Christ which also had a soundtrack by Peter Gabriel.

And that's quite enough about this film for now.