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In Jesus of Montreal, Denys Arcand's witty satire about a group of actors who put on a revisionist Passion play, the church sponsoring the play sends in some security guards to call off the production in mid-performance. The actors have tinkered with the Gospels too much; their reconstruction of the historical Jesus challenges church tradition at nearly every point, so out it must go. But the audience objects; one woman says she wants to see the end, and the head of security replies, impatiently, "Look, he dies on the cross and is resurrected. No big deal. Talk about slow!"
The scene neatly sums up one of the main challenges faced by films about the life of Jesus: namely, overfamiliarity. Jesus has been represented in paintings, sculptures, and stained-glass windows for centuries; since the invention of moving pictures in the 1890s, he has also been a perennial subject in films and television. All these portrayals tend to fuse together in the popular imagination; audiences think they've seen it all before, and they can remain blind to the unique perspective each film sheds on the life of Jesus and his relationship to modern moviegoers.
But there is a second challenge faced by films about Jesus, which is also addressed in that scene from Jesus of Montreal: hostility. Directors who put too unique a spin on the life of Jesus are met with controversy, much of it loud and unthinking, and the debates that swirl around their films tend to fall along a predictable faultline, pitting repressive authority against artistic freedom. The deeper issues raised by such films get lost in all the sound and fury.
Fortunately, in the past decade, the biblical epic in general, and the Jesus movie in particular, have begun to at tract a more positive sort of criticism. Three of the most recent books that have come out—W. Barnes Tatum's Jesus at the Movies: A Guide to the First Hundred Years, Lloyd Baugh's Imaging the Divine: Jesus and Christ-Figures in Film, and Savior on the Silver Screen, by Richard C. Stern, Clayton N. Jefford and Guerric Debona—are very helpful in identifying the specific concerns of each director and the challenges each film poses to the church. And the discussion isn't likely to end there; Hollywood is presently doing its part to provide more films for our consideration. This season, the "big three" American networks all slotted brand-new films about Jesus into their schedules. Last November, NBC aired Mary, Mother of Jesus, which was produced by members of the Kennedy clan. This spring, ABC will show The Miracle Maker, an animated film produced in Russia and Great Britain, and CBS will broadcast Jesus, a two-part movie from the producers of "The Bible Collection," in May.
These films are just the latest entries in a genre that dates back to the very beginning of the medium. The earliest Jesus movies were short, simple Passion plays recorded on film. The first of these was La Passion (1897), a five-minute filmstrip shot in Paris by a Frenchman named Lear. It was followed by The Horitz Passion Play (1897), a slightly longer film produced by the Lumiere brothers, two French entrepreneurs who had opened the first movie theater in December 1895. The first American film about Jesus was The Passion Play of Oberammergau (1898); despite its title, it was filmed on a rooftop in Manhattan. Nevertheless, audiences flocked to the film for weeks; one Protestant minister even bought a copy for use at revival meetings.1
From the beginning, tensions surrounded these films. Guardians of high culture were deeply concerned that Jesus had been turned into a commodity, into a gimmick for lowbrow consumption. Most early films were shown in Nickelodeons or in other venues aimed at the working class, and one early critic, reviewing From the Manger to the Cross (1912), complained that it would be "both bad taste and artistically ineffective to sandwich the picture between a juggler's act and a Broadway song and dance."2 When Hollywood mogul Adolph Zukor tried to secure the distribution rights to an early Passion film, he met with resistance from priests who claimed that Christ belonged in the cathedral, not the theatre.3
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