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The following article, written by one of our critics, Peter T. Chattaway, is a chapter from the new book Re-Viewing the Passion (Palgrave Macmillan). With the one-year anniversary approaching for the release date of The Passion of The Christ (Feb. 25, 2004), we thought this was a good time to run this retrospective.

In orthodox Christian belief, Jesus is both God and man, fully divine and fully human. And it is because God has revealed himself in the form of a particular person who lived in a particular time and a particular place that Christians down through the ages have generally felt free to portray Jesus in icons, passion plays, and other forms of religious art. But except for the most basic and theologically essential points, such works of art generally pass over the particularities of Jesus's life. His humanity, expressed in the mere fact that he can be depicted at all, is often balanced with his divinity by a degree of artistic abstraction: Whether depicting Christ in static paintings or following the stations of the cross according to a set pattern, artists have tended to downplay realistic or naturalistic details to focus on the more eternal truths.

Film, therefore, poses a special challenge for the artist who would dramatize the life of Christ. Traditionally, movies about Jesus have respected his divinity by keeping him at a distance; he has typically been portrayed in objective terms that keep him mystical and otherworldly. But in recent years filmmakers eager to explore the humanity of Jesus have tended to portray him in more subjective terms, through the use of voice-overs, dreams, and other techniques that draw us into the minds of a film's characters; however, in doing so, they have often demystified Jesus so thoroughly that he seems to lose his divine authority. The Passion of The Christ presents a striking balance between these two approaches. Through its frequent use of flashbacks and point-of-view shots, the film gives the audience the sense that it is experiencing Jesus's thoughts and memories from his own subjective perspective, yet the memories themselves often are portrayed in an objective, iconic fashion that preserves the film's more mystical inclinations.

The basic element of a film is the shot. The word "movie" is short for "moving picture," so film itself can be said to have a dual nature of sorts: The filmmaker arranges people and objects within a specific visual space (the shot, or "picture") and then strings these shots together in a linear fashion over a specific length of time (the "motion"). Both the composition of the shots and the way the images are paced and edited together convey some sort of meaning to the viewer. The earliest filmmakers, however, did not grasp the key dimension of editing at first. For them, the basic element was not the edited series of shots but the scene, and their films were little more than wordless plays set in front of a static camera.

A typical early example of this is The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ (1905), produced by the Pathé company in France. Nearly every shot is a simple tableau in which the camera stands still and observes the entire stage, as it were, while the actors move about within the frame. The few exceptions to this format stand out precisely because they are so rare. When Pilate presents Jesus to the crowd, the film cuts to a medium shot of Jesus accompanied by the words ecce homo (Latin: "behold the man"). Later the film cuts to a medium shot of St. Veronica holding a cloth with the image of Jesus's face, which she offers to one side of the screen, then the other, and then up in the direction of heaven. Again, we as film viewers are invited to behold the man. In all of this, the Pathé film's treatment of Jesus and the other characters remains fairly objective—the camera sits and observes the characters, and it specifically encourages us to gaze on Christ but not to identify with him, as such.

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Related Elsewhere:

Jesus at the Movies	Printer view