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The longest and most ambitious of Jesus films, Franco Zeffirelli's miniseries Jesus of Nazareth (1977), embodies aspects of both the Stevens and Pasolini films. Because it was produced for television, not for the big screen, the film eschews wide landscape shots in favor of regular close-ups, but it also features many head-on shots of Jesus as he gazes at or near the camera. (Zeffirelli has said he hired actor Robert Powell for his eyes: "The eyes, which, more than anything else of the human body, are the portals of the spirit, became in Powell two penetrating beams of light.") And Zeffirelli's Jesus is very much a mystical Jesus. The interactions between most of the characters are frantic, busy, antagonistic, even humorous—but at the heart of it all, Jesus himself remains serene. Rare hints of subjectivity are overwhelmed by their more mystical significance. For example, Jesus tells the parable of the prodigal son after observing, in a point-of-view shot, that a sullen Peter has shown up reluctantly at a party thrown by the despised tax collector, Matthew. Whatever insight this point-of-view shot might give us into Jesus's motives for telling that story at that time is overshadowed by the close-ups on Jesus's face as he reaches the climax of his story and implicitly bids Peter to be reconciled to Matthew. Jesus, looking at the camera, approaches it, and we realize that we are now seeing him from Peter's point of view; the mystical gaze of Jesus has fixed on him, and on us, with the aim of changing his heart and ours.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) marked the first truly subjective cinematic interpretation of the life of Jesus. Not only does director Martin Scorsese, working from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, revise the Gospel narrative in a way that emphasizes Jesus's doubts and uncertainty about his identity, but he also uses voice-overs and point-of-view shots in a way that encourages the viewer to identify with Jesus and that draw the viewer into the mind of Jesus. The film's sexual content, the source of much controversy when it was first released, is made even more shocking because we often see Mary Magdalene and other naked women through Jesus's own eyes; where the Jesus of the Bible said men should not even look lustfully upon a woman, the Jesus of this film chooses to watch as Mary has sex with her clients, and the viewer is obliged to watch along with him. Scorsese has said that he believes in the divinity of Jesus, but his highly subjectivized interpretation of the character makes it difficult to find any sort of mystical transcendence in him.

A similar problem plagues Jesus (1999), directed by Robert Young and produced for television. Although the screenplay is more sensitive to orthodox belief, it too emphasizes the subjective humanity of Jesus, through dream sequences and romantic subplots, rather than his transcendent divinity. The film clearly identifies Jesus as the Son of God, but its overly familiar approach to the character ultimately presents him as more or less just another person grappling with the problem of evil and trying to make the world a better place.

One of the most interesting treatments of subjectivity in a Jesus film is in The Miracle Maker (2000), a British-Russian animated film partly financed by Mel Gibson's Icon Productions. This film cleverly alternates between two kinds of animation: clay puppets, which represent the objective, physical world; and hand-drawn animation, which is used to convey more subjective states of mind, spiritual experiences, and products of the imagination such as parables, stories, memories, flashbacks, even demonic temptations and possessions. In one scene the puppet Mary strokes the hair of Jesus as he sleeps, prompting a hand-drawn flashback to the Nativity; in another, the puppet Jesus enters the Temple and, just before he drives out the moneychangers, he has a hand-drawn flashback to his first visit there when he was an awestruck 12-year-old, suggesting perhaps that his childlike innocence has given way to a more mature criticism.

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