Several papal documents, including Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Vigilanti Cura (1936), have acknowledged the power (and attendant controversies) associated with the cinema since its invention in 1895, especially in its dealings with religious subject matter. Filmic representations of the Virgin Mary increase the potential for contention by interconnecting with gender issues in addition to theology (see Zwick 1997; Duricy 2000; Roten 2001; O’Brien 2011). Paying attention to these polemical dimensions, this chapter explores three approaches to Mariology on screen: (i) the symbolic effect of the Marian image; (ii) Marian apparitions and the attendant shrines; and (iii) filmic adaptations of the life of the mother of Jesus. The following analysis will consider both form and content (whether the chief aim may be proselytization or entertainment) in films that appropriate the image of the Virgin Mary.
Marian iconography is employed in secular cinema (for both sincere and satirical effect) to offer acknowledgement of religious affiliation in the establishment of characterization. In the opening moments of Angela’s Ashes (Parker 1999), the narrator intones: ‘Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood’. This direct quotation from the memoir by Frank McCourt, on which the film is based, is accompanied by a shot of a statue of the Virgin Mary. The mise-en-scène underlines the fact that Marian imagery serves as recognizable shorthand for an ethnic Catholic community (Italian, Spanish, or Polish, for example) in both religious and domestic spaces.
While ecumenical efforts seek to overcome the divisions between Christians, Mariology may still provide a distinguishing feature, as exemplified by the depiction of the Catholic aristocracy as they sing the ‘Salve Regina’ in the family chapel in Brideshead Revisited (Jarrold 2008) in a pre-Vatican II context. Yet Mary is also a link between the Abrahamic faiths, as shown in Where Do We Go Now? (Labaki 2011) in which a statue of the Virgin apparently sheds tears of blood in sorrow at a conflict between Christians and Muslims in a Lebanese village. Indeed, the Iranian film The Saint Mary (Bohrani 2001), which tells the story of Mary in the Koran, is a helpful tool for interfaith dialogue (see O’Brien 2009).
Rather than simply acting as set dressing, Marian images may be explicitly tied to questions of sexual morality. The Magdalene Sisters (Mullan 2002), set in the 1960s, relates the controversial story of ‘fallen’ Irish women (often young unmarried mothers) who were sent to work in laundries run by religious orders as a punishment. The women pray the Litany of Loreto; they are attired in blue cloaks and white veils when they walk in the Corpus Christi procession; and a reproduction of the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help hangs on the wall of their dining room. Within the diegesis, the purity of Mary is contrasted with the lives of the women who are said to be ‘lost’ in the eyes of society.
Unusual pregnancies that form a plot device also signal Marian analogies. The revelation of the conception (reportedly without a father) of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader in The Phantom Menace (Lucas 1999) caused comment amongst aficionados of the Star War series, although there was theological confusion when the character’s mysterious origins were described as an ‘immaculate conception’ by film reviewers (see O’Brien 2011: 20), a consequence of a common misunderstanding of the Marian dogma of 1854.
‘Ave Maria’, set to the music of Schubert or Gounod, graces an eclectic assortment of film soundtracks in both diegetic and non-diegetic forms. Its most mundane role is to add a religious ambiance (at a wedding ceremony, for example) in which the Latin lyrics do not compete for attention with the visuals. On other occasions, the music may offer a subversive commentary, a situation humorously illustrated in the animated Chicken Run (Lord and Park 2000), when the dulcet tones of Gracie Fields singing the aria on the radio provide a contrastive backdrop to the machinations of a farmer’s wife who has wicked intentions for her poultry.
Michael Duricy (2000: 162) explains how Marian symbols are also chosen to indicate opposition to evil forces. In 28 Days Later (Boyle 2002), ‘Ave Maria’ (the Gounod melody sung by Perri Alleyne) offers the hope of divine blessing as the survivors of a plague drive through a post-apocalyptic London landscape, with the music providing an aural cocoon against the horror outside. Marian allusions have also been detected in Wonder Woman (Jenkins 2017): the final onscreen First World War battle, in which the eponymous heroine appears in the sky above the conflict on the side of the allies, recalls the reported apparition of Mary to French troops at the Battle of the Marne (8 September 1914) in which the Germans were unexpectedly defeated.
For identifiably Catholic protagonists, Mary is also a symbol of hope in the face of persecution. The innocent Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda) clutches his rosary during the trial when he becomes the titular victim in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956); and in the era of martyrdom in seventeenth-century Japan encountered in Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016), the hidden Christians reveal a painting entitled ‘Our Lady of the Snows’ that is a precious sign of their ongoing faith despite the threat of execution.
There is a multi-dimensional filmic response to visions of the Virgin Mary: the biopics of the seers; the numerous documentaries about Marian apparitions across the world (see Duricy 2000); and the movies in which the shrines figure as a plot destination. There are now also live webcams at the major shrines so that events may be viewed via the internet in real time. Xavier Giannoli’s film L’Apparition (2018) tells the fictional story of a war journalist (Vincent Lindon) who joins a Vatican investigation into the reported visions of a young French girl called Anna (Galatéa Bellugi), thereby touching on issues of doubt, faith, and exploitation.
Apparition sites have been explored on screen since the fifty-second ‘views’ shot in Lourdes in 1897 at the instigation of Auguste and Louis Lumière, the French inventors of the moving image. The variety of material covers different geographical locations: Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico (1531) is the focus of La Virgen Morena (Soria 1942), La Virgen que forjó una patria (Bracho 1942), and The Blood and the Rose (Watkins 2013); the nineteenth-century apparition at Knock in Ireland (1879) is examined in a twenty-first century documentary entitled Strange Occurrences in a Small Irish Village (Kelleher 2016); the apparition of Mary at Zeitoun in Egypt in 1968 is the inspiration for Namir Abdel Messeeh to investigate the Coptic background of his own family in La Vierge, les Coptes et moi (2011); and the events at Medjugorje (1981 onwards) are the foundation for Gospa (Sedlar 1995). Films about Marian apparitions have been targeted at a range of audiences, including cartoons for children, with age appropriateness being a concern when describing the fires of hell in the Fatima apparition of 13 July 1917 in the animation film The Day the Sun Danced (Hahn 2005).
Anchoress (Newby 1993) uses stark black and white cinematography to tell the fourteenth-century story of Christine Carpenter (Natalie Morse), a young girl from Shere in Surrey, who becomes an ‘anchoress’ and is confined to a cell built onto the side of the village church. The local priest is disturbed that the Virgin of Christine’s visions wears a red cloak rather than a blue garment, his negative response resonating with all attempts to visualize Mary on screen when expectations are not met. In The Butcher Boy (Jordan 1997), the young anti-hero named Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens) hears a sermon about Fatima and conjures up his own vision of Mary, controversially played by the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor. Director Neil Jordan argued that O’Connor’s beautiful face mirrored the images of Marian statues that he had seen as a child, while Colin MacCabe remarked that the contentious choice ‘embodied an attitude to sexuality and religion which spelt death to the masculine theocracy which had held sway over Ireland since the middle of the nineteenth century’ (MacCabe 2007: 68).
The casting of suitable actors to play the (sometimes later canonized) seers is also problematic. In the case of Lourdes, there are photographs of Bernadette Soubirous in which she re-enacts the moment of the apparitions, kneeling down, gazing upwards and ‘performing “saintliness”’, in which ‘it is entirely to her credit that she is not at ease posing: it can be read as a sign of her authenticity’ (Lawrence 2010: 87–8). It is a credibility that an actress must attempt to recreate, a feat for which Jennifer Jones won an Academy Award in The Song of Bernadette (King 1943). Directors must also decide whether to place the audience in the visionary’s privileged position and observe the young girl who had ‘neither the prophetic doom of the Virgin at La Salette, nor the healing rays and rounder contours of the Immaculate Mother on the miraculous medal’ (Harris 1999: 82). In The Song of Bernadette, the spectator witnesses the apparition (played by the uncredited Linda Darnell) at the insistence of the producer Darryl Zanuck: ‘What I want to know is, what did the girl see? … I found myself leaning over my chair, trying to find out, trying to see what she saw’ (in Thompson 1995: 135). More unusually, the camera adopts the apparition’s point-of-view in King’s film, so that the audience gazes down on Bernadette as if through the eyes of Mary herself.
In contrast, the apparition is represented by wind (one of cinema’s traditional manifestations of divine intervention) and a heavenly light reflected on the face of the eponymous seer (Sydney Penny) in Bernadette (Delannoy 1988), therefore leaving the image of Mary to the imagination of the spectator. Delannoy’s film was shown every day at a cinema in Lourdes during the pilgrimage season, until replaced by another traditional production, Je m’appelle Bernadette (Sagols 2011), in which the vision is once again visible to Bernadette (Katia Cuq) and the cinema audience, but not to the onscreen observers at the grotto. From the perspective of inculturation, the Indian production Our Lady of Lourdes (Gopinath 2007), shot in the mountainous region of Kerala, emphasizes the universal nature of the message of Lourdes that crosses national borders.
One of the most remarkable documentaries about Lourdes is Georges Rouquier’s critically acclaimed Lourdes et ses miracles (1955) in which the director interviewed people who claimed to have experienced a cure, leaving his spectators to draw their own conclusions. Notably, Rouquier provides some of the most memorable (and invasive) moments when he films the sick pilgrims being taken to the baths, a location that is now usually deemed to be ‘off limits’ to any film crew (Borde 2008: 223). By chance, Rouquier’s camera captures two women whose cures took place during the shoot: Adrienne Roche (who does not feature in the official statistics) is filmed before and after being healed from a painful brain tumour; and Marie Bigot (the fifty-ninth official miraculée) who eventually recovered her mobility, sight, and hearing.
The Lourdes shrine has been used as a narrative element in a number of films by directors of different nationalities from the silent era onwards (see Borde 2008), including Credo ou la tragédie de Lourdes (Duvivier 1924). In the controversial movie Le Miraculé (1987) by the avowed atheist Jean-Pierre Mocky, the fraudulent Papu (Jean Poiret) goes to Lourdes to pretend that he has been miraculously cured so that he can keep the insurance money that he received after his faked paralysis. However, while Mocky attacks the Catholic Church as an institution, it is notable that Papu himself receives his comeuppance: when he enters the Lourdes water he actually becomes paralysed. Claude Lelouch uses a journey to Lourdes as a resolution to his film Hommes, femmes, mode d’emploi (1996); and Le scaphandre et le papillon (Schnabel 2007)—an adaptation of the memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby who suffered ‘locked in syndrome’—includes a visit to Lourdes by the sceptical Jean-Do (Mathieu Amalric) as one of the memories of his life before his illness.
Lourdes (Hausner 2009), which was shot (with permission) at the shrine is characterized by the starkness of its mise-en-scène, which leaves the spectator free to form an opinion on the nature of the healing of the fictional pilgrim Christine (Sylvie Testud) who has multiple sclerosis. The result divided critical opinion, winning the FIPRESCI and SIGNIS awards as well as the criticism of Monseigneur Jacques Perrier (2011), the bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes at the time of the film’s release, who claimed that the dramatization had misrepresented the hopeful atmosphere amongst the pilgrims and the volunteers.
The treatment of the Fatima apparitions offers a notable case study in which the fidelity to the reports by the seers, the attraction of artistic liberty, and the release date come into play. The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima (Brahm 1952), beginning with a reference to the socialist and anti-Catholic government in Portugal in 1910, was produced during the Cold War era when the House Un-American Activities Committee was searching for communists in the United States, so that the Virgin’s warnings about Russia found a willing outlet in conservative Hollywood. Apparitions at Fatima (Costelle 1991), made with the support of the Portuguese shrine, is more meticulous in its detail (including the appearances of the Angel of Peace before the apparition of the Virgin Mary, for example) and has a concern for accuracy.
The miracle of the sun on 13 October 1917 offers the opportunity to use special effects to create a visually spectacular solar event, and Dominic and Ian Higgins manipulate twenty-first-century digital technology to tell the story of Fatima in The 13th Day (2009) and the accompanying docu-drama Finding Fatima (2010). Using Lúcia dos Santos (played by Filipa Fernandes) as the narrator of the feature film, the episodic structure presents the everyday world chiefly in black and white, with the apparitions being shot in vivid colour and Jordanna Tin receiving a credit as ‘the Blessed Mary’.
Films made after the publication of the ‘third secret’ of Fatima in 2000 have the advantage of comprehensiveness, and The 13th Day includes a visual representation of the much debated message of 13 July 1917. However, the cinema has also provided a medium for the dissemination of conspiracy theories, including M et le troisième secret (2014), a documentary made by the journalist Pierre Barnérias, who believes that the Vatican has withheld parts of the ‘third secret’, despite the protestations to the contrary by emeritus Pope Benedict XVI in May 2016. The Pastoral Instruction Aetatis Novae (1992) sets out the possibilities offered by new media in the mission of the Church and the opportunities that films provide to ‘stimulate interpersonal communication rather than substituting for it’. Films about the Marian apparitions continue to play a notable role in this regard.
Since the very first stages of the moving image, directors have drawn on the biblical scenes in which Mary plays a significant part as the mother of Jesus: the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Presentation in the Temple, and the Finding in the Temple (in the Gospel of Luke); the arrival of the Magi, and the Flight into Egypt (in the Gospel of Matthew); the ‘mother and brothers’ pericope that occurs in the three synoptic gospels (Matthew 12:46–50; Mark 3:31–35; and Luke 8:19–21); the wedding at Cana and the Crucifixion (in the Gospel of John); and Mary’s presence amongst the disciples at Pentecost (Acts 1:14).
Mary appears in a subsidiary role in the ‘life of Christ’ productions such as From the Manger to the Cross (Olcott 1912); INRI (Wiene 1923); The King of Kings (DeMille 1927); Golgotha (Duvivier, 1935); King of Kings (Ray 1961); and The Greatest Story Ever Told (Stevens 1965). In addition to the Hollywood and European epics made with the aim (although not always the achievement) of profit for the film studios, there are projects that were created with the chief intention of spreading the message of Christianity, such as Dayasagar (Bhimsingh 1978), The Jesus Film (Sykes and Krish 1979), and the Visual Bible films. Mary’s onscreen visibility is evidently increased when the screenplay incorporates the Infancy narratives or concentrates solely on the childhood of Jesus, the latter approach finding inspiration in the Apocrypha (such as The Infancy Gospel of Thomas) in Un Bambino di nome Gesù (Rossi 1987) and The Young Messiah (Nowrasteh 2016). There have also been a number of dramatizations in which Mary is the titular protagonist, ranging in approach from the pious Italian production Mater Dei (Cordero 1950) to the controversial Je vous salue, Marie (1985), in which Jean-Luc Godard updated the story of the Annunciation to twentieth-century Switzerland and earned a papal condemnation for his efforts (see Locke and Warren 1993).
The choice of actress to incarnate Mary raises extratextual and intertextual issues about suitability, as well as questions concerning religion, race, and age. Few Jewish women have taken on the role, with notable exceptions being Yaël Abecassis in Maria, figlia del suo figlio (Costa 2000) and Maia Morgenstern, whose presence helped to counter the accusations of anti-Semitism in relation to The Passion of the Christ (Gibson 2004). Black actors were cast in Son of Man (Dornford-May 2006) and Color of the Cross (La Marre 2006), allowing the films to address inculturation and postcolonialism in their respective portrayals of a Black Madonna. The sixteen-year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes played Mary in The Nativity Story (Hardwicke 2006), thereby paying attention to the probable young age of the Virgin of the Annunciation, an issue that was frequently ignored in earlier films. Sometimes two actresses take on the role at different stages of Mary’s life, with Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (Pasolini 1964) being a famous example in which Margherita Caruso portrayed the young Mary, and the director’s own mother Susanna Pasolini played Mary at the Crucifixion.
The films may engage (obliquely or directly) with feminist criticism of the representation of Mary as a patriarchal symbol, with the staging of the Annunciation (Luke 1:26–38) being of particular importance to the argument. Mary’s physical reaction to Gabriel’s message is immediate prayerful acceptance in La Vie et la Passion de Jésus-Christ (Zecca and Nonguet 1902–05), whereas later productions present a wider gamut of emotions.
The angel may be visible (often an actor in a white robe) or indicated by wind and light, as in Jesus of Nazareth (Zeffirelli 1977), The Nativity (Kowalski 1978) and La sacra famiglia (Mertes 2006), when the audience must have previous knowledge of the New Testament dialogue in order to comprehend the scene. An insistence on complete faithfulness to the Lukan verses is not without contentiousness given the range of biblical translations of key vocabulary, such as ‘Chaire, kecharitomene’ in the original Greek (Luke 1:28), which is variously rendered on film, for example as ‘Greetings, Mary, thou that art highly favoured’ (Maria, figlia del suo figlio), and ‘Hail, O favoured one!’ (The Nativity Story).
Other screenwriters take the opportunity to develop the encounter in their own words or to omit particular lines. The absence of the first part of Luke 1:38 from Hardwicke’s The Nativity Story avoids the dilemma of whether to use the noun ‘servant’ or ‘handmaid’. The key issue centres on Mary’s response and whether she is represented as an active and willing participant in God’s plan of Salvation or a symbol of patriarchal subservience. In addition, the relationship between Mary and Joseph may add another dimension to the script, as the repercussions of Mary’s virginal pregnancy on their betrothal and the reactions of their community come into play. Joseph’s initial anger and subsequent acceptance of the situation has become a common feature in screenplays, for example in The Nativity (1978); Giuseppe di Nazareth (Mertes 2000); and The Nativity Story (2006). In The Star (Reckart 2017), an animated children’s film which relates events predominantly from the comedic perspective of the animals who play a part in the Christmas story, Mary also ponders over how to explain events (‘It’s all good news …’) but Joseph expresses uncertainty about his unexpected parental role rather than hurt or suspicion. As Mary later admits during the journey to Bethlehem: ‘Just because God has a plan, doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.’ Such attempts to extend the narrative often lead to digressions that have no biblical (or apocryphal) foundation, some of which have met with unfortunate results, notably in Mary and Joseph: A Story of Faith (Till 1979) and La sacra famiglia.
There is significance in the inclusion (or omission) of the Visitation in the characterization of Mary on screen, with regard to her missionary role and her bond with her kinswoman Elizabeth. If the Magnificat is incorporated, it is often cut short so that the inclusion of the whole canticle, as in Son of Man, focuses attention on the revolutionary nature of the verses. Mark Dornford-May revisions the biblical narrative taking place in the fictional African state of Judea, with the twentieth-first-century Mary (Pauline Malefane) as the mother of a young pacifist. When Mary sings the Magnificat in Xhosa with the sound of gunfire in the background, she personifies the brave mother who, in the words of Pope St Paul VI in Marialis Cultus (1974: 37), ‘was far from being a timidly submissive woman or one whose piety was repellent to others; on the contrary, she was a woman who did not hesitate to proclaim that God vindicates the humble and the oppressed, and removes the powerful people of this world from their privileged positions (cf. Luke 1:51–53)’.
While a film script is not a work of theology, cinema touches upon the four Marian dogmas (by accident or design) in the depiction of Mary’s earthly life: the Divine Motherhood; the Perpetual Virginity; the Immaculate Conception; and the Assumption. It is notable that Hardwicke introduces Mary as an occasionally sullen ‘teenager’ in The Nativity Story (which led to descriptions of Castle-Hughes’s performance as a ‘Protestant Mary’) as opposed to the devout young woman in Maria di Nazaret (Campiotti 2012). In the latter film, the direct confrontation between Mary (Alissa Jung) and a snake evokes the traditional Marian iconography of the Immaculate Conception (with reference to Genesis 3:15) and the representation of Mary as the New Eve. In Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Mary stands face to face with Satan across the Via Dolorosa before taking her position at the foot of the cross.
Mary’s Ever Virgin status is an issue for the staging of the Nativity scene. The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ [La Vie et la Passion de Jésus-Christ] (in which the baby appears on screen via stop motion) and Dayasagar (in which the baby is delivered at the end of a yellow beam of starlight) offer the clearest example of a supernatural birth, but films avoid references to the in partu virginity (represented by the unbroken hymen) that is recorded in the apocryphal Protevangelium of James. Both Maria, figlia del suo figlio and Maria di Nazaret take a similar approach: the birth occurs off screen as Joseph goes for help, and he returns to find Mary cradling the baby Jesus, thereby leaving the exact nature of the birth to the imagination of the audience. However, most films since the 1970s depict birth pains, particularly dramatically in Per amore, solo per amore (Veronesi 1993) and The Nativity Story (2006), although there is no evident umbilical cord in the latter film. Some narratives introduce a midwife, while Joseph adopts that role in Marie de Nazareth (Delannoy 1995) and The Nativity Story. Guido Chiesa’s Io sono con te (2010), filmed in Tunisia, is particularly interested in patriarchal power, even inventing rules that Mary flouts, such as a ban on breastfeeding (see Johnson and Ottaviani-Jones 2014), thereby drawing attention to the biblical verse: ‘Blessed is the womb that carried you and the breasts at which you nursed’ (Luke 11:27). Mary’s ‘ever virgin’ status is rarely contested (or discussed) on screen: Joseph verbally accepts his celibate marriage in Maria, figlia del suo figlio; La Marre takes the opposite approach and breaks with filmic convention in Color of the Cross by including younger siblings in the family, indicating that the brothers and sisters (Mark 6:3; Matthew 13:55–56) are the children of Mary and Joseph after the birth of Jesus.
After the scene in which Jesus is lost and found in Jerusalem at the age of twelve (Luke 2:41–52), screenwriters must invent ways to enhance Mary’s role, such as the flashbacks to Nazareth in Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Mary and Mary Magdalene are introduced as childhood neighbours in Campiotti’s Maria di Nazaret in order to create a ‘parallel lives’ strand (see O’Brien 2016: 451) that contrasts the relationship between the two women and their respective stories until they join together to follow Jesus to the Cross, a popular narrative device that is also found in Ray’s King of Kings. However, the first miracle at Cana is a vital Marian episode in John’s Gospel (John 2:1–11) that has received a range of treatments, varying from Mary’s discreet intercession in The Gospel of John (Saville 2003) to her overt intervention in Jesus (Young 1999). The absence of Mary (Verna Bloom) from the Cana wedding in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)—and, therefore, the omission of the ‘Do whatever he tells you’ verse (John 2:5)—is in keeping with Mary’s lack of comprehension of her son’s purpose in the film. However, while Mary may sometimes be in the vicinity in cinematic treatments of the Last Supper, it is unusual for her to take a seat at the table as she does in Scorsese’s controversial adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel.
Mary is usually present in onscreen representations of the Crucifixion in line with the Gospel of John (19:25–27), and her stance on Calvary (distressed or stalwart) has theological implications for an understanding of Jesus’s sacrifice. Mary collapses in grief in Pasolini’s Il Vangelo secondo Matteo; she stands stoically at a distance in Il messia (Rossellini 1975); she screams ‘No’ in Mary, Mother of Jesus (Connor 1999); and there is blood on her forehead from an invisible crown of thorns in Delannoy’s Marie de Nazareth, as if to underline her participation in the plan of Salvation.
It is notable that, despite the many controversies surrounding Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, its extrabiblical dimensions (with sources including the writings of the Catholic mystics Mary of Agreda and Anne Catherine Emmerich) and its focus on Mary did not dampen enthusiasm from Protestant audiences. J. Stephen Lang remarks on Mary’s substantial role in the film but admits that ‘as an evangelical myself, I did not find that offensive, since love for one’s son is not something specifically Catholic’ (2007: 16). In the Pietà scene, Mary (Olivia Hussey) wails in agony in Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth; but in Gibson’s film, the camera pulls back to show the dead body of Jesus in the arms of a silent Mary as she looks directly into the lens and invites the spectators to contemplate their own response to the death of her son.
Mary’s life after the Resurrection is treated in a small number of films, such as a brief appearance in L’inchiesta (Base 2007), but there are few representations of her death. The most substantial reflection on the final period of Mary’s life is Full of Grace (Hyatt 2015), which shows Mary’s widowhood in a house ‘outside Jerusalem’. During her illness, Mary (Bahia Haifi) is accompanied by a young woman named Zara, whose Christian faith has grown in her presence: ‘When I look into her eyes, when I see how she lives, that’s how I know it’s all true. I see Him in her. I hear Him because of her.’ Knowing that she is dying, Mary sends word to the apostle Peter, who turns to her for counsel, and the other apostles eventually gather at her deathbed in a manner that evokes scenes in the writings of Maximus the Confessor. Through flashbacks and reminiscences, Mary contemplates her life with Jesus (‘For nine months, his heart beat with mine’) and encourages the disciples in their ongoing mission: ‘When you said “yes” to Christ, you brought Him forth in your heart into the world—your heart beating with His for eternity.’ She closes her eyes and her breathing stops (‘She will rise straight into the arms of Our Lord,’ says the apostle John) and her body is carried in procession to a tomb. The Assumption is referenced directly in Cordero’s Mater Dei, which is unsurprising as its release coincided with the proclamation of the dogma in 1950; and in Costa’s Maria, figlia del suo figlio, Mary is given a palm branch before the disciples are transported miraculously to join her, in line with the ‘Palm narrative’ that is one of the traditions of the Dormition (see Shoemaker 2007: 37). In Costa’s film, Jesus returns after the Resurrection and is greeted with joy by Mary. In response to her assertion that she is ‘only a mother’, Jesus says, ‘You are the mother of my Church. Whoever looks at you will come to me’, and he carries Mary away in his arms.
In Marialis Cultus, Pope St Paul VI stated: ‘It should be considered quite normal for succeeding generations of Christians in differing sociocultural contexts to have expressed their sentiments about the Mother of Jesus in a way and a manner which reflected their own age’ (1974); and in his Letter to Artists (1999), Pope St John Paul II wrote of the way in which filmmakers have joined painters, poets, and musicians in finding inspiration in biblical figures. Through Marian symbols, responses to Marian apparitions, and reflections on the life of the mother of Jesus, it is clear that Mary remains a significant source of creativity for cineastes.