Foreword

When I was invited to write the foreword to Screen Jesus I was extremely honored and proud. I have been fortunate to work with Peter Malone over many years in universities, small summer schools, retreats, and international conferences. Amazed at Peter’s sheer knowledge of film—from who won which Oscars, when, and for which films to who starred, directed, or played a humble supporting character in whichever film under discussion—I once called him an Anorak. Peter, being Australian, wasn’t familiar with this British expression for someone who gathers and retains endless information on some subject or other and was unsure whether or not I was being pleasant. I was indeed, being pleasant—nay, I have again and again found myself utterly bemused by and envious of his sheer ability of recall and his unparalleled knowledge of film and theology.

I have over the years watched generations of students from the college at which I lecture in film, myth, and spiritualities sitting in lecture halls, or in the more intimate setting of workshops, engrossed with Peter’s enthusiasm for his subject and for the connections he makes between film story, mythic themes, human emotion, and spiritual approaches. Peter is a born movie buff, and that is one of the differences between his writing and that of many others who write about film in an academic environment. Peter is soaked in the stories we tell each other and is just as much at home with a piece of slapstick comedy, a rom-com, a weepy chick flick, a sci-fi adventure, or hanging out with the vampires and superheroes as he is with the more serious attempts of filmmakers to query, investigate, or interrogate the human condition. Many of my students studying for a media and film degree opt to study ideas of the sacred and the screen. They are well aware, as students of screenwriting and the creation of characters, that without offering a spiritual dimension to their characters’ identities, there is no depth and therefore less hope of connecting with the audience at the kind of level that ensures people will want to see their films again and again. This is a question of the filmmaking craft, but it is also, of course, a commercial issue. Think of The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption with their exploration of goodness, compassion, and hope, or Shirley Valentine who, in direct close-up to the audience, asks, “Why do we have all these feelings and dreams if we get lost in all this life?” Such movies sell, and sell again, as each new generation discovers them and finds in them answers to their questions on life—or at least, better questions than perhaps they have, so far, been asking.

A prolific writer on film, Peter has contextualized movies such as these and others too numerous to count, such as Kundun, Meet Joe Black, The Accused, Where the Heart Is (in terms of the liturgy of the Mass), and The Ten Commandments (these in partnership with Rose Pacatte, FSP). His work on film and values continues to shine a light on how stories as varied as Easy Rider (1969) and the American comedy Jesse Peretz’s Our Idiot Brother (2011) help us to ask questions of ourselves such as What is goodness? and Is goodness catching? Above all, in the age of that perhaps most enduringly popular movie character—the superhero—Peter’s work on Jesus- and Christ-figures has enabled us to open up our understanding of the connections and distinctions between the two and how they connect with, and are distinct from, so many movie characters both superhero and those of us who try live with our feet on the ground.

Peter’s 1988 book Movie Christs and Antichrists does not contain in-depth exploration of one or two films on the Christ-figure—others have done this to great effect, as has Peter as contributor to many such books. Rather, it offers us a long list of categories of Jesus-figures and Christ-figures through a creative, knowledgeable, and significant list of movies from a variety of genres, from Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth to Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. I cannot overstate the boon this book has been to generations of film students, many of whom have no or very little introduction to theology. Many students whose culture is based on two thousand years of Christian theology, faith, and practice have been thoroughly impoverished theologically over the past thirty years or so. More and more young people have no background knowledge or understanding of how the past two thousand years of Christian thinking have shaped the world in which they live. They no longer know the stories that have informed our art, our literature, and even our comic book heroes from the early part of the twentieth century. These stories have not been their formation. Their delight, then, when they find it possible to read Mad Max through the character of a savior-figure that can be traced back to the New Testament—not Jesus as Mad Max nor Mad Max as Jesus but rather a mythic/spiritual identity of one who, as Peter describes it, “suffers in a mindlessly violent society and rescuer of victims and leader to safety in Paradise”—is one of discovery and encouragement to seek deeper and deeper meaning. Pop-culture saviors speak to the generations who have neither heard, nor are interested in hearing, the Gospel as spoken in church.

Screen Jesus, however, takes that earlier work to another level. As Jaroslav Pelikan did for our cultural understanding of Jesus through the centuries, Peter Malone has compiled a first-rate resource for everyone interested in the Jesus-figure in film since the first movie camera was directed at this subject. The book covers the whole spectrum of films, from Jesus in art to the early twentieth-century Jesus films to Jesus films through the decades; from categories such as Jesus in our world today to verbal Jesus-figures to Jesus and film beyond Christianity to the reverent and the bizarre, including documentaries such as Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (United States, 2005) and What Would Jesus Buy? (United States, 2007) to Jesus on YouTube and the new wave discourse on this panoramic subject after Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Peter also sends us to the main scholars in his field, such as Lloyd Baugh, Adele Reinhartz, W. Barnes Tatum, and others.

No one in the field of film scholarship is better suited to this subject than Peter Malone. No one else has taught and studied film and theology with the breadth and depth that Peter has. The sheer scope of his international interest in film is unique. He has traveled the world and been the honored guest at film festivals in the Philippines, across Europe and the United States, in Asia, in the Pacific Islands, and in the Middle East, including Iran. In his capacity of president of SIGNIS, the World Catholic Association for Communication, Peter has met with film scholars, filmmakers, and those who organize film events across the globe over the past few decades. He has been a film critic and commentator for diverse publications and broadcasting outlets across the world. Most of all, he has shared his passion for film and his film and theological scholarship with immense generosity. Peter has enthused generations in the subject of the screen Jesus and so has opened eyes and ears both to the “greatest story ever told” and the threads connecting that story with all the other stories told on celluloid into the digital age.

Above all, Screen Jesus offers us quite simply an engrossing read. Peter talks us through his scholarship with deceptive simplicity. This is a book not only to use as a reference when exploring resources for studying Jesus on screen but also to dip into for spiritual nourishment, combining as it does the sensitive reflections of one who loves movies but who walks a deeply spiritual path through the stories told in the medium that offers, as Jimmy Stewart said, “little tiny pieces of time we will never forget.”

Maggie Roux

Communications and Media

Trinity and All Saints College

Leeds, UK