16

The Reverent/Serious

Going to Glory . . . Come to Jesus

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) refers to this as a lost film. It quotes the advertising tagline: a fight with the devil. It also notes that it is referred to in That’s Black Entertainment, an hour-long 1990 documentary on black cinema from 1929 to 1957.

Whistle Down the Wind

This film (1962) is a moving British allegory, directed by Bryan Forbes. A group of children, led by Hayley Mills, come across an escaped convict in a barn. As they approach him, he mutters the expletive, Jesus. They think he is Jesus and show their love and devotion by sheltering him and bringing him food.

SedutO allA SUA Destra

This is an Italian film from 1978, directed by Valerio Zurlini and starring Woody Strode, Jean Servais, and Franco Citti. This is principally a dialogue between a prisoner, a former black leader of an African country awaiting execution, and a guard and another prisoner. The Italian title translates as Seated at the Right Hand, the suggestion being made that the prisoner is a Christ-figure martyr.

Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien

Based on a miracle play by Gabriele D’Annunzio with music by Claude Debussy, this is a German production (1984) for French television with an international cast, Michael Biehn as Sebastian and Nicholas Clay as Augustus. With the transposing of the life of Sebastian from the fourth century to the time of Jesus, it allows for Jesus to appear. (Derek Jarman’s homoerotic Sebastiane [1976] is set in the correct period so no presence of Jesus.)

Seoul Jesus

In Seoul Jesus (1986), a mental patient escapes from an institution, calls himself Jesus, and goes to Seoul to warn the city of impending disaster. The director, Sun-Woo Jang, stated his intentions:

I co-directed Seoul Jesus with Son-U Wan because my police record made it hard for me to sign it myself. Also, I had no confidence about handling the technical aspects, and needed someone with more experience alongside me. The film was a simple work of imagination: what would happen if Christ appeared in Seoul today? My feelings about the Christian church (especially but not only in Korea) are strongly sceptical; there has been enormous deviation from what I understand to have been Christ’s teachings. The original idea was to end the film with the protagonist’s crucifixion, but we had to change that to a happy ending. Actually, we had two problems throughout the production: no money, and no cooperation from the authorities, who saw it as an anti-government film.

We made Seoul Jesus independently because we couldn’t find a producer. I did find a producer for my next film, and so I made it within the film industry. There are sometimes negative aspects to working with a producer, but on the whole it’s an easier way to make films. I don’t think there’s any significant creative difference between what I did in The Age of Success and what I’d done in Seoul Jesus: this time, I set out to satirise society’s commercial and economic development. The story is a satire on commercial exploitation, advertising and so on. In the 1970s, materialism from America conspired with Korean fascism to deform society, and I wanted to register a protest, that’s all.1

The Magic Boy’s Easter

This is an inspirational story of a magician (Bernie Kopell) who visits a hospital (1989). One boy doesn’t find his performances funny because of his bone illness. However, he has a dream that takes him back to Gospel times. A twenty-five-minute film for religious education using a format often employed for a biblical lesson (as in the 1998 Stephen’s Test of Faith).

The Garden

Derek Jarman was an idiosyncratic filmmaker, a designer, and an artist. Jarman died from complications from AIDS. He was outspoken about his sexuality and this pervaded his films beginning with the strange, Latin-spoken, homoerotic Sebastiane in 1975. In the poetic The Garden (1991 and winner of an ecumenical commendation at the 1991 Berlin Film Festival), he makes a parallel between the persecution and Passion of Jesus and the treatment by contemporary secular and religious societies of a homosexual couple. It is special pleading for understanding and for tolerance and an appeal to Gospel understanding. As with Terence Davies (The Long Day Closes) and Paul Verhoeven (The Fourth Man), the point of reference is Jesus and his Gospel message of peace, love, and compassion.

In Isaac Julien’s 2008 documentary Derek on Jarman, his life, and his work, Jarman reminisces on how he spent a year, aged eight, at a Catholic school and was versed in Catholic imagery—and during the film Tilda Swinton remarks that he should have been a Catholic (especially with his love for costume and ritual). Jarman eschews the church and Jesus but sees him as a rebel, a social justice stirrer, and, therefore, an icon for homosexuals, someone who willingly accepted the lepers, the unclean of his day. Because of this, Jarman uses images from the Passion of Jesus to make his point in The Garden and in Caravaggio, in which the artist’s religious paintings are from models from the streets. At one point in The Garden (shown in Derek), Jesus, with his side pierced, stands in an artificial landscape and a sports referee follows him, seems to accost him and blow his whistle. Jarman remarks that authority blew the whistle on Jesus.

La Vie de Jesus

This 1997 somber film by French director Bruno Dumont (Cannes winner for L’Humanite and Flandres) is about working class young men, unemployment, and the mundane details of their day-to-day lives. It leaves it to the audience to make the Jesus’ connections.

Les Demons de Jesus

Set in 1968, Les demons (1997) is a story of a family of gypsies, one of whom is called Jesus.

Stephen’s Test of Faith and Resurrection

Tom Newman appears as Jesus in both these short inspirational films (1998, 1999, respectively). Stephen’s Test of Faith focuses on a boy who is bullied and has a dream in which he goes back into the past and encounters Jesus, Stephen, and Saul. Resurrection is a story of early Christians.

Jesus 2000

This is a 1998 thirty-minute satirical short involving television reporting about Jesus’ last week if he had come in our time.

Jesus’ Son

A not so bright but very good-natured young man tells his story. However, he interrupts himself to explain his relationships with his friends and the dangers he found himself in as he fell in love with a sympathetic drug addict and became dependent himself. Gradually he makes contact with addiction groups and finds work in a home for the elderly and senile. It emerges that he has a gift for reaching people—but he is not self-consciously aware of it. A nurse urges him to touch people and he pacifies them. He also listens to a young Mennonite woman singing. This soothes him, and he repeatedly goes back to listen. Looking through her window, he sees that she is blind. He reaches through the window and touches her. She regains her sight. He also befriends a woman who sees herself as the cause of the illnesses and deaths of husbands and lovers. When he invites her to dance at a social, she leaves her cane behind. Without his intending it, he becomes a means of healing. He is like Jesus’ son.

Jesus’ Son won the International Catholic Cinema Organization’s award at the 1999 Venice Film Festival. The citation stated that it was a film of healing. It is the journey of a confused but good young man who is imperceptibly transformed into a man of compassion who literally and spiritually touches people and changes their lives. The film makes compassion and grace visible.

Da jeg traff Jesus . . . med sprettert

The title (which translates When I Hit Jesus . . . with My Slingshot) refers to a small boy in Norway in the 1930s who wants to find out more about Jesus and God. The film is based on a memoir by poet and jazz musician, Odd Borretzen. This is a pleasing reminiscence about childhood, growing up, and religion (2000).

In Jesus’ Name, Jesus Wept, and Baby Jesus

These are three short experimental films on images of Jesus and painted light by lecturer and filmmaker Stan Brakhage (2001).

Das Jesus Video

A television version of a German novel in the “What if . . . ?” vein. A young student of archaeology finds a Sony video camera instruction book in Jerusalem where it was buried two thousand years earlier. Did a time traveler photo-record Jesus? The film has some tongue-in-cheek adventure and quest (2000).

Superstar

Perhaps a bit of the irreverent and the bizarre, but this is a 1999 comedy about a Catholic schoolgirl, Mary Katherine (Molly Shannon) and her ambitions to be a star. It has light poking fun at the church and school, with Will Ferrell as the heartthrob but appearing in fantasies as Jesus—and supporting Mary Katherine’s hopes.

Dracula 2000

It may be something of a surprise to find a Dracula film in this list but there are some brief Jesus moments when the screenplay reveals who Dracula actually is.

This is a Dracula for the beginning of the twenty-first century. While it opens with memories of the Bram Stoker novel and Dracula being transported to England, it moves to the end of the twentieth century with Van Helsing (Christopher Plummer) keeping himself alive by the help of leeches. However, a group of American criminals decide to raid the safe that Van Helsing owns, thinking that it will provide wealth. However, it unleashes Dracula (Gerard Butler) again—to their detriment and their being transformed.

Jonny Lee Miller is the hero of the film, a reformed drug addict, who gets help from Van Helsing, who is an antiques dealer. Johnny then has to help Mary Heller, Van Helsing’s daughter, who does not know the secret of her ancestry. The action takes place in England but moves to the United States and to the city of New Orleans during Mardi Gras.

The particular point of interest—and quite surprising—is that at the seventy-seventh minute it is revealed that Dracula is, in fact, Judas. There is a flashback to Judas and his betrayal of Jesus, the kiss, the pieces of silver, the Crucifixion, Judas hanging himself—and the rope breaking, which means that he has roamed the earth since then. The final confrontation with Dracula by Mary is to hang him, with the rope not breaking this time—and she taking up the Van Helsing tradition as safeguarding humanity from vampires. Not exactly the Gospels, but arresting nonetheless.

Secondo Giovanni

This 2000 Italian experimental film, fifty-two minutes, combines a modern story of a young man who committed murder and wanders the city with an encounter between a modern Pontius Pilate and Jesus. It has digital camera work and elaborate editing with text and images, as well as a nonprofessional cast.

The Cross

The Cross is a twenty-minute short film on the Passion using the technique of the camera being the point of view of Jesus himself, something that was developed in the 1970s for the film on Mohammad, The Messenger, since the prophet could not be portrayed face-on. It is a reverent film by a director, Lance Tracy, whose family have been missionaries in Indonesia since the early 1990s. It is worth checking an interview by Matt Page of the director who indicates similarities in the filming of the Crucifixion with The Passion of the Christ. Tracy also speaks of an ambition to make a feature on Jesus (in the Gladiator, Lawrence of Arabia vein). In the meantime, he mentions that he is making a documentary on the adult industry in the United States! (The interview can be found on the Bible Films Blog, along with a longer review by Matt Page.)2

What Wouldn’t Jesus Do?

In this fifteen-minute short (2002), an interviewer goes to the home of Jesus in contemporary Los Angeles to get his views on how he sees modern society. God is also in the cast list.

The Boy Who Saw Christ

This is a debut short film (2003) from an African American writer-director, Kenya Cagle, who then went on to a series of feature films and a television series raising social issues, especially concerning children, like Thug Kidz.

Jesus, du Weisst

Jesus, du Weisst (Jesus, You Know, 2003) is a feature-length documentary from Austrian director Ulrich Seidl (Dog Days, Import/Export) in which six Catholics go to different churches and are filmed expressing their prayers and personal intentions to Jesus. They include a woman cleaning the church whose husband is a Muslim, a woman angry at her husband’s adultery, and a young man whose family ridicule his faith.

Screen Door Jesus

Not quite as odd as it sounds, it is the story of people in east Texas and their religious responses, faith, and eccentricities when someone detects an image of Jesus on a screen door (2003).

De Arm vAn JeZus

Translated Jesus’ Arm (2003), this is a Dutch film about a search by a son for his father. It involves migrating from Rotterdam to the United States, with the son later returning to find his father. The film includes footage of the bombing of Rotterdam in World War II.

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus

This documentary film (2005) takes a close-up look at the culture of some small towns in the American south—rural, poor, disadvantaged regarding education, and strongly Pentecostal in religious belief and practice.

Jesus Camp

Oscar-nominated documentary (2006) focusing on Becky Fischer, who runs a summer camp for small children that, she says, is based on the methods of the Islamic Madrasas. Enthusiasm and commitment to Jesus is what she claims. Brainwashing is the view of critics, especially when the children see themselves as part of the Army of God, proclaim their faith loudly, are crusaders for moral issues like abortion, and absorb a political agenda that is supportive of the stances of President George Bush.

Gas Station Jesus

This was the working title of a film, also known as Miracle Baby, which was released in 2006 as False Prophets. A young woman experiences a miraculous conception and decides to abort the child. A fundamentalist Christian group intervene and persuade her to join an adoption scheme. She becomes suspicious and ends up at a service station, where she meets a wise radio preacher and his son, Manny, who becomes her guide. Attacked, she prepares to undergo a difficult birth and a possible miracle. The question is whether Manny is a Jesus-figure or an incarnation of a Jesus disciple. (Bloggers’ comments on the IMDb are generally favorable and see the film as a parable and serious minded.)

World Trade Center

Oliver Stone’s 2006 re-creation of the collapse of the Twin Towers focuses on two New York firemen buried in the rubble who are finally rescued. They give each other moral support. One is Hispanic and, at one stage, has a kind of “vision” of Jesus. For many audiences (and film critics) the vision looks particularly kitsch, but it is one of those very popular devotional images of Jesus—brightly colored, predominantly yellow—of the Sacred Heart. It gives the man some strength to survive.

What Would Jesus Buy?

This is a sometimes raucous but telling documentary (2007) about the commercialization of Christmas in the United States. It includes many sequences of frantic shoppers and interviews, as well as some comedy with an actor who, with a growing entourage of singers and performers, pretends to be a protesting reverend, picketing stores like Walmart, and getting arrested for his pains. The spirit of Jesus is there in this critique of very un-Jesus-like commercialism.

The Priestess

Armenia was the first nation in the world to accept Christianity as its state religion. This happened in 301 AD. Armenian director Vigen Chaldranyan created a fictional story about a priestess of Mithra who became a pivotal figure in foretelling the rise of Christianity and who succored Gregory the Illuminator in his imprisonment. As she makes a prophecy, Jesus is seen in the background carrying his cross, a moving icon indicating a spirituality that was to pervade the nation. The director himself plays Jesus in the brief sequence (2007).

The Perfect Stranger and Another Perfect Stranger

With the interest in religious films after the success of The Passion of the Christ, these two films (2005, 2007, respectively) were popular amongst Christian niche audiences in the United States. Based on books by David Gregory, the films introduce a stranger who, in the first film, comes to dinner with the Cominsky family. He is Jesus who talks about issues of faith and religion. In the second film, which takes place ten years later, the little girl, Sarah, of the first film, is now nineteen, going to college, and facing spiritual questions. She meets a traveling stranger for more discussions.

Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo

One of the saints who had visions of Jesus was Teresa of Avila (1515–1582). Filmmakers took more interest in her because of the erotic undertones of her experiences, best known from the statue by Bernini. There was a straightforward film from Spain about her in 1961, Teresa de Jesus (available on YouTube); a television series in 1984, Teresa de Jesus (a complete and reverent look at her life); and a telemovie in 2003, Teresa, Teresa.

The sexual motifs are to the fore in Ray Loriga’s Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo (2007), with Paz Vega a rather unlikely choice for portraying the saint. There is a focus on her visions and ecstasies and an actor credited with playing Jesus.

There had been some controversy in the 1990s with Nigel Wingrove’s Visions of Ecstasy (1989), an eighteen-minute film on Teresa and her visions that was banned by the British censors. When the distributors appealed in 1996, the European Court of Human Rights upheld the British ban for blasphemy. In 2000, Wingrove made a salacious sex film, Sacred Flesh, about a convent where the superior had visions of Mary Magdalene and discussed sexuality, the Catholic Church, and its attitudes toward sex—Mary Magdalene’s views were not those from the Gospels.

Notes

1. Sun-Woo Jang interview with Tony Rayns appears in Rayns’ book Seoul Stirring: 5 Korean Directors (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1993).

2. “Interview with Lance Tracy,” Bible Films Blog, February 19, 2007, biblefilms.blogspot.com.au/search/label/Cross%20%28The%20-%202001%29; Matt Page, “The Cross (2001)—Review,” Bible Films Blog, February 7, 2007, biblefilms.blogspot.com/2007/02/cross-2001-review.html.