Open Heaven Jesus Films Workshop

This Sunday I'm going to be running a 45 minute session with Jesus films at my church Open Heaven. I don't often get a chance to play to the home crowd, so to speak, so it's something I'm looking forward to. (Actually, I like it this way. It means that when they do ask me to do something it's because it's really want it, rather than because they feel they have to).

Anyway, I'm going to be looking at how different films portray the end of the story of Jesus. It's an exercise I've run before as part of the Jesus Films course I ran a few years back (download notes), and it worked fairly well as I recall.

I'm going to show clips from the following seven films (chapters and timings included incase anyone wants to play along at home):

The King of Kings (1927 cut) - ch.26; start- 2:22:55; end- 2:25:50
Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo(1964) - ch.16; start- 2:06:36; end- 2:11:00
Son of Man (1969) - ch.10; start- 1:26:50; end- 1:28:55
Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) - ch.23; start- 1:36:39; end- 1:41:20
Last Temptation (1988) - ch.29; start- 2:39:28; end- 2:41:05
Passion of the Christ (2004) - ch.15; start- 1:53:10; end- 1:55:45
The Passion (2008) ep.4 - ch.1; start- 19:42; end- 22:42

There's a nice mix there of how the different films end the story, focussing on the different elements. Even the films that don't portray the resurrection bring out different aspects of the significance of Jesus' death. Son of Man is very depressing, whereas Last Temptation ends on a victorious note, even though it doesn't explore a bodily resurrection.

It's also nice to have the BBC's The Passion to add into the mix. It's one of the more controversial endings, and has been read in widely different ways. For some it suggests Jesus' followers were hallucinating, for others it nicely brought out the apparently changed nature of Jesus' physical body.

One of the things we will look at is the different biblical accounts of Jesus' resurrection which I've summarised below:

Matt	Mark
Women at the Tomb	Women at the Tomb
Empty Tomb	Empty Tomb
Jesus appears	(Res'n appearances)
Soldiers Bribed

Luke	John
Women at the Tomb	Mary at the Tomb
Empty Tomb	Pete & Jon at Tomb
Road to Emmaus	Mary sees Jesus
Appearance to 11	Appearance to 11
	2nd appearance to 11
	Fish for breakfast

What I find interesting is how the films that are more popular amongst more conservative Christians (The King of Kings, Passion of the Christtend to use the most artistic licence on this part of the story, whereas those that are more criticised by those groups (Last Temptation, The Passion) actually stick more closely to the text. It's also interesting that ending a Jesus film without showing the resurrection is often considered the product of modern scepticism even though it is actually continuing the traditions of the Easter passion plays.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what they all make of the different films. I'll report back next week.

Intolerance Script Online

I'm doing some teaching on French church history, so naturally my mind thought of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), and in trying to find some more information on it I came a cross a couple of useful sites. Firstly, this site has the entire 'script' (wording on the title cards essentially), and you can also watch the film online and see thumbnails of screenshots taken once every minute at Internet Archive. You can also view it on a larger screen at YouTube.

The Original Fireseed Jesus Remix

My friend Joel Wilson has been working on a project taking clips of the same scene from different Jesus films and editing them together. He's made six overall, and the first three are now on YouTube:

Episode 1 - Temple Clearing
Episode 2 - Meditation
Episode 3 - God is With Us

My favourite is the third I think. I'm encouraging Joel to post the others as well as I think it's an interesting concept. In particular I like the way it demonstrates how you can always spot which bearded male is Jesus even though face, build, clothers and hair etc. all vary from film to film. It shows just how important the composition of a shot is.

Nina and the Children's Bible Synoptic Problem

So my 3 year old, Nina, and I were reading the nativity story from one of her children's Bibles the other day. As I was reading out the closing words "Joseph made a bed for him to lie on and..." she interrupts me. "No Daddy, it was Mary who made Jesus' bed". Nina has a good memory for these types of things, so I suspected she was reclling the story from one of her other children's Bibles. So I checked her Candle Bible for Todddlers, and sure enough, it climaxes the scene with "and Mary made him a bed from the straw". I must admit I felt a little gush of pride at my three year old spotting the small differences in the broadly similar accounts of the same story. She's a smart kid.

Capitalism, Jesus of Nazareth and Michael Moore's Love Story

Last week was a bit of a crazy week, such that I didn't manage to blog a single thing. Apologies to all those who stopped by only to be disappointed. Almost as annoying as not having the time to blog was finding that there was so much to blog. So hopefully the next few days will yield various small tid bits of information, which, with a bit of luck, will pave the way for me to do more of the type of blogging I really like - doing reviews, making observations and so on.

For now, though, I'm going to have to content myself with talking about Michael Moore's latest film Capitalism: A Love Story/.

I only caught onto the film a few weeks ago when I saw that Moore had talked about Jesus being anti-capitalist. I wrote a brief piece on this for rejesus.co.uk a week or two back. I must admit that I'm one of those evil people who is suspicious of capitalism, largely, I guess because, as Moore says, it seems so out of touch with Jesus and the new community he founded.

Nevertheless, my interest peaked last week on discovering a write up in The New Yorker which includes the following excerpt:

He (Moore) uses old films, like Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, for sarcastic fun: Jesus, dubbed, recommends not care for the poor but deregulating the banking industry as the way to salvation.

Given that Moore has been quite open that this film is inspired by his religious views and his appeciation of Jesus's teaching in particular, I'm not sure on what basis this is pigeonholed as "sarcastic fun", but then David Denby has seen the film and I have not (yet). It does sound a little cheesy though. I can't, at all, see how this could be done well. Even so it's interesting that it's this Jesus film that is used instead of one of the others, particularly given that General Motors were originally going to sponsor the film until religious groups pressurised them into changing their minds. Both this film and Moore's earlier Roger and Me cover GM in some detail.

Fox to Make 300-Style Moses Movie

Both Empire and Variety are reporting that Fox are planning to make a new film about Moses in the style of 2007's 300. The new film will be produced by Peter Chernin and Dylan Clark from Adam Cooper and Bill Collage's script. There's no definite news on who the director will be but the current favourite is Timur Bekmambetov who is working on a similarly styled film version of "Moby Dick".

Here's a little bit more from Variety:

20th Century Fox has made a preemptive acquisition of a pitch to tell the story of Moses in "300" style. The tale will start with his near death as an infant to his adoption into the Egyptian royal family, his defiance of the Pharoah and deliverance of the Hebrews from enslavement.

[snip]

The Moses story will be told using the same green screen strategy as "300," so it will feel more like that pic or "Braveheart" than "The Ten Commandments,” the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille film.

The popular mythical and magical elements inherent in the Book of Exodus will be there--including the plagues visited upon Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea--but the Cooper & Collage version will also include new elements of Moses’ life that the writers culled from Rabbinical Midrash and other historical sources.

That last line is imilar to the kind of thing Cecil B. DeMille said about his second version of The Ten Commandments. In reality, though, his film contained relatively little midrashic material and mainly used modern novelisations of the Moses story.

I'm not sure I'm hugely optimistic about this film. Whilst I appreciated the style of Sin City and 300, I also found both films to be depressingly misogynistic. I'm not sure I'm too keen for a hyper-violent misogynistic take on a patriarchal story, even if it also looks fantastic. But who knows, perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Biblical Studies Carnival 46

Photo by Tim Parkinson, used under a Creative Commons Licence

Daniel and Tonya of the Hebrew and Greek Reader have posted Biblical Studies Carnival XLVI. The latest Biblioblogs chart is also up. I've just crept back into the top 100.