Living in the Reel World - Elizabeth Roy

Living in the Reel World
Non-assigned reading blog
Elizabeth Roy
4/23

David Jasper, in “Living in the Reel World: The Bible in Film” discusses some of the problems inherent in the purposeful depiction of religion in film. He says that film involves deception, lies, limitation, and interpretation as a matter of course. Therefore, it’s impossible – and an invitation to failure – to try to create an accurate depiction of the Bible or of Jesus. Jasper says, “The too-serious refusal to risk the comedy of the intersection of ritual and representation - or, if you prefer more simply, the eternal and the temporal – results merely in absurdity, a wrong packaging of the deceiver's art, so that John Wayne's classic moment in George Stevens' The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), as the centurion drawling "devoutly" at the foot of the Cross, "Truly this man was the Son of God", becomes an act of hilarious inappropriateness” (32.) In other words, an attempt to make a serious movie about Christ often turns out to be high-handed, overdone, or impossible to take seriously. He argues that two of the most successful portrayals of Jesus are in two films strikingly different from normal “The Life of Christ” films. One is unique in its metanarrative (Jesus of Montreal is a film about a play) and the other is unique in its comedy (Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.) I tend to agree with Jasper. More modern films (the article was written in 1994) such as The Passion of the Christ may succeed in the box office, but they fail to move us, inspire us, or make us think. On the other hand, plays-turned-film such as Jesus Christ Superstar, by being both a metanarrative and not entirely serious, tend to succeed in one of these ways.
Jasper, David. "Living in the Reel World : The Bible in Film." Modern Believing 35.1 (1994): 29-37.