Jesus Movies

1. Jesus Movies fall 2008 King/Malbon

2. Classical Hollywood • modes of probabilistic and historical realism • goal-centered narratives driven by the decisions of white, heterosexual heroes • regular and redundant clarification of story progress • editing/cinematography meant to disguise the artifice of narration and thus intensify emotional response

3. Blockbuster business • abandonment of prestige road-shows for … • intensive, opening-weekend marketing to fans • market centers on suburban, post-60s youth • themes include nostalgia for pulp culture, and youthful rebellion and sarcasm • franchise marketing returns

4. Franchises • Blockbuster marketing involves tie-in products, the potential for which shapes selection of source material and emphasis in the adaptation/ screenwriting and production design. • fantasy cycles: Back to the Future, Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean, Spiderman, Star Wars, Terminator, X-Men …

5. Franchise development • Proprietary stories are the surest sellers, with aggressive fans who will turn out. • Multimedia proliferation of authors’ works and fans’ reworkings builds fan worlds that lend depth to the clichés of fantasy literature (Manichean duels between good and evil). • Filmmakers who manage such franchises take care during development to court fans.

6. Franchise rewriting • Filmmakers condense reams of trivia into coherent stories with no more than several dramatic arcs. • Filmmakers often rely upon fan investment to sustain narrative interest if not clarity. • Arcs usually build toward peril and face-offs with evil.

7. acts of clarity • setups, in which protagonists conceive initial goals • complicating actions, in which protagonists encounter new situations and reformulate goals • developments, in which protagonists struggle to reach their goals, though with little progress • climaxes that build toward sustained periods of action and the resolutions (not necessarily successful) of their struggles. • (optional) epilogues that suggest what stability will follow

8. Transition signals • fades or cuts to black or to white, to silence or to musical flourishes • montages of decision-making, or post-break news reports or executions of previous end-act decisions • In most cases, between-act transitions are regularly timed and feature ways for viewers to contemplate what they have just seen.

9. Structure and theme • Look at end-act decisions and situations of Jesus Christ Superstar. • What patterns emerge, lending emphasis to what aspect of the gospel? • How does this compare to Gospel plotting? • What does it suggest about Hollywood’s approach to Jesus?

10. Jesus Movies fall 2008 King/Malbon

11. Rumor control • The story about Gibson’s conversions doesn’t check out. • (Fortunately, that’s an unusual situation in an academic journal.)

12. Portraiture • Protestants tried to avoid taking devotional attitudes toward images. • Christ was first pictured, in their art, in narrative context. • But Victorian Protestants backslid to portraiture by extracting the head of Christ from approved images. • Heinrich Hoffman • Christ and the Rich Young Ruler, 1889 • and extraction

13. Warner Sallman • Head of Christ • 1941 http://www.warnersallman.com/ • rejected during the 1960s by evangelicals as middlebrow and feminine

14. Warner Sallman • rejected sketch (too “feminine”) • 1962

15. Richard Hook • Head of Christ • 1964 • Popular with the 1970s Jesus movement and evangelical Christians today

16. Del Parson • Christ in Red Robe • 1983 • commissioned as official portrait of the LDS church • (told while painting to make it “more masculine”)

17. Spectacle • Concerned about the idolatry inherent in devotional responses to imagery, Protestants have rejected immersive, spectacular art as well. • By adopting this attitude, Protestants resisted the growing interest in high-impact visual media, such as cycloramas and panoramas, which became family destinations during the 19th century. • Spectation and pilgrimage were joined in these trips, as artists tried to draw viewers into the stories told by the panoramas.

18. panorama http://www.panoramas.dk/fullscreen6/f40-rio-de-janeiro.html http://www.jacobson.nl/Pages/fotografie/Panorama/painted_panorama's_en.html http://www.cyclorama.com/eng/panorama.htm • Medieval artists originally developed displays of Stations of the Cross for those who could not travel the Via Dolorosa.

19. Jerusalem und die Kreuzigung Christi http://www.prof-bruno-piglhein.de/Panorama/dpanorama-color-gross.html

20. Ritual space Panoramas work by recreating aspects of the ritual space of large churches and cathedrals: • Insulation from world outside • Presumption of bond of faith between viewers • Darkness and silence to blend viewers into a group and reduce distraction • Light trained on focus of group attention • (missing mainly the rhythmic effort to affirm elements of cosmology)

21. Absent presences • Because God can be considered the object of faith rather than empirical proof, God is an absent presence—felt not seen. Film is another. • Both religious observance movie enjoyment require the understandings of visual media and the suspensions of disbelief—the images must be made to symbolize. • Seeing (the art) must be turned, by immersion in spectacle and ritual devotion, into believing. • (This is what Protestants had wished to avoid in their consumption of imagery.)

22. Crucifixion art • http://sharpiron.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/different-visions-of-the-cross/ • Grünewald: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/G/grunewald/grunwld1.jpg.html • Master of the Virgo Inter Virgines • 16th C • Diego Velazquez • 17th C

23. violence and belief • Medieval courts regarded torture as a means to truth, and depictions of suffering as means to faith. • Violence overwhelms reason, evokes strong feeling, and allows truth to well up from within. • Today, symbols of violence are central to many emotionally-charged religious rituals, enhancing faith in symbols of powers worthy of our sacrifices. • More so than Passion plays, passion films seek to overwhelm with stimulus, drawing viewers in beyond spectation to experience.

24. violence and belief • Art does this not with realism defined as historical accuracy as measured by scientists, but rather as a style that evokes a senseof historical or probabilistic reality. (more on this later) • The point is to make viewers feel close to suffering. • Where panoramas surround viewers and thus mime physical presence, movies use continuity editing and tight shots to make them feel close to events.

25. violence and belief • The result of such immersion in spectacle can be a feeling of solidarity (pride in group membership). • But artistic, media violence can also overwhelm reason and summon emotion to the opposite effect: anti-social aggression. • This fear joins the fear of idolatry at the heart of crusading against Jesus films—that the magic lantern that makes absence present can also move people in the wrong directions.