Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: Ma contro "La Passione" non ci sono solo atteggiamenti precotti...

Questo e' un articolo molto interessante sul film di Gibson che ho trovato
sul "World Socialist Web Site" (purtroppo e' in inglese). L'articolo e'
lungo, ma deve parte della sua lunghezza al soffermarsi a considerare
realmente i diversi aspetti del film, anche nel contesto delle altre
rappresentazioni artistiche avute in passato della stessa vicenda. Per
quanto opinabile, e' la prima analisi contraria al film in cui mi sia
imbattuto che mostri un po' di testa e, soprattutto, qualche passo oltre le
consuete banalita' astratte. Inoltre, al di la' del sentimento politico o di
una certa arbitrarieta' che non condivido del tutto, ho trovato interessanti
anche le riflessioni alla fine sul rapporto tra le reazioni al film e alcuni
aspetti della societa' americana contemporanea. Enjoy!
Why has The Passion of the Christ evoked such a popular response in America?
By David Walsh, 5 March 2004
The Passion of the Christ, directed by Mel Gibson, screenplay by Gibson and
Benedict Fitzgerald
Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is a deeply repugnant film, but not
an insignificant one. While offering no contribution to our understanding of
Jesus' life or his teachings, or the relation of religion to modern life
(even from the point of view of a believer), it does provide insight into a
certain contemporary American mentality and mood. In that sense, Gibson's
film is far less a work of theology, much less a serious artistic effort,
than a revealing, quasi-autobiographical cri de coeur-and deserves to be
treated as such.
The Passion of the Christ opened to great fanfare in the US last week and
has attracted a large audience, especially among the fundamentalist
Christian faithful. By and large, the American media has treated the film
with great respect. Rupert Murdoch's tabloid New York Post dedicated its
front page to the film, as did the New York Daily News. It has made
front-page headlines in every major newspaper and received wide play on
television. The film has also come under criticism in some quarters, particu
larly from liberal and Jewish commentators.
The essential facts of The Passion's production are now widely known.
Gibson, a leading man in numerous action and dramatic films over the past
two decades, belongs to a traditionalist Catholic splinter group, one of the
many sects that reject the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65.
His father, Hutton Gibson, is a Holocaust denier who has railed against the
Church hierarchy for decades. Gibson senior describes the Second Vatican
Council, which, among other things, officially absolved the Jewish people of
responsibility for Christ's death, as "a Masonic plot backed by the Jews."
The movie actor privately financed The Passion of the Christ, filmed in
Italy in Latin and Aramaic. Its lead performer, James Caviezel (The Thin Red
Line), is another devout Catholic, who announced on the Christian talk show
"The 700 Club," in late February, "I believe I was called to play this
 role." Gibson first screened a rough cut of his film last year for
Christian fundamentalists and other right-wing political and media figures,
while excluding potentially critical voices.
The film treats the last 12 hours of Jesus' life, as recounted in the four
New Testament Gospels and other, later embellishments, particularly the
version of the Passion set down by the German Augustinian nun Anne Catherine
Emmerich (1774-1824), a mystic and anti-Semite. Emmerich's The Dolorous
Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ adds sadistic details to the Gospel
accounts and is filled with references to the "Jewish mob," depicted as
"cruel," "wicked" and "hard-hearted."
Gibson's film is disgustingly brutal, perhaps unlike any other widely
distributed film before it. For two hours, virtually non-stop, a man is
beaten, punched, spit upon, whipped, scourged, tortured and finally nailed
to a cross. All the bloody, horrifying details are lovingly filmed. The
Passion of the Christ is also profoundly anti-Semitic in its imagery and
narrative thrust. The entire frenzied, violent work is oddly unaffecting.
The filmmaker asserts that he has limited himself to the last half-day of
Jesus' existence on earth to emphasize the "enormity of the sacrifice."
Other possible motivations suggest themselves. The narrow scope of The
Passion of the Christ renders impossible any serious discussion of Jesus'
religious and social message. It also excludes the fact of his popularity
with wide layers of the Jewish population in Jerusalem. After all, only a
few days before his death, according to the Gospels, Jesus was welcomed to
the city by jubilant crowds. Most accounts of the Passion begin with this
triumphant entry.
Gibson's work, on the other hand, opens with Jesus' internal struggle the
night before the crucifixion in the Garden of Gethsemane. Foreseeing what is
to come, he asks God that the chalice might pass from him, adding, however,
"your will be done." A sinister, androgynous Satan tempts and taunts him
(he/she reappears throughout the film).
Jesus is arrested, through the treachery of his erstwhile disciple, Judas.
Why do the Romans, egged on by the Jewish high priests, take Jesus into
custody at night? Gibson's film never addresses the question, because a
serious answer would have to take into account the Roman fear that the
charismatic prophet's detention might lead to Jewish popular protest.
The extreme brutality begins almost immediately upon Jesus' capture.
Dramatizing one of Emmerich's additions, Gibson has the Roman soldiers hang
Jesus over the railing of a bridge at the end of his chains, to the point of
nearly killing him.
Brought before the Jewish high priests, led by Caiaphas, Jesus is condemned
as a heretic and blasphemer. They demand to know if he claims to be the son
of God. "I am," he replies. Jesus is spit upon and further abused. "Death!"
shriek the offended Jews.
Writing of Gibson's approach to the leading Jewish officials, the New
Republic's Leon Wieseltier notes justly: "The figure of Caiaphas, played
with disgusting relish by an actor named Mattia Sbragia, is straight out of
Oberammergau [location of the medieval German Passion play that depicted the
Jews as "Christ-killers"]. Like his fellow priests, he has a graying
rabbinical beard and speaks with a gravelly sneer and moves cunningly
beneath a tallit-like shawl streaked with threads the color of money. He is
gold and cold. All he does is demand an execution." These are, as Wieseltier
observes, "classically anti-Semitic images."
While Pontius Pilate and the other Roman officials vacillate, seeking to
avoid imposing a death sentence on Jesus, the Jewish leaders are utterly
relentless. They become ever more enraged and bloodthirsty. Gibson follows
the spirit of the Emmerich ravings: "[T]he sight of [Jesus'] sufferings, far
from exciting a feeling of compassion in the hard-hearted Jews, simply
filled them with disgust, and increased their rage. Pity was, indeed, a
feeling unknown in their cruel breasts."
Caiaphas and the "Jewish mob" demand Jesus' death, but Pilate promises only
to "chastise" him. A group of brutish Roman soldiers sets gleefully to work
whipping, beating, scourging Jesus. The scene, which lasts more than half an
hour, is one of the most repellent in the film. The brutish soldiers first
beat Jesus with rods, then whips, then a kind of cat-o'-nine-tails whose
various strands are tipped with metal. The latter is first tested on a
wooden table, where it tears out chunks of wood. When it is used on Jesus'
back, bits of flesh and skin fly through the air. By the end of the beating,
which no human being could endure, Jesus' body is a mass of striated, bloody
flesh. The placement of the crown of thorns on Christ's head is an occasion
for additional torture and streams of blood.
Still unsatisfied when the flayed and nearly unconscious Jesus is brought
before them, the Jewish mob demands his death. Fearful of mass unrest,
Pilate gives in to their demands and authorizes the crucifixion. Jesus is
obliged to bear the massive wooden cross up Calvary (in three of the Gospels
another man carries it, and, historically, criminals were only obliged to
carry a cross-beam). The driving of the nails into Jesus' hands and feet is
another horrific sequence, with the drunken Roman soldiers inflicting
unbearable pain on their victim. Stuck on his cross, Jesus begs forgiveness
for those persecuting him, and dies. When a centurion sticks a spear in the
dead Jesus' side, a shower of blood pours out. In an epilogue, as it were,
Jesus rises from the dead, unmarked except for the holes in the palms of his
hands.
Gibson's agenda
What is one to make of all this?
Gibson is not without talent. He has obvious skills as an actor. His Hamlet
(Franco Zeffirelli), while not brilliant, was competent and sometimes
moving. Alongside the super-violent Mad Max and Lethal Weapon series, the
American-born, Australian-raised Gibson appeared in a number of films
produced by the "new wave" of Australian directors who emerged in the late
1970s (Peter Weir and Gillian Armstrong). He could give relatively
straightforward performances in works like Tequila Sunrise and The River.
His persona (and something of his real personality may find expression here)
has suggested equal parts genuine amiability, bewilderment and death-defying
recklessness.
Even as a director (The Man Without a Face and Braveheart), Gibson has his
moments. His treatment of Pontius Pilate in The Passion, perhaps the only
character allowed to exhibit genuine contradiction in the film, reveals a
certain sensitivity. Pilate is someone he bends over backward to understand.
Ideology has apparently prevented Gibson from treating the Jewish leaders in
the same fashion.
The characterizations in general are cartoonish. One becomes inured to the
bloodletting or averts one's eyes. The overall result is tedium, monotony.
This is not a compelling artistic or intellectual experience. Furthermore,
although a few miracles are duly recorded, the film does nothing to explore
the sacred, the mythic and the epic elements in religion and religious
belief. The entire affair is rather banal and cold, and-aside from the
extreme level of violence-thoroughly forgettable.
The destruction before one's eyes of a passive, virtually inert human body
is a horrifying spectacle, but not necessarily a deeply moving one. To feel
the significance of Jesus' death, one must have some grasp of the
significance of his life. For all Gibson's assertions about the depth of his
faith, his is a largely soulless Jesus Christ, a nonentity. His mother Mary,
Mary Magdalene and his supporters are reduced to horrified spectators.
Activity and life lie almost entirely with the tormentors and oppressors. A
peculiar state of affairs. It's difficult to see how this film might
convince the skeptic or waverer about the truth of Jesus' doctrines.
Again, one must insist that Gibson's treatment of Jesus has relatively
little to do with traditional Catholic or Christian faith or its artistic
iconography. The Passion takes up three or four chapters of each Gospel (in
Matthew, 26-28; in Mark, 14-16; in Luke, 22-24; and in John, 18-21). Mark
simply says, "And it was the third hour, and they crucified him." The
emphasis in the Gospels is on Jesus' teachings, not his horrifying death.
A Canadian Catholic priest, Gérald Caron, writes, "[T]o make such a
spectacle of Jesus' passion and death totally disconnected from his message
and life mission is theologically flawed. It is not the quantity of blood
and suffering that has redeemed us, but Jesus' death-crowning a life of
'service' as Mark says in 10:45. It was the price He had to pay, not to God,
but to remain faithful to the call and mission of His life. It was His
vision of God's reign that led Him to the cross-not the other way round."
Western art, from Giotto in the late 1200s and early 1300s until the age of
the great secular Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, is
inconceivable without images of Jesus and the Passion in particular. Hardly
a great name is missing from the list of those painters who took up the
suffering and death of Christ: Bellini, Mantegna, El Greco, Bosch, Dürer,
Caravaggio, Van Dyck, Piero della Francesca, Fra Angelico, Grünewald,
Titian, Correggio, Rembrandt, Leonardo ("The Last Supper"), Michelangelo,
Raphael, Tintoretto, Botticelli, Van Eyck, Cranach, Rubens, Velasquez and
many more.
While the contemporary museum-goer may weary of the religious imagery, it
clearly had great collective spiritual meaning to the artists and the
viewing public of the time. Christianity's "double bookkeeping," as Trotsky
referred to it, did not make the ills of this life disappear, it merely
solved them fictitiously. Society, through the medium of the Church, handed
out a promissory note, which the oppressed masses were to redeem in the next
world. Nonetheless, artists and viewers alike drew real consolation from the
death and resurrection of Jesus, a God-in-Man who felt deeply for their
suffering, who had died for them, whose return held out the promise of a
paradise on earth.
Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is a work from which love and compassion
for humanity, everything "Christlike" in the best sense of the word, are
largely absent.
The postwar Biblical epics (Quo Vadis, The Robe, Demetrius and the
Gladiators, Ben Hur, King of Kings, Barabbas, The Greatest Story Ever Told),
for all their clumsiness and sometimes downright foolishness, nonetheless
pursued certain themes: tolerance, forgiveness, opposition to official
repression and cruelty. Particularly in the aftermath of the Holocaust and
the slaughterhouse of two world wars, filmmakers felt that the message of
universal brotherhood and resistance to tyranny would find a receptive
audience.
Many remember the scene from William Wyler's Ben Hur (1959) in which Jesus
gives a thirsty slave a drink of water, angering a Roman soldier, who
proceeds to threaten Christ. Jesus simply stands there, the epitome of
compassion, looking at the soldier and the latter backs away, awed.
Each generation creates a Jesus in its own image, so to speak. Pier Paolo
Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) belongs loosely to the
radicalized era of "liberation theology." Pasolini's work, which is not
above suspicion of political opportunism, coming as it did in part as a
byproduct of the Catholic-Communist Party rapprochement in Italy in the
early 1960s, is nonetheless breathtaking at times. Pasolini's Christ
violently ejects the moneylenders from the temple, orders his disciples to
surrender their possessions and break from their families, and expresses his
preference for the poor and the meek.
Gibson has something else in mind. The actor/filmmaker may not have a
specific political agenda, but he is no naïf. To have screened his rough cut
last summer for the likes of the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan, the
National Review's Kate O'Beirne, syndicated columnist and Fox News Channel
analyst Linda Chavez, and David Kuo, the deputy director of the Bush
administration's "faith-based initiative"-right-wing scoundrels all-provides
some indication of his general orientation.
The traditionalist Catholic strain has been inextricably linked to
right-wing politics. Michael Cuneo, in his The Smoke of Satan, wrote that
its practitioners "would like nothing more than to be transported back to
Louis XIV's France or Franco's Spain, where Catholicism enjoyed an unrivaled
presidency over cultural life and other religions existed entirely at its
beneficence." In his Verdict on Vichy, Michael Curtis pointed out that
Frenchman Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, one of the founders of the
traditionalist movement, and his followers supported an extreme right-wing
ideology, imbued with anti-Semitism. For many years, they provided sanctuary
to Paul Touvier, who tortured and murdered Jews while serving as a Vichy
policeman during World War II.
How could Gibson, linked to such ideas and circles, possibly do justice to
the humane and indeed profoundly subversive message of Jesus in the Gospels?
The German philosopher Hegel cites Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount,
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," and calls this "a
dictum of the noblest simplicity." This "pure heart," Hegel points out,
further citing the Sermon, is filled with love for "the peacemakers," for
those "persecuted for righteousness' sake," for those who strive to be
"perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." What
remarkable sentiments!
Inevitably, comments Hegel, this exacting doctrine must assume a "polemical"
(revolutionary-practical) form. "Whatever might disturb the purity of the
soul, should be destroyed," he continues. Further quoting Jesus, "Wilt thou
be perfect, go and sell what thou hast, and give it to the poor, so shalt
thou have a treasure in heaven, and come, follow me," Hegel adds, "Were this
precept directly complied with, a social revolution must take place; the
poor would become the rich."
Socialists have often noted the resemblance between early Christianity and
the socialist working class movement. Both originated as movements of the
oppressed, Christianity as a movement of slaves and freed slaves, of poor
people deprived of all rights. Both movements preach and predict a future
liberation from bondage and misery, Christianity placing salvation in the
afterlife, socialism struggling for the transformation of conditions on
earth. Both movements were subject to cruel persecution, outlawed at various
points, declared to be enemies of the existing social order.
This subversive, socialistic content, which at least found passing reference
in nearly all the Biblical epics of the past, is missing from Gibson's
Passion.
What takes its place, as the film's real positive content?
The marginal personality
Critics like Wieseltier and others are capable of scoring points at the film
's expense. They may even express outrage. Richard Cohen in the Washington
Post legitimately points to the cult of violence in Gibson's work and calls
it "fascistic." But none of these liberal or erstwhile liberal critics hints
at the possibility that The Passion of the Christ tells us anything about
contemporary America and its discontents.
Gibson is clearly a political right-winger of one variety or another, but
the film cannot simply be reduced to those dimensions, although it has
undoubtedly become an element in the Bush campaign, even a plank in the
Republican election platform, one could say.
The film bears witness to a more general socio-psychological process. What
emerges most strongly is the bitterness, resentment and even self-pity of
definite social layers.
In the traditional depiction of the Passion, the Roman soldiers and the
Jewish bystanders represent us, general humanity, including the artist him-
or herself. The death of Jesus brings out human capacities for wickedness,
for indifference, for nobility. It is intended to set these qualities in
relief and permit us to examine ourselves, the degree to which we are "pure
in heart." For Gibson, this is not of any great interest. Such
considerations are largely brushed aside.
Rather one senses a semi-autobiographical impulse at work in Gibson's film.
And one is not referring to his individual psychological state. The
actor/director may very well see himself as a man who has been persecuted,
wronged, even (metaphorically) scourged, and no doubt personal demons play a
role here, but the mix of aggression and passivity in Gibson's psyche is
secondary.
One is speaking of an embittered, troubled social type. The political
tendency (in the broadest sense) he represents, which has relatively deep
roots in the US and has become more pronounced in recent years, is
associated with feelings of deep resentment and paranoia.
Such individuals and groupings on the right are deeply convinced that
Americans and Christians in particular form an endangered species and face
an almost universally hostile world. To these forces, the planet is full of
enemies, and the events of September 11 only confirmed this fact. This is a
social milieu to which Bush's call for a crusade against the "axis of evil"
came as both a vindication and a battle-cry. These elements are convinced
"everyone is out to get" them. Operating with a great deal of self-delusion,
and turning the world upside down, they see America-irony of ironies!-as the
victim.
Gibson belongs to this class of marginal personalities who feel they and
other Christian Americans have been hard done by, ignored, persecuted. For
his father, this creates a conspiracy mania, a hatred of the Catholic
hierarchy, for the Jews and for all the "traitors" to the true cause. One
should recall that the son appeared in a film entitled Conspiracy Theory, in
which he spoke the line, "Somebody has to lift the scab...the festering scab
that is the Vatican."
Of course, Gibson's film has an appeal beyond these most paranoid elements,
in the first place to wider layers of fundamentalist Christians. But what
does the growth of evangelical Christianity (and its specific Catholic
variant) represent, if not primarily a concentrated ideological expression
of the increased confusion and disorientation of considerable numbers of
people in the US?
And such a phenomenon is not so difficult to understand. One only has to
consider the massive changes that have occurred in American society over the
past several decades. In the first place, the economic transformations: the
wholesale destruction or decline of entire industries and regions, the
changes associated with globalization and computerization, the virtual
disappearance of traditional rural and even small-town America. Along with
these, the demographic changes in family structure, religious affiliation,
in union membership-in general, every old allegiance has been loosened or
broken.
Momentous decisions are taken-to go to war or prepare for new ones, to
eliminate the social-welfare state, to deregulate or scrap essential
services-entirely behind the back of the population. All the while, official
society discards its liberal consensus, lurches to the right and promotes
every form of backwardness, including religious superstition and bigotry.
And all this goes undiscussed, undebated! American political life seems
entirely barren to masses of people, something distant, alien and hostile.
The two-party system, a corpse from the point of view of history, crushes
the living with its enormous, apparently immovable weight.
Is it any wonder that wide layers of the population feel powerless,
marginalized, even beaten and scourged? There are millions of tortured,
anguished souls in America, who feel abandoned, betrayed, at the mercy of
persecutors. Unable to associate itself with any broad-based progressive
social movement, this mass desperation finds expression at present in a
variety of forms, many of them unattractive and even anti-social. To
misdiagnose or turn a blind eye to this reality is to underestimate the
depth of the crisis of American society.
One feels safe in predicting that The Passion will not encounter precisely
the same response in western Europe, and not because Americans are
inherently vulnerable to religious mania, although there are ideological
difficulties deriving from US history. Nowhere else in the advanced
industrial world have the ruling elites been so successful as in the US,
with the indispensable assistance of the trade union bureaucracy, at
destroying social programs, reducing living standards in the interests of
profit, and paralyzing opposition and resistance.
Gibson is not oppressed. He is a multimillionaire. The "sigh of the
oppressed," as Marx termed the religious impulse, is not present in his
film. But something of the "sigh of the oppressed" is present in the
response to the film. The Passion of the Christ is a reactionary film, but
one ought not draw the conclusion that the majority of those attending it,
probably overwhelmingly drawn from the lower middle class and working class,
are reactionary. This is not a film with an overt social message. If Gibson,
or those he now associates with, in and around the Bush administration, put
forward their misanthropic, right-wing political agenda in a film, masses of
people would not turn out.
Trotsky once pointed out that a political leader "is always a relation
between people, the individual supply to meet the collective demand." Gibson
is not a political leader, but one might say that every major cultural
phenomenon, even the most retrograde, is also "a relation between people,"
the response to a social demand. Here the demand, however, is very diffuse,
confused, composed of disparate elements.
Those seeing The Passion are reading all sorts of things into it. Its
appeal, under the present confused ideological conditions, extends into
different and even opposed social layers. As noted above, there are
distinctly ultra-right, if not fascistic elements, who respond to its
fascination with violence, its paranoia and bitterness, who see America as
whipped and persecuted, by Arab and other "terrorists," by the ungrateful,
vengeful, Pharisee-like French and Germans! Reactionary forces who also want
Americans to get used to making their own "sacrifices."
But the film also attracts the genuinely oppressed, who are valiantly, often
futilely trying to "embrace their cross" of everyday life at this point.
They take consolation in Jesus' suffering as a means of coming to grips with
their own. This is by no means an ignoble effort. This same response,
however, has another, debilitating meaning, as an expression of the doctrine
of passivity and resignation to one's fate. These are people who largely
have no insight yet into their own problems and circumstances.
The Passion of the Christ is a reprehensible work. Those who praise the
film, or downplay its reactionary character, or remain silent for fear of
drawing fire from the fundamentalist right, serve political reaction
themselves.
However, the film, artistically and intellectually negligible, has provoked
a response that points far beyond itself and its director. Whatever the
immediate fate of Gibson's work, its reception underscores, above all, the
increasingly unstable social and moral state of American capitalist society,
inexorably coming face to face with its own peculiar Passion.

 aspetti della societa' americana contemporanea. Enjoy!
Molto interessante.
Temo che tutti i preconcetti si stiano rivelando concreti.
La tematica anti-semita ormai accertata.
Purtroppo anche dal punto di vista filmico si sta rivelando molto piů 
deludente del previsto, non ho nessuna voglia di andare a vedere ore ed 
ore di torture e sangue.
Forse la migliore rappresentazione filmica della Passione rimane "Jesus 
Christ Superstar"
H.N.

 Christ Superstar"
E de "L'ultima Tentazione" che ne pensi?
(rappresentazione "eretica" per rappresentazione "eretica"...)
--
Bak
Strategic Sarcazzer della Gotha S.n.c.
Aderisci alla campagna "SNOBBA IL BOVE SEASON 2004"
Per le istruzioni ed i benefits, clicca QUI

 (rappresentazione "eretica" per rappresentazione "eretica"...)
Preferisco il Gesù "politico" a quella "privato".
Ma in fondo in fondo mi piaccioni le canzoni.
A proposito, su imdb sono già partite le discussioni sulla visione 
"realistica" di Gibson Vs la visione "blasfema" di Scorsese.
H.N.

 (rappresentazione "eretica" per rappresentazione "eretica"...)
Hanno qualcosa in comune. La figura di Giuda per esempio.
Perņ il momento in cui Willem Dafoe si strappa il cuore e chiede "Chi sono
io?", e Pietro si inginocchia e risponde "Adonai", č commovente.
-- 
ArAmesh

Su 
www.papaboys.it
 c'è tutto uno speciale dedicato a THE PASSION: molto ma
molto interessante

 molto interessante
I Papaboys sono sempre un punto di riferimento irrinunciabile...

Ho visto settimana scorsa il film.
A me sembra ben fatto.
Se non avessi letto le polemiche neanche mi sarebbe venuto in mente il
problema antisemita. (che gli Ebrei lo condannino e i Romani se ne lavino le
mani non mi sembra uno scoop, č quanto scritto nei vangeli)
Il film č tutto incentrato sul Cristo e sulla sua sofferenza piů che su che
sui personaggi al contorno.
La violenza ed il sangue rasentano l'eccesso ma meglio questa violenza che
altre.
Questo secondo la mia opinione (di uno che ha letto poco ma che almeno ha
visto il film)
Saluti
Max505
"Henry Newbolt" <a.n...@the.opera> ha scritto nel messaggio
news:5xj3c.311$5h5...@tornado.fastwebnet.it...


 molto interessante
Ma per piacere...
Pikkio