Screen Jesus: Portrayals of Christ in Television and Film by Peter Malone (review)
2015; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1548-9922
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Religious Studies of Rome
ResumoScreen Jesus: Portrayals of Christ in Television and Film Peter Malone. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012, xvii +317 pages, hbk. ISBN 978-0-8108-83895 $55.Cinematically speaking, Jesus Christ certainly is a superstar. From Cecil B. DeMille to Mel Gibson and beyond, Nazarene has proved a popular, if controversial, subject for film treatment, and Peter Malone's second book on subject provides what is perhaps most comprehensive survey of such material to date. Flowever, Screen Jesus does follow in wake of a considerable number of similar studies with remarkably similar titles, including: Roy Kinnard and Tim Davis's Divine Images; A History of Jesus on Screen (New York: Citadel Press, 1992); Lloyd Baugh's Imaging Divine: Jesus and Christ-Figures in Film (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1997); Richard C. Stern, Clayton N. Jefford, and Guerric Debona's, Savior on Silver Screen (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1999); W. Barnes Tatum's, Jesus at Movies: A Guide to First Hundred Years (Revised edition, Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2004) and Adele Reinhartz's, Jesus of Hollwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). With exception of Reinhartz, most of these authors focus fairly narrowly on a corpus of most celebrated Jesus films, including De Mille's King of Kings (1927), Nicholas Ray's King of Kings (1961), Pier Paolo Pasolini's II Vangelo secundo Matteo (1965), George Stevens's Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Denys Arcand's Jesus of Montreal (1989), and - in more recent studies - Mel Gibson's Passion of Christ (2004). Malone covers these core films too, but also takes a much broader view that includes not only television treatments, such as Franco Zeffirelli's landmark 1977 series, Jesus of Nazareth, with Robert Powell as a strikingly handsome Jesus, as well as an impressive range of lesser-known international films not only from Europe but also from Mexico, Iran, India and elsewhere. Malone's select filmography of what he regards as The Major Jesus Films (271) includes eighty-odd items.This inclusiveness is largely a good thing, and it is certainly refreshing to have some reasonably substantial discussion of important but relatively little-known films like Julien Duvivier's very French Golgotha (1935) - first sound-picture to deal with Christ's passion, with Jean Gabin as a memorably pensive Pontius Pilate - and Roberto Rossellini's exquisitely paced but doggedly unspectacular 1975 Italian television film II Messia. Fascinating, too, are Malone's accounts of Klaus Kinski's 1970s one-man performance piece, Jesus Christus Erloser (the film of which, directed by Peter Geyer, was released in 2008), and of Dennis Potter's 1969 British television play Son of Man. And it is to author's credit that his background as a priest and theologian does not prevent him from accommodating useful discussion of Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979); though irreverent, Malone contends, the film is not blasphemous (100). But desire for inclusiveness is ultimately book's undoing, since meaningful discursive momentum that is sustained in first half subsequently gives way in final chapters to a mere listing of anything vaguely Jesus-related. This capitulation to mere cataloguing is a shame, especially as Malone starts his book with a useful distinction that promises to keep project focused. …
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