The Passion of the Christ

[KLAXXON]

The Passion of the Christ: "You are my friends, and the greatest love a person can have for his friends is to give his life for them."



Written, directed and produced by Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ is the controversial movie based on the life of Jesus of Nazareth. "The Passion" (which itself is taken from the Latin for suffering, but also meaning a profound and transcendent love) refers to the agonizing and ultimately redemptive events in the final twelve hours of Jesus' life, of which there are four separate accounts in the New Testament of the Bible.

A labour of love by the Oscar Winning Australian, Gibson picks up the story of Jesus Christ from where he waits to be arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane and details the events that took place before, during and after his arrest and eventual crucifixion. Using a mixture of emotive imagery and flashbacks, Gibson inter-cuts between scenes of intense torture to concentrate on the human angle of The Passion - the pain and personal torment that Christ suffers before he dies and also offers insights into Jesus' life.

Brutally realistic, the film pulls no punches as Jesus is slowly and painfully put to death. Talking of his decision to highlight physical realism, Gibson says: "I really wanted to express the hugeness of the sacrifice, as well as the horror of it. But I also wanted a film that has moments of real lyricism and beauty and an abiding sense of love, because it is ultimately a story of faith, hope and love. That in my view, is the greatest story we can ever tell".

The cast of The Passion of the Christ including James Caviezel, Monica Bellucci; Maia Morgenstern and Rosalinda Celantano all give incredible performances in a film that required that they each learn the dead language which was spoken at the time - Aramaic.

James Caviezel (Jesus) suffered the most, as he underwent hours of grueling make up sessions and spent two weeks dragging a 150 pound cross (about half the weight of a real crucifixion cross) to Golgotha, only later to be suspended from it. Because he spent these weeks working in a loin cloth, the actor experienced several bouts of hypothermia, often becoming so cold that he couldn't speak. In one of the most literally shocking moments on set, Caviezel and assistant director Jan Michelini were struck by lighting while shooting in the midst of a thunderstorm. Astonishingly, neither man was seriously injured.

Speaking of the role, Caviezel said: "The role changed my life in the sense that now I'm no longer afraid of doing the right thing", he explains. "I'm now more afraid of not doing the right thing".

Behind the Scenes: A Dead Language:

One of Mel Gibson's earliest decisions when creating The Passion of the Christ was to have the Jesus of his film speak the same language that the historical Jesus spoke 2,000 years ago. That language is Aramaic, closely related to Hebrew that today is considered by some linguists to be a "dead language", still used in dialects by only a small number of people in the Middle East.

When Jesus was alive however, Aramaic was the language of education and commerce that was spoken the world over. After his death, early Christians wrote portions of scripture in Aramaic, spreading the stories of Jesus' life and messages across many lands.

To bring Aramaic to life on film was an enormous challenge and Gibson turned to one of the world's foremost experts on the Aramaic language and Semitic cultures, Father William Fulco, Chair of Mediterranean Studies at loyal Marymount University. Fulco translated the script of The Passion of the Christ entirely into First Century Aramaic for the Jewish characters and "Street Latin" for the Roman characters, drawing on his extensive linguistic and cultural knowledge. After translating the script, Fulco served as an on set dialogue coach and helped the cast learn how to speak the language.

Gibson explained why he decided to keep the film so authentic "To bring a cast from all over the world to one place and have them all learn this one language gave them a sense of common ground, of what they share and of connections that transcend language". It also compelled the cast to look more deeply into themselves above and beyond the use of words. "Speaking in Aramaic required something different from the actors", observes Gibson, "because they had to compensate for the usual clarity of their own native language. It brought out a different level of performance. In a sense, it became good old fashioned filmmaking because we were so committed to telling the story with pure imagery and expressiveness as much as anything else".

The history of The Passion on film:

As early as the silent movies of Thomas Edison, The Passion was a theme addressed by the most ambitious of filmmakers. In 1927, Cecil B. DeMille directed the first epic treatment of Jesus' life and death with the silent film The King of Kings. Then, in 1953, 20th Century Fox kicked off the new CinemaScope technology with The Robe, starring Richard Burton as a Roman tribune who seeks redemption after the crucifixion. By the 1960s, Biblical epics had become a whole film genre unto themselves, with George Stevens creating the monumental The Greatest Story Ever Told featuring lavish sets and an all-star "cast of thousands."

Around the same time, the Italian film master Pier Paolo Pasolini approached the subject in an entirely fresh way with The Gospel According to St. Matthew, which featured a completely non-professional cast, a naturalistic style and language taken directly from the Bible, and became the most successful film of Pasolini's career. In the 1970s, The Passion was represented in two counter-culture musicals: Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. More recently, director Martin Scorsese was also drawn to examine Christ's final days with his own controversial The Last Temptation of Christ.

But never before has any filmmaker attempted to bring this story of passionate sacrifice to life with such intensely focused cinematic detail and realism. For Mel Gibson, creating such a film was a long-lived dream, taking a significant amount of his own passion and that of many others, including his Icon producing partners Bruce Davey and Steve McEveety, to turn into reality.

"My intention for this film was to create a lasting work of art and to stimulate serious thought and reflection among diverse audiences of all backgrounds," says Gibson.

He continues: "My ultimate hope is that this story's message of tremendous courage and sacrifice might inspire tolerance, love and forgiveness. We're definitely in need of those things in today's world."








It's based on the Gospels, so first the good news; never again will I have to endure another sermon from some sanctimonious God-botherer on the inherent evils of violent cinema. As a hardcore horror fan who is also an habitual churchgoer (unconfirmed C of E) I have never seen any contradiction between enjoying gruesomely violent movies during the week and then singing hymns and praying for world peace on Sunday. My opposition to film censorship - for adults, anyway - is based partly on a belief in the Christian principle of free will; the God-given right to make our own choices and take responsibility for our own actions.

The Passion of the Christ Release: 2004 Countries: Italy, USA Cert (UK): 18 Runtime: 126 mins Directors: Mel Gibson Cast: James Caviezel, Maia Morgenstern, Monica Bellucci More on this film I have never met a horror movie fan who would do anything other than turn the other cheek in a fight - largely because we're a bunch of physical wimps with no interest in actual bodily endangerment. But having previously been something of a novelty ('A horror fan who goes to church...?'), I now find myself just one of thousands of churchgoers suddenly showing an interest in blood-splattered cinema. If nothing else, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, which presents a gruelling, graphic depiction of the crucifixion, should at least put paid to the notion that sensational shockers like Blood Feast and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are the sole prerogative of satanists.

When I started working last year on a forthcoming Channel 4 documentary about Mel Gibson, The Passion was widely regarded in Hollywood as a joke - a folly of epic proportions. Today that folly has transformed itself into the most talked-about film of the year, with an extraordinary Ash Wednesday opening now generating predicted US box office receipts in excess of $100 million - the official 'blockbuster' watershed.

It's a startling showing for an R-rated, subtitled film shot entirely in Latin and Aramaic, and largely lacking in famous faces. Crucial to the movie's success in America has been the mobilisation of Christian groups who have block-booked screenings for their followers and orchestrated widespread congregational support. In Dallas, Christian businessman Arch Bonnema reserved an entire 20-screen cinema to play The Passion to more than 6,000 viewers on its opening day.

Also raising the film's profile have been the acres of press coverage addressing grave charges of anti-semitism, prompting demonstrators to don concentration camp uniforms outside a midnight screening of the film in New York last week. At the heart of their complaint is the film's portrayal of the Jewish high priest Caiphus, who is seen as effectively instigating the crucifixion (rather than the historically culpable Pontius Pilate) and whose depiction in the movie is described in a review from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops as 'almost monolithically malevolent'.

The conference also noted within The Passion 'a recurring tendency to slip into horror movie conventions', a quality which they see as a 'flaw' but which I find a blessing. Ultimately, for all the theological bluster and intense inter-faith arguments which it has provoked, The Passion seems to me a quintessential horror film, a visceral cinematic assault which is no more or less 'Christian' than Ken Russell's The Devils or Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. All are examples of extreme movie-making from flamboyant film-makers who are passionately obsessed with the mysteries of Catholicism. But all are also rooted in the saleable aesthetic of the carnival sideshow; promising the audience an eye-opening spectacle of grotesque proportions.

Fainthearted viewers of The Passion who have so far avoided the fleshy shocks of gore cinema may find themselves mentally reciting that old monster movie mantra: 'It's only a movie, it's only a movie...' If there is a lesson I would wish such viewers to take away from Gibson's bloody epic it is that, contrary to the hollerings of the Daily Mail, the pleasures of horror cinema are not primarily sadistic but masochistic. One woman in Wichita has already reportedly expired during a screening of The Passion, inspiring breathless Exorcist-style press stories of the life-threatening powers of the film. All of which will doubtless add to its crowd-pulling clout.

The strange bond between exploitation cinema and spiritual pageant is in fact far sturdier than some may expect. In 1951 former carnival owner turned exploitation movie producer Kroger Babb struck gold with a film of the celebrated Easter Passion Pageant which took place annually at Lawton, Ohio. Shot by two directors whose other credits include Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla and House of the Black Death (aka Blood of the Man Beast), The Prince of Peace was billed as 'the screen's first great passion play - the world's finest spiritual screen production!'

Fast-forward 50 years and we have The Passion of the Christ, a religious movie directed by a star who built his reputation on the ultra-violence of Mad Max and Lethal Weapon, and who orchestrated his own brutal disembowelment in the sporran-waving, breast-beating Braveheart. Elsewhere in the credits we find make-up effects stalwarts Keith VanderLaan and Greg Cannom, horror graduates who honed their skills on shockers such as the vampiric epic Bram Stoker's Dracula and the grisly modern-gothic chiller Hannibal.

At the West End screening of The Passion which I attended last week, an early scene of Jesus stamping upon a snake in a ghostly Garden of Gethsemane prompted one viewer to let out a shriek of anticipatory terror - an unusual reaction for an allegedly 'religious' movie, perhaps, but entirely understandable within the blood-curdling Night of the Living Dead ambience of this ominously moonlit opening. We almost expect Jim Caviezel's Jesus to be jumped upon by zombies, and are unsurprised when he meets an incarnation of the walking damned replete with maggot-infested nostrils.

To someone who believes in the invigorating power of extreme cinema, it seems entirely fitting that Gibson has leaned so heavily upon the horror genre to express his clearly tortured Christian faith. When the evangelist Billy Graham (who famously condemned The Exorcist as 'evil') likens The Passion of the Christ to 'a lifetime of sermons', I hear a man experiencing a Damascene (if probably temporary) conversion to the transcendent power of shocking cinema. As an unrepentant gore-geek, I have no problem with the unremitting physicality of The Passion, and admire the dexterity with which it ruthlessly terrorises its audience. Yet any sense that Christianity has less to do with enduring sublime suffering than with helping the poor and needy seems lost in the anguished howl of the film. Personally I have found more of religious substance in the 'secular' prison drama of The Shawshank Redemption, or the strangely comedic ramblings of the cult psychological thriller The Ninth Configuration.

In the end, Gibson has created an exploitation movie par excellence, fittingly shot in Italy whose national cinema has produced both Pasolini's The Gospel According to Saint Matthew and Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust, those twin visions of heaven and hell between which The Passion of the Christ ultimately falls.









James Caviezel ...  Jesus
Maia Morgenstern ...  Mary
Christo Jivkov ...  John
Francesco De Vito ...  Peter
Monica Bellucci ...  Magdalen
Mattia Sbragia ...  Caiphas
Toni Bertorelli ...  Annas
Luca Lionello ...  Judas
Hristo Shopov ...  Pontius Pilate (as Hristo Naumov Shopov)
Claudia Gerini ...  Claudia Procles
Fabio Sartor ...  Abenader
Giacinto Ferro ...  Joseph of Arimathea
Aleksander Mincer ...  Nicodemus (as Olek Mincer)
Sheila Mokhtari ...  Woman in Audience
Lucio Allocca ...  Old Temple Guard




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