new theology review • august 2011
“Who do you see that I am?”
Global Perspectives on Jesus Films
Darren J. N. Middleton and S. Brent Plate
How might new representations of Jesus be shaping Christian
theology of the future? With an ever-greater diversity of Christian
ethnicities, cultures, and theologies, we see new images of Jesus
as well as a greater diversity of ways of visually engaging him.
J
esus, elusive as he remains to historical critics, is alive and well in cinemas
around the world. No other historical figure has been the subject of as many
film productions, and a great many adherents garner their personal christologies
from what they have seen acted out on screen, consciously or unconsciously. These
images come not only from the industrial film production companies of Hollywood,
but increasingly from areas that used to be considered “remote.”
Our aim here is twofold. First, and quite simply, we mean to highlight for many
English-speaking scholars the plethora of international films about Jesus and to
encourage further reflection on these. Along with the increasing globalization of
Christianity, especially into the southern hemisphere, and radical reshaping of the
faith that this entails (Jenkins 2002, 2008; Sanneh and Carpenter; McGrath), there
is simultaneously a new production of Christian media in the form of film, video,
Darren J. N. Middleton is professor of religion at Texas Christian University. He is
the author of three books, including Theology after Reading: Christian Imagination and
the Power of Fiction, as well as four edited volumes on religion, literature and film.
S. Brent Plate is visiting associate professor of religious studies at Hamilton College.
He has published widely on religion and film, including the books Religion and Film:
Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World, The Religion and Film Reader (co-edited with
Jolyon Mitchell ), and Representing Religion in World Cinema. He is co-founder and
managing editor of Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief.
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literature, and the arts in general (Meyer; Middleton; Renne). In this light, we intend
to contribute to a global conversation and attendant shifting of meanings about
who Jesus is seen to be.
Our second aim stems from the first and that is to suggest how these new
representations might be shaping Christian theology of the future. A new way of
seeing emerges out of these popular media, a new way of engaging what might
be called the “sacred gaze” (Morgan). This renewed vision gives rise to a new
understanding of Jesus, his life and work. Far from being second-order representations of a more fundamental, linguistic christology, these images are actually
shaping global christologies from the ground up. Hollywood has provided images
of Jesus for well over a century now and, as is usual, he looks a lot like the people
in the culture in which the images are produced. As Richard Wightman Fox puts
it, Jesus is “perpetually reborn in one culture after another. . . . His incarnation
guaranteed that each later culture would grasp him anew for each would have a
different view of what it means to be human. Jesus had to be reborn if he was
going to inspire or even make sense to people in every era” (Fox, 11).
Now, with an ever-greater diversity of Christian ethnicities, cultures, and theologies, we see new images of Jesus, as well as a greater diversity of ways of visually engaging him. This occurs not just “in every era” as Fox suggests, but in the
same era in different places. Jesus today is light skinned and dark skinned, speaks
Telugu and Xhosa, wears ancient Palestinian robes and modern sneakers, performs
miracles and is a political activist: all things to all people. One key implication of
the global shift is that Christianity rubs up against other religious traditions, and
we begin to see Jesus through the eyes of, as will be noted below, Hindus and
Muslims, among others.
History and the Hollywood Jesus
I
n 1985 the esteemed historian of Christianity Jaroslav Pelikan published Jesus
Through the Centuries, offering a historical take on the changing views of Jesus.
Jesus was a rabbi, then a king, a cosmic Christ, a monkish figure, teacher, poet,
liberator, and more. Because of the success of that book, a decade later Pelikan
published a shortened version, but this time with many illustrations. Readers are
able to see the ways Jesus assumed these roles at different points in time (Pelikan
1985, 2007).
In similar fashion, contemporary biblical scholars have taken up versions of
Jesus presented on film and suggested emerging typologies through 115 years of
cinema (see Kinnard and Davis; Tatum; Baugh; Deacy; Humphries-Brooks; Reinhartz; Walsh). Dominant films include Sidney Olcott’s From the Manger to the
Cross (1913), Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings (1927), Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings
(1961), Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977), Martin Scorsese’s The Last
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Temptation of Christ (1988), and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004).
These studies often include what we might call the “anti-Hollywood” Jesus stories
seen in the Canadian Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal (1989), the British Monty
Python’s Life of Brian (1977), and Pier Paolo Passolini’s Italian masterpiece, The
Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964).
Stephenson Humphries-Brooks, for instance, suggests that by looking at various
representations of Jesus in popular Hollywood films over time, we learn not only
about film, but also about shifts in United States culture. DeMille’s 1927 King of
Kings was the “first truly American Christ,” and Jesus eventually changes from
being a king to a hero, and ultimately with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ,
a “superhero” (Humphries-Brooks). Adele Reinhartz also looks to the “Hollywood
Jesus” for the a-historical but culturally important imagery of these imaged and
imagined Jesuses, stating, “Even as the Jesus biopics play out our society’s fascination with Jesus as a historical and religious figure, they also address our own fears
and anxieties, our comforts and joys, our beliefs and values” (Reinhartz, 8).
Reinhartz’s point here about Jesus films as a cultural marker, a litmus test of
sorts, suggests that similar studies can be achieved in places other than the United
States, as well as subcultures within the United States. Moreover, apart from the
diachronic shifts noted by the authors quoted so far, we can also chart a synchronic
view, investigating the variations that occur within a similar timeframe from global
perspectives. Here we turn to some of the Jesus films produced in the past forty
years from nations, cultures, and languages that are far from the Hollywood Jesus.
The Cinematic Jesus in Africa
and the African Diaspora
G
iven African Christianity’s numerical strength, up from an estimated ten
million in 1900 to today’s figure, which lies between four and five hundred
million, an African film illustrating the Gospel within an African cultural context
was inevitable (World Christian Database). The first film in this vein, Son of Man,
appeared in 2005 and, one year later, it received its world premier at Utah’s Sundance Film Festival. Inspired by Dimphono Di Kopane’s theatrical set-piece The
Mysteries, which offers an African outlook on selected biblical events, Son of Man,
directed by Mark Dornford-May and starring Andile Kosi, re-tells and situates the
life of Jesus in a corrupt context within present-day Africa. Shot primarily in the
Eastern Cape and in Xhosa with some English and Setswana, this 86-minute
feature employs traditional art forms—dance, music, fable-telling, symbol, and
ritual—not simply to secede from the mainly European-style Christianity that
Africans first received from the missionaries, but to celebrate as well as uphold
indigenous cultural renewal and local religious agency.
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Son of Man © Lorber Films, 2007.
Born to an ordinary couple in a shanty-town shed in the southern African state
of Judea, Kosi’s Jesus soon finds himself thrown into an arena of scarcity and
carnage—terrifying territory held fast by Satan, who appears, fully clad in black
leather, during Jesus’ traditional Xhosa initiation ritual. Jesus’ mother is, like her
Matthean and Lukan counterpart, a virgin, although her sassy, even operatic approach to the guardian angels, played by African boys, highlights her inimitability.
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In time, civil war breaks out. Offered the chance to avoid its remorseless brutality
and to secure himself to heaven, Jesus rebuffs his Father’s angels, and, instead,
elects to walk among women, men and children, preaching a gospel of radical
egalitarianism. But equality is a tough sell in this part of the world. Viewers see
savage internecine warfare, kleptocracy, and summary executions; the TV news
coverage of such stark realities only accentuates the modern, urban feel of the
movie. Occupying forces—a new Rome—take over the city. Insurgency movements—modern-day Zealots—rise up in the townships. And yet Jesus loves wastefully, urging his followers to go and do likewise, and many do so. This African
Jesus is the elder brother or the healer, to invoke two images within African christological thought, because this Christ comes before his people with a diagnosis
of rampant, selfish individualism and a cure of
radical communitarianism (­Kärkkäinen; Stinton).
In Son of Man, Jesus’s message decolonizes the
theology of the Judean tribal authorities, since his
struggle to humanize life disturbs their so-called
This African Jesus
God-given pax Africana, and thus they broker a
deal to do away with him. With the help of Judas,
is the elder brother
who spies on Jesus with a video camera, the guntoting ­authorities arrest and then kill Jesus.
or the healer, to
What happens next is stunning: Dornford-May
films the resurrection as a majestic and meticuinvoke two images
lous amalgam of celebratory clapping, drumming,
singing, and stamping. Here, African dance bewithin African
comes the festive, exultant arena of c­ ommunitas,
where the sacred time and space of communion
christological thought.
with the crucified and now resurrected Jesus
re­-creates the social order and culture, advancing
as well as reflecting the solidarity and harmony
that Jesus lived and died for, even as it—the dance—situates such harmony and
solidarity within an African context that prizes both qualities unreservedly. The
film’s final scenes thus illustrate Dornford-May’s a­ ttempt to craft a visual Christology that addresses the contemporary concerns of Africans—concerns for fairness
and concord. The Son of Man’s Jesus represents Christ as the liberator and Christ
as reconciler, two additional images of Christ in Africa, and, in this respect, the
Jesus of Son of Man resembles the Christ of ubuntu (reconciliation) theology,
traceable to the work of the South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Battle).
In sum: Son of Man portrays how theology and film coalesce to depict what
happens when one attempts to indigenize Christianity, to decolonize theology, and
to uphold spiritual home rule—three traits of the mother tongue, post-Western
Christianity that Lamin Sanneh and other scholars have in mind when they address
the staggering movement in global Christian numbers to Africa (Sanneh; Sanneh
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and Carpenter). Besides consulting the growing number of sophisticated books
detailing the major changes within Christianity in the twenty-first century, anyone
intrigued by how Christianity is being reconceptualized in Africa will find that
films like Son of Man offer thought-provoking, visual accounts of how Africans
grasp and relate to Jesus Christ (Jenkins 2008; McGrath; Oden; Oduyoye).
To take in the African world comprehensively, which is to say Africa and its
diaspora communities wherever we find them, we must mention Color of the Cross,
two independently-financed, California-shot productions. They reflect the personal
vision of Jean Claude La Marre, a Haitian-American artist, to film the Christological
concern of the peoples of the African Atlantic diaspora—the belief that Christ’s
true identity, as the oppressed one, must be scrutinized and understood in the
context of the black experience (Brown Douglas; Cleage; Cone; Davis; Erskine;
Witvliet). Filmed in Santa Clarita, which is located just north of Los Angeles, and
working with a $2.5 million budget, Color of the Cross (2006) focuses on the last
two days of Jesus’s public ministry, and it portrays a black Messiah leading his
disciples to Arimathea, a city of Judea (Luke 23:51), to celebrate Passover.
La Marre’s Jesus then wanders into the cross hairs of the temple authorities, who
acknowledge his Jewishness but interrogate his skin color. Spirited away from
such hostility, which includes the antipathy of the Romans, who think black Jews
present more social challenges than white Jews, Jesus reconnects with his followers,
preaches racial inclusivity and then makes kiddush before the Pesach meal commences. The ensuing story line then travels the well-worn path of betrayal, condemnation, and death; this said, Color of the Cross breaks new narrative ground
in two ways. First, Jesus’ mother complains, sometimes quite trenchantly, that race
motivates the authorities to persecute her son. And second, La Marre’s crucified
Christ—hanging from the cross, mouth gaping with pain, stomach hollow, ribs
etched against the skin—invites an instructive comparison with Countee Cullen’s
poetic “Black Christ”: both signify an arresting, disquieting symbol of the brokenness of black existence, one that helps the viewer internalize the words of the old
Negro Spiritual, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” (Cullen).
“We are the only race of people, African-Americans, that worship a God outside
of our own image, and to have a movie like this, representing us, is, to me, probably
tantamount to Roots, and the effect that that movie had on our community,”
­announces La Marre. With this comment, taken from a behind-the-scenes featurette
that accompanies the DVD, and with his 88-minute film that depicts “the first black
Jesus in the history of Hollywood,” La Marre pictures God in a manner not unlike
James Cone, Marcus Garvey, and Henry McNeal Turner, three of the most remarkable and radical thinkers in the last three centuries of the African-American religious experience (Raboteau). Like Turner, an AME bishop who urged black people
to visualize and represent God in their own image, just as whites did, La Marre
suggests that theology—how we picture the divine—is not something a­ lways
already done by somebody else; rather, theology derives from personal experience,
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in this case the experience of black people, and it seeks to reflect the joys as well
as the sorrows of those seeking liberty from oppression. “The truth will be told,”
actress Ananda Lewis (‘Leah’) declares in the featurette, “Jesus is the color of you.”
Unsurprisingly, Color of the Cross created considerable controversy upon its
theatrical release, and some of the lively debates are still available on YouTube,
yet “the movie was way overdue,” LaMarre avers, and while some reviewers, like
The Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter, lamented its “cramped, TV-style re-telling,”
its effort to promote as well as celebrate theology’s contextual character represents
no small virtue (Hunter).
The straight-to-DVD sequel, Color of the Cross 2: Resurrection, was filmed—
again, with limited resources—in the Mojave Desert’s Fremont Valley, and was
released in 2008. Footage from the original appears at the onset of this 85-minute
film, as if to remind viewers where they left off, and then the greater part of Color
of the Cross 2 utilizes Matthew’s account of the first Easter morning. With the
post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, La Marre harmonizes Matthew and Luke;
and, by and large, the message is that the physical resurrection of Jesus—we see
La Marre’s Messiah wriggle out from his burial shroud, like a butterfly from its
cocoon—is the definitive sign of God’s action in Jesus Christ. At the end, God
vindicated everything Jesus did; and this miracle affords authority for believing
in the living Christ. A nitty-gritty, black Jesus pulsates at the heart of Christianity,
according to La Marre, and although race appears absent in the sequel’s dialogue,
in contrast to the original, there emerges from both films an eye-catching image
of an oppressed one, who struggles with and for the subjugated and browbeaten
everywhere.
The Cinematic Jesus in Interreligious,
Asian Perspectives
A
s Christianity has crept through the southern parts of Asia and Africa, the
faith has merged and melded with other cultures and languages, but also
other religious traditions. To flesh out this movement, here we look at two films
from Asia that take views of Jesus in an interreligious direction.
The Telugu production, Karunamayudu (“Man of Compassion,” directed by
A. Bhimsingh, 1978), has now been seen by over 100 million viewers, a number
rivaling many a blockbusting Hollywood film. For the past three decades in South
India and beyond, villagers have gathered in front of makeshift outdoor theaters
to watch the life of Jesus on screen. The film is a devout Christian production, and
the official website of the Hindi language version suggests it is “one of the most
culturally relevant tools for sharing the love of Christ in India” (Dayasagar).
At the same time, it is over two-and-a-half hours long—a length more common
in Bollywood than Hollywood—and incorporates a South Indian cast. Further,
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the film style resembles the long tradition of Hindu devotional and mythological
films more than a Western-style Jesus film. Jesus could easily be seen as part of
the pantheon of Hindu deities. Dwight Friesen, who wrote his PhD thesis on the
film and its reception, suggests it is a fascinating blend of the Western biblical
epic and elements of the Indian historical, devotional, and mythological genres.
Karunamayudu even filmically achieves the noted Indian mode of mutual sacred
gazing, understood through the term darshan (Eck). And through use of song and
dance in the midst of the narrative, the film employs a staple of the Indian film
tradition. The Jesus presented here is a local, Hindu visual and audio presentation.
In so doing, Friesen argues, the Jesus of Karunamayudu is a “hybrid Jesus,” and
while the film “reflects biblical ­accounts with fidelity, it simultaneously locates
Jesus in the realm of Hindu mythology through
the use of subtle allusions to deities and texts
commonly associated with the bhakti tradition”
(Friesen, 149–150).
In Iran, the journalist and filmmaker Nader
Interreligious
Talebzadeh made the award-winning film, The
Messiah (2007), the story of Jesus told from an
dialogue itself, an
Islamic-Persian perspective. Here, Jesus is strong,
beautiful, and revered as the last Jewish prophet
ever-increasing vital
who teaches and performs miracles. He is not the
“Son of God” but is highly revered as in the traenterprise, might
ditional Islamic view. Indeed, the film aired on
several Arabic television stations during the
begin by looking at
month of Ramadan, though not without protests
from varying Christian groups especially in
the ways films from
­Lebanon. There are significant divergences with
the orthodox Christian perspective here, including
differing traditions
the depiction of Judas Iscariot being substituted
for Jesus in the Crucifixion. God saves Jesus and
represent a sacred
he ascends directly to heaven. However, the ascension scenario has a strong link with the vision of
figure, text, symbol,
a second coming, only in the Iranian-Shia perspective it is the Imam Mahdi who returns to redeem
myth, or ritual.
the earth before the Day of Judgment, and in
many views it is Jesus who comes with the Mahdi
during this time. There are both links made between Christianity and Islam, but also differences.
Talebzadeh has been interviewed by several Western news outlets and provided
strong arguments for the nature of The Messiah. In an ABC interview, Talebzadeh
raises the question of the dissemination of religious ideas: “How do we export our
thinking? It’s the movies. This is a film for students and for practicing Christians,
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for people to become curious, and go investigate more” (Setrakian). The filmmaker
here gives credence for the worldwide export medium that film is, and also shows
the ways multiple perspectives on Jesus can be seen.
Interreligious dialogue itself, an ever-increasing vital enterprise, might begin
by looking at the ways films from differing traditions represent a sacred figure,
text, symbol, myth, or ritual. In this way too, the familiar Hollywood Jesus might
become a strange image. However, new translations, perspectives, and visions
allow us to see the strange as familiar and the familiar as strange, ideally leading
to a renewed vision.
Renewing Ways of Seeing Jesus
T
here is no space to develop more in-depth studies here, so we work toward
concluding with brief mention of other films worth attention for their renewing ways of seeing Jesus.
Man Facing Southeast (1986) was written and directed by the Argentine filmmaker Eliseo Subiela. The film is set in a mental institution and the “man” who
faces southeast is one of the patients. (The film was blatantly plagiarized in the
United States, made into a novel called K-Pax and then a film of the same name.)
The man is somewhere betwixt and between a messiah, an insane person, or an
extraterrestrial, and the film refrains from tying up any loose ends. Whether or
not Subiela had the C.S. Lewis trilemma in mind (“Liar, Lunatic, or Lord”) is not
clear, but the film fleshes it all out in rousing ways.
The Cuban film La Última Cena (“The Last Supper,” Tomás Gutiérrez Alea,
1976) recasts the eponymous meal, but sets it in a Cuban sugar mill at the end of
the eighteenth century. The master is white and sits in the role of Jesus, while
twelve of his black slaves act out the roles of disciples. There is a deep cynicism
toward Catholicism here, with the white Catholic master playing a despicable role.
Yet, the film inverts the story and one of the slaves (Sebastián, who initially figures
as Judas) becomes linked to liberation as he is mixed with images of Orishas. In
the end, Sebastián becomes the Jesus figure, and the master is Judas.
Video-film production in Ghana and Nigeria has grown immensely in recent
years. Nigeria (dubbed “Nollywood”) is now the second largest producer of movies
in the world, after India and ahead of the United States. While subject matter
ranges from the mundane to the horrific, a great many of the productions center
on Christian themes, especially delving into the supernatural. There are a vast
number of titles to look at here, and more sustained studies will undoubtedly be
forthcoming, especially as Nigeria has become one of the most populous Christian
nations in the world.
Many other films could be discussed in this light, and our hope is that further
studies will begin a search for a cultural Jesus (or, cultural Jesuses) in films other
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than those of industrial Hollywood. Gibson’s Passion and the resulting controversy
stimulated the academic publication of at least eight full volumes on the one film,
while almost nothing has been written on the films we outline here. The discrepancy is telling.
Readers may never have heard of the films noted in the preceding, in spite of
each of the films’ prominence in their locations of origin. Therein lies some Western
myopia with regards to religion, including the regard for images of Jesus. Yet, it
is not exactly the viewers’ fault: part of the reason people in the West in particular
do not know these films is that each film mentioned has struggled to find any
distribution outlets. Our understandings and comprehensions of theological issues
continue to be regulated by distribution companies who control the media. Nonetheless, the films are available with a little research, and part of the interest in
writing this article is that we might take some time to find new channels of production, distribution, and translation. In so doing we may find refreshing new ways
to see Jesus.
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