Re-writing Jesus by Holderness Graham

Author:Holderness, Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472573339
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2015-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

VIII

Gibson spoke of The Passion of the Christ in terms of the Greek word ‘aletheia’, ‘truth’ (literally what is not forgotten in the oblivion of Lethe):

The film is not meant as a historical documentary, nor does it claim to have assembled all the facts. But it does enumerate those described in Holy Scripture. It is not merely representative or merely expressive. I think of it as contemplative in the sense that one is compelled to remember (unforget) in a spiritual way which cannot be articulated, only experienced.55

A parallel Greek word ‘anamnesis’ (ảυảμυησις), used by Plato to denote the soul-memory that survives immersion in Lethe, became in Christian terminology a technical term associated with the Eucharist. Like ‘aletheia’, it means more than its usual translation ‘remembrance’, and suggests a proactive dispelling of oblivion, an insistence on preserving or reinstating the past as a present reality. ‘Aletheia’ and ‘anamnesis’ are more than just ‘remembrance of things past’: they are actions of restoration and revivification, ‘re-collection’ and ‘re-membering’. They are acts of faith.

Gibson also however speaks here of ‘compulsion’, which may be a spiritual obligation to him, but becomes an onus on his viewer. The compulsion of aletheia leaves the disinterested open-minded liberal spectator with precious little room for manoeuvre. In addition this compelled unforgetting is to take place in a ‘spiritual way’ that ‘cannot be articulated, only experienced’. This is entirely in line with the ‘contemplative’ tradition on which Gibson has drawn through The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ: a tradition characterized by ‘vision’ and ‘showing’, the apprehension of images rather than words, things rather than ideas. As Girard puts it, ‘Mel Gibson is situated in a certain mystical tradition of The Passion . . . mystics see it as their duty to imagine the sufferings of Christ as accurately as possible.’ It also connects the film with the vivid sensuous pictorialism of counter-Reformation visual art, to which Gibson in the same context also alludes: ‘I began to look at the work of some of the great artists who had drawn inspiration from the same story: Caravaggio . . . Mantegna’; and to the active devotional contemplation recommended by St Ignatius in his Spiritual Exercises. These are all examples of visualized mysteries that defy rational comprehension. As Messori puts it, ‘If the mind does not understand, so much the better. What matters is that the heart understands.’

Such contemplation is then essentially visual and deeply filmic. It privileges the image over the word; experience over articulation; immediacy over exposition; repetition over continuity; and where we would expect to find narrative, we encounter instead a timeless domain of inward contemplation. Viewers caught up in this medium, their attention ‘imprisoned’56 or as Gibson put it ‘compelled’, could find their experience so unlike normal cinematic pleasure as to constitute something other than film:

This is not a movie that anyone will ‘like’ . . . There isn’t even the sense that one has just watched a movie. What it is . . . is an experience on a level of primary emotion that is scarcely comprehensible.

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