Annie Goldmann, novelist and essayist, teaches cinema at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
In its silent period, the cinema made abundant use of the episodes and characters of the Bible in order to draw from them popular spectacular films. Noah’s Ark, Moses, the Queen of Sheba, Sodom and Gomorrah, Samson and Delilah, David and Goliath would be the favorite subjects, taken up several times by filmmakers sometimes obsessed with the genre, such as Cecil B. DeMille. But within the immense Hollywood and Italian production of peplum films of every kind, biblical themes are far from occupying first place quantitatively. Ancient history, Roman history in particular, is more of a source of inspiration, with the cataclysm of Pompeii, the turpitudes of the emperors, the legendary wars of Rome and Carthage, Hannibal and Scipio, and above all the loves of Cleopatra, from Pompey to Antony and even to Octavian. For if historical truth is respected in appearance, it is not always plausible.
The advent of color, in the 1950s, would provoke a resurgence of these productions, for the reconstruction of monuments, landscapes, costumes, the crowd scenes and the great natural catastrophes — choice morsels in these films — acquired an impressive force with the new resources of Technicolor. The great international stars would obligingly lend their faces to mythical characters and make crowds shudder amid grandiose reconstructions. Is the dazzling Ava Gardner not the very image of Sarah, whose beauty is insistently proclaimed in the Bible! Does the sensuality of Hedy Lamarr not absolve the weaknesses of Samson — Victor Mature? And can Solomon resist the seductions of a Gina Lollobrigida disguised as an extravagant Queen of Sheba? Nevertheless, the puritan morality of the era retained its rights and imposed sometimes puerile stratagems to spare the supposed modesty of the spectators. Thus the famous bath of Bathsheba at the foot of David’s palace is filmed in silhouette by Henry King (1951), and while Queen Vashti appears “topless” before Ahasuerus in the French print, she is carefully clothed in the American version of Esther and the King by Raoul Walsh in 1960.
To make popular films and not to transmit ideas.
The aim of these productions is to make popular films and not to transmit ideas. If their authors take liberties with History, it is to favor identification with the characters by simplifying them and above all by making the forces at play easily identifiable, by creating ordinary, commonplace human situations, by making the characters not abstract heroes but men and women grappling with the passions and their power over the human will. This is why thwarted, impossible love plays a great role in them: Moses, rival of the pharaoh’s legitimate heir in the love for his daughter; Ruth coveted by her brother-in-law who wishes to exercise his levirate — all liberties with respect to the text are permitted so long as they fit within plausible human conduct common everywhere. What is more universal than love, jealousy, the abuse of power; and the miracles intervene to untangle inextricable situations in which individual destiny has as much importance as collective destiny.
Certain films that are adventure tales of the Roman era, in which the hero struggles against the mighty of the empire, such as Spartacus or Ben-Hur, nevertheless end with very clear Christian allusions or even intentions — the pagan hero of this last film, for example, encountering at the end of his adventures the community of Christian faith. And what of a Salome–Rita Hayworth who dances not to obtain the head of John the Baptist but, on the contrary, to save from Herodias’s vengeance the precursor of Christ? We shall analyze further on, more precisely, two examples of this Christianization of the Bible.
More astonishing is the mixture of mythologies that one encounters in a number of films. The characters of Greek mythology, of ancient history, and of the Bible collide with one another; the episodes are stirred together, mixed, crossing eras and civilizations without concern for historical — or at least textual — plausibility. Thus Hercules is mistaken for Samson, and David fights the dragon, for the myths are now no more than stories and the characters are not bearers of an idea, of a teaching, but the mere actors of an adventure. But one may remain dreamy at the sight of Hercules seduced by Delilah (as he was by Omphale in the Greek myth), or a series of Goliaths fighting the Barbarians (1959), the Dragon (1960), the Giants (1961), or the sins of Babylon (1964). There is an appropriation of the Bible by screenwriters who use the techniques of the comic strip, in which the hero is independent of any reference to the universe of Greek civilization or of Jewish tradition. This amalgam, which would have outraged the sages of Yavneh, is so watered down that one cannot speak of culture but quite simply of a tale, of a narrative merely arranged to move the spectator in an indescribable assemblage.
The credits obligingly cite the names of the eminent specialists consulted for the making of the films. For example, for the ultimate version of the Ten Commandments, in 1956, by Cecil B. DeMille, specialists from the Museum of Art of New York, from the Department of Egyptian Antiquities of Luxor and of Chicago, and from the Jewish Library of Los Angeles lent their assistance to a work in which the slightest detail of costume is truthful; and yet, through subtle and imperceptible additions, the work is nonetheless steered toward a certain interpretation.
In this brief article it will be a question only of two productions among the most spectacular; interesting because, separated by more than thirty years, they reveal an evolution in the apprehension of the biblical episodes. It will be a matter of the work of B. DeMille cited above and of Abraham, the recent television series produced by France 2 with the participation of a certain number of Italian and other co-producers, and a screenwriter and a director who, judging by their surnames — Robert McKeen and Robert Sargeant — could be English-speakers.
The Ten Commandments by Cecil B. DeMille
DeMille’s film, grandiose, skillfully blends the biblical narrative with personalized episodes in which the protagonists are not merely vectors of divine forces, but real persons confronting the difficulties of love, of jealousy, and the consequences of despotic oppression upon individual lives. Skillful distortions deflect the narrative through details that make it possible to graft onto the collective history that of characters of flesh and blood with whom the spectator can identify without concerning himself with questions of faith or religion.
For example, Moses is welcomed and adopted not by the pharaoh’s daughter but by his sister; this being so, he will be able, twenty years later, to be in love with and loved by the pharaoh’s daughter and to enter into rivalry with the king’s legitimate heir, who struggles both to push him from the throne and to rob him of this love. This small deviation from the biblical narrative — for, at bottom, we know nothing of Moses’s princely life — allows the director to inscribe a sentimental story at once plausible and implausible, like the tales for children.
Furthermore, playing on the silence of the biblical text concerning Moses’s youth at court, the screenwriter can give free rein to his imagination and develop the intrigues and power struggles habitual in such a setting, where Moses figures as the good one and the future Ramesses as the wicked one, whose personal hatred will explain his refusal, later, to let the Hebrews leave Egypt: an easy and banal psychological explanation. It then becomes possible to have Moses’s true mother encounter him and to play upon the spectator’s heartstrings in the conflict between the two mothers, the adoptive and the blood mother, and Moses’s anguish.
The Christianization of the Bible.
This human aspect is accentuated by the love that binds the hero to the pharaoh’s daughter; the snares his rival sets for him; the affection the old king bears him, and so forth. But — and this is the unconsciously Christian element of the film — the enslaved Jewish people await with confidence a liberator and assign this role to Moses. Shortly before his birth, a star appeared in the sky; the Egyptian astrologers assure the pharaoh that a prophecy promises the Hebrews a liberator and that the star signifies his coming into the world. The Hebrews are accused of working badly because they believe in a liberator. Still more: while it is far from certain — see the Passover Seder — that Moses himself preserved the faith of his fathers during his enslavement, his compatriots remind Moses at every moment that God has not forgotten him, of the existence of an all-powerful God who will send a liberator. Better still, it is his true mother who will reveal his mission to him: “If the God of Abraham has chosen my son to accomplish His designs, Moses shall be warned of it.” The preponderance given to the mother and her confidence in her son is not without an implicit reference to the mother of Jesus and her acceptance of her mission. The insistence on the coming of a liberator is constant. An old slave murmurs as he dies: “I had hoped to see the Liberator lead men toward freedom,” and the dialogue with the slave Joshua is a model of its kind: “God of Abraham, four years now we have been waiting. The lament of your children has risen up to you” — “I know nothing of your God,” Moses replies — “The finger of God has come to rest upon you.”
Another Christian resonance: cast into the desert by order of the pharaoh, who deems himself betrayed in his affection (and not in flight, as in the biblical narrative), Moses is mocked by his triumphant rival, who ironically gives him “the royal mantle,” a cloth striped with blue, and “a scepter,” a staff that a contemptuous soldier throws to him — a scene directly inspired by Jesus mocked as king of the Jews by the Roman soldiers.
Moses’s return to Egypt gives rise to extravagant episodes, such as the rescue of his son by the still-enamored princess; but, once she has disappeared from the scene, the crossing of the Red Sea, the golden calf, the tablets of the law evacuate every personal element. There remains the collective destiny of the Jewish people, and Moses’s final apostrophe as he departs for Mount Nebo to die there: “Go and proclaim that liberty reigns over all the earth and that today liberty belongs to mankind.” It is no longer a matter of individual destiny, nor even of a single people, but the affirmation of a universalism that surpasses personal interests and particularisms. The personal and accidental circumstances have vanished, the web of coincidences and chances has disappeared, and above all, the role of an extraordinary Messenger is relayed by the exemplary adventure of a people and its message of freedom.
The television film Abraham: fidelity to the biblical narrative
Thirty years elapsed between Cecil B. DeMille’s film and the television film Abraham. In two long episodes, the work obeys the constraints of television: few establishing shots, emphasis on the characters, and so on. What is interesting is to observe the evolution of the perception of biblical history in relation to the previous film.
First of all, the external melodramatic elements are insignificant, whereas they were important in The Ten Commandments and the films of the 1950s. It is in the psychological developments that the screenwriters’ imagination is set free; there are few invented characters and episodes. It is at the level of the spirit of the text that one detects the new tendency of the reading made of it.
The Christian references have practically disappeared; apart from one supplication of Abraham, “My Lord, do not abandon me,” of obvious Christian connotation, which recurs twice, and the fact that he leaves Haran not after his father’s death, as it is said in the Bible, but during his father’s lifetime — abandoning, then, not the paternal house, as God commanded him, but his father and his mother, as Jesus will ask of his disciples.
It is above all in relation to contemporary preoccupations that the reading of the Bible is made. Problems of emigration, of exclusion, of underdevelopment, and, above all, idealized relations between Ishmael and Isaac, both sons of Abraham.
From the very beginning, the family of Abraham’s father, Terah, is presented as a tribe different from the others. It is reproached for multiplying, for having ever-greater needs, and for profiting from the hospitality that the king of the region grants it. Although they are makers of idols (idolatry being then the religion practiced by all), Terah is tolerated only thanks to the exorbitant tribute he pays to the authorities. This emphasis placed on émigré status is still visible at the border of Egypt, where “the border police” turn back the starving who aspire to enter the coveted country, just as today the desperate of the whole world try to make their way into the richer countries. Moreover, they are enjoined to submit to the laws and customs of the host country (“You shall worship the Egyptian gods”) — that is, to renounce their specificity as the price of their integration.
Much more restrained than the films of preceding years, Abraham faithfully follows the biblical narrative without seeking to exploit its scabrous aspects, such as the episode of Sarah’s capture by the pharaoh. Faithful in this to tradition, Abraham’s wife protects her purity, but not thanks to the miraculous intervention of an angel as the midrash recounts, but by her own will, by succeeding in creating a dialogue with the one who holds her, who recognizes the woman’s freedom: “Nothing shall happen that you have not consented to of your own free will.”
Contrary to Cecil B. DeMille’s film, the scenario contains no imaginary characters; it is at the level of psychology that the director enriches the narrative, and this on one particular point: the rivalry between Sarah and Hagar; a rivalry of wives — Hagar complains of Abraham’s indifference — a rivalry of mothers, each reckoning the chances of inheritance for her son. Hagar is Egyptian; she was Sarah’s servant at the pharaoh’s court, which allows her to make a perfidious allusion to that cohabitation when her mistress takes offense at seeing her prepare an Egyptian dish. “It is an Egyptian dish that you ate with pharaoh, do you not remember it?” Hagar persists in her fidelity to her origins: “It is I who will raise him (Ishmael) according to our traditions”; but Abraham initiates Ishmael into the ritual of the burnt offering by having him sacrifice a ram, indicating thereby that he considers him as part of his tribe.
The reconciliation of the enemy brothers.
But the new message of the film resides in the love that binds the two brothers. During an evening before the tents where all of Abraham’s family is gathered, a friendly contest pits Ishmael against a young shepherd. Isaac, still a child, encourages him and even takes part in the combat by perching on his brother’s shoulders, to Sarah’s great displeasure, under the tender gaze of the father who says with affection, “I love you both.” But Sarah convinces her husband to send away Hagar and her son, and when these disappear, Isaac is saddened. His father, to console him (“You miss him too much; you are worried about him?”), proposes that he offer a sacrifice “to ask God to help him.” And one sees this astonishing scene in which Isaac chooses a kid, “the one I love most,” and Abraham concludes: “God will provide for Ishmael” (allusions to Isaac’s akedah, which will take place a little later), on which the film ends. A voice-over concludes that at Abraham’s death, “at the tomb they joined their hands.” The emphasis is placed on the reconciliation between the two brothers, Ishmael and Isaac, both at the origin of the two peoples who, at the moment the film was being made, were struggling against each other. From the Christianization of preceding years, one has passed to contemporary preoccupations, to the conflict of the Middle East and a call for peace between these peoples.
Monument in memory of the deportation (Yad Vashem) (Photograph: David Rosenman)