Before Christ, it’s simple. During Christ, it’s not too complicated. After Christ, everything blurs. In other words, in the mirror of the peplum [the sword-and-sandal epic]—whether it be, with some nuances, Hollywoodian or transalpine—it is better that only a single category appear on screen: either Jews or Christians, it doesn’t matter which. It is when they are face to face that one gets lost. Take any biblical film: things are clear—the good and the wicked, Hebrews and Egyptians, Danites and Philistines, Israelites and Assyrians, Judeans and Babylonians, Jews and Greeks, then Romans. One could easily cite many films for these summit duels. At the other end of the chronological scale, in that fourth century when the Empire is about to become Christian, or still later, when the barbarian is at the gates, things become clear again: the good and the wicked, Christian Romans and pagan Romans, the Pope facing the Huns and Fabiola facing the others. What remains, then, roughly speaking, is two centuries—the first before and the first after—that pose a problem. Let us look, then, at the solutions adopted.
Two centuries minus a quarter before Christ
Although Jesus was born before Jesus Christ, no doubt around 6 BC, the Christians, for their part, should not figure in films supposedly set before their era! Granted. And yet. The temptation is strong—especially in American cinema—to see in them a few proto-crypto-Christians whose implicit status can always strike the imagination of an audience eager for Testamentary fare. Let us look at Samson and Delilah (C. B. DeMille, 1948). The filmmaker, whose biblical culture is well known, pulls off the tour de force of not once uttering the words “Jews”—which is normal, since premature—“Hebrews”—which is just as normal, since archaic—“Israelites,” which is not normal at all, since the tribe of Dan, of which Samson is the Judge, is part of the tribes of Israel. It will therefore be easier to see in Samson the wounded Just Man, the one who, in dying, implores a God who has abandoned him (for good reasons, to be sure!). Let us add that Delilah has a flavor of a little (Mary) Magdalene and that the Philistine Saran has the airs of a Pontius Pilate. No need to multiply examples. The cinema has done nothing but follow—no doubt unconsciously—the reductive and apologetic schemes of the Church Fathers who scrutinized the Old Testament through a magnifying glass to discover there the announcement of the New.
This desire, anchored in the heart of Americans, to find in the ancient epic biblical leads can even lead to historical drolleries, of which a fine example is the Spartacus that S. Kubrick shot half-heartedly in 1960 (after star-producer Kirk Douglas dismissed Anthony Mann) and that he all but disavowed thereafter. The film is drawn from a novel of the same name by Howard Fast (1951), a politically committed writer, in which one finds, alongside the Thracian gladiator, a Jew, David, who dies with him. This character, gone from the screen, did he inspire the symbolic ending of the crucified gladiator, looking at his wife, at the foot of the cross, showing him the son who has just been born (a scene that does not appear in the novel)? One notices there a sort of inverted Calvary. If the Mother is still at the foot of the cross, the Son is with her, while it is the Father who undergoes the torment. A pre-Christian Spartacus? Why not. So much has already been embroidered on the revolt of the slaves! The only piquant detail is that ancient Christianity never included in its universalism the liberation of the slaves, essential cogs in the economy of an ancient world of which it would be, from Constantine onward, at the beginning of the fourth century, the new manager…
One must include in this pre-Christic period, at least by way of transition, the representations of King Herod, before he goes off to order an improbable Massacre of the Innocents that the cinema shows with complacency, and which one sees clearly to be only the repetition, on a small scale, of the one ordered by Pharaoh in the time of Moses. Herod the Great was certainly a sorry character, with nonetheless undeniable qualities as a leader and a builder. An Idumean by stock, of a family Judaized for barely two generations, he is shown on screen in his cruelty and his madness, both quite real, as the emblematic figure of the tyrant. It is not by chance that he figures in the prologue of King of Kings (N. Ray, 1961) under the traits of the comedy villain that the actor Grégoire Aslan always played. A prologue all the more interesting in that it constitutes a hapax in the immense filmography devoted to Jesus.
The filmmaker goes back to the year 63 BC. That year Pompey took Jerusalem, violated the Temple, and was astonished to find it empty (at least if one is to believe the testimony of Cicero, whom the filmmaker seems to have read closely). One thus sees the victorious Roman arriving on horseback in the forecourt of the Temple: a fine cinematic shot but, alas, founded on no text! One will thus have understood that, in the imagination of the American spectator—an imagination the filmmaker transcribes—to violate a temple is first of all to enter it on horseback, to enter the Holy of Holies, to cut with a decisive and slashing sword the gauze veil that prevents one from going further, to come back out with a sacred scroll in hand that one supposes to be the Torah, to face the suppliant crowd of priests and Levites and, finally, to give back, in a gesture in which bursts forth the virtue of a magnanimous heart (let us not forget that Pompey was nicknamed “Magnus”), to an old man who implores him, mute and tragic, the sacred document. There is something of the “correct” German in this cinema Roman—the German, himself too of the cinema, of course, not the Nazi. There is also, in this positive representation—let us repeat it—of the assembled crowd, a stereotyped vision of the Jewish religion, such as an Augustine or a Paul, before him, saw it: estimable certainly by its antiquity, but frozen. Is it not represented here by faithful mummified in the Old Covenant? Whereas it is the New Covenant that Jesus will offer.
The Italians, anxious to sacrifice everything to the spectacular, will not have, faced with Herod, the same attitude. In The Cruel Tower (Il sepolcro dei re / Cleopatra’s Daughter… here Le Roi cruel), a 1959 film whose staging results from a bouillabaisse in which there float an old Slavic veteran of the silent era, V. Tourjansky, and a young hack of the talkies, A. Genoino—in this film, then, Herod, played by Edmund Purdom, a Hollywood star whose brilliance went out as fast as it had shone, is shown in all his madness, massacring his own family (which History does not contradict). A symbol at once of the last Jewish dynasty—even if it was illegitimate—and of a perverse and corrupt pagan world, Jerusalem and Rome thrown into the same bag: that of Evil, of which a few years later—but at the same time in the cinema—Nero will be the most illustrious flower. It is a world that it is time, one thinks, on leaving the theater, to regenerate with new blood, that of Christ or that of the martyrs of the catacombs. In short, there is no Jewish history in the cinema, with a few notable exceptions—among them the Masada series (Boris Sagal, 1981)—except as the prolegomena of Christian history.
Jesus, Mary, Joseph
This Jewish history, which lives its last great hours up to that year 70 when Titus seizes Jerusalem and burns the Temple, finally appears only as a backdrop, a pretext, even a hypotext, to the accounts of the Gospels, which serve as a hypertext. Thus in The Thief (Il ladrone; novel by P. Festa Campanile adapted by the author for the cinema, 1979), the film’s hero may well explain to the Roman soldiers who shamelessly piss on him that he is not Judean but Galilean—they couldn’t care less. Neither could the spectator, for whom there is no difference between the inhabitants of Judea, under Roman mandate and under the authority of a prefect (in this instance Pontius Pilate), and those of Galilee, who come under the authority of Herod Antipas, sketched as a lecherous old man before his stepdaughter Salome removing her veils little by little, in the Salome of W. Dieterle, 1953—Herod Antipas, whom the Gospels and the cinema call simply Herod. Which does not simplify matters. For the record: Jesus, a Galilean by birth, is sent back by Pilate before Antipas, on whose authority he depends.
From the very birth of Jesus, moreover, the attitude of the Jews opposes that of the Gentiles, who send him their Magi kings. In J. Cellan Jones’s TV film The Day Christ Died (1980), Herod even sends three of his agents who are, in a sense, “counter-Magi-kings.” But one senses clearly, in all these films and TV films that stage the childhood and life of Jesus, that it is not possible to mask—assuming one wishes to, at least unconsciously—the fact that Jesus, a Jew, was born of Jewish parents (even if one has a doubt about the identity of the father, there is none about his religion) and that he lives in a Jewish milieu. One gets around the difficulty by putting on the index of the image and the camera a few specimens of “good” Jews opposed to others of “wicked” Jews. Who, little by little, will go to swell an immense crowd, the one that, in defiance of all historical and psychological verisimilitude, harasses and jeers at Jesus, from the Praetorium to Golgotha.
Take the Jesus of Nazareth of F. Zeffirelli (1977). On one side, those who believe in Jesus—Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, both played by actors with “noble” physiques, Laurence Olivier for the first, James Mason for the second. On the other, those who do not believe in him: Caiaphas, the High Priest, to whom Anthony Quinn lends his features, which, from dint of playing Mexican bandits, lewd Greeks, and drunken Huns, have taken on, it must be admitted, something foreign-looking; and Judas, to whom one must quite naturally restore the color of betrayal: red. Judas must be a redhead. He is here, as he will be in The Last Temptation of Christ by M. Scorsese (1988). But where Zeffirelli—of whom one recalls that he is financially aided by the Vatican—shows the tip of an ear of which one tells oneself—at the very least—that it is not philosemitic, is in the invention of the character of Zerah, a scribe, very cultivated for that matter, who orchestrates the plot against Jesus. Representing the intellectual element, generally absent from the image and referring back to the famous Gospel apostrophe to the “scribes” and the “Pharisees.”
And one would be wrong to see in this a maniacal obsession: the facies in the cinema has a capital importance. It corresponds to an image that the spectators have in their heads. It matters little that it does not necessarily coincide with historical truth. Likewise, many films—and above all in the silent era—have made of the little Jewish peasant girl that Myriam (Mary) was a sort of Carmelite avant la lettre, at least by the costume. It is still so in the Golgotha of J. Duvivier (1935). Should one prefer the prim sadness of Myriam (sic) Muller in the Marie de Nazareth (Mary of Nazareth) of J. Delannoy (1994) or the mute despair of Susanna Pasolini, the filmmaker’s own mother, in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)? Only a nebulous and murky TV film by Eric Till (1979), Mary and Joseph: A Story of Faith, makes of Mary a prisoner of the Romans, saved by a young and heroic little carpenter and enrolled in the ranks of the rebels led by Judah (sic). But the angel Gabriel will save her bacon. An unprecedented and failed attempt to make of the Nazareth couple a sort of Bonnie and Clyde, Palestinian-style.
From Jesus to Christ
But the thing is even more interesting when it comes to the first Christians. It matters little that the term is anachronistic: one should speak, at least in the 70s, of Judeo-Christians; it matters little that the cross by which they recognize one another appeared only very late, in the fourth century. Only The Sign of the Cross (C. B. DeMille, 1932) begins with a sequence in which the fish (the scene is supposed to take place under the reign of Nero) is indeed the Christian sign of recognition—it matters little, then, about these subtleties. What happens, then, when one has to show the Apostles, those rough fishermen of Galilee, simple, even coarse little folk? One goes to look for their representation in Leonardo da Vinci: impeccable tunics, well-trimmed beards, noble features. Judas, of course, set apart.
One will be content with a single example, but one so emblematic. The canonical Quo Vadis? (M. LeRoy, 1951) stages Peter and Paul. The first is played by Finlay Currie, an actor of noble portliness and a flowing beard. Paul, for his part, played by Abraham Sofaer, is small, swarthy of complexion, with a sly air. In the first, the clear and assured gaze of one who is sure of perishing with his head held high but, on the cross, in the position inverted from that of Jesus—humility obliges. The second, whose end—assuming one knows it—will be, certainly, less painful (the axe or the sword, for Paul is a Roman citizen) but far less noble, has in his feverish gaze the anguish of the neophyte who has joined, after many an indignity, the flock of the faithful, of which he was at first the relentless persecutor. Now both are Jews, both Mediterraneans, and if Peter was the first Pope, it is to Paul that we owe Christianity.
We have no—and it is a pity—traces in the cinema of the polemic that arose after the fire of Rome in 64 and of which the Church Fathers murmur to us that its object was the accusations brought by the Jews of Rome against the Judeo-Christians. But one can follow in the cinema the evolution of a few characters who end up following the Christic message. The most interesting is no doubt the Barabbas of the eponymous film by R. Fleischer (1961). Let us forget the highly improbable character of his liberation, demanded by a multitude of whom one wonders what it is doing there instead of preparing the Passover meal; let us forget that his first name is Jesus and that his name means “the son of the father.” In Fleischer’s film, he has become, through his liberation, which seems to have endowed him with immortality, a sort of Wandering Jew who, crowned champion of the arena (a magnificent essedarius combat between a gladiator on foot and another mounted on a chariot), is going to end up where he should have gone directly, in the place of Jesus: on the cross. A fine example of a Jewish fighter (or brigand) touched by grace. Just like the Demetrius of The Robe (H. Koster, 1953) and, above all, of its sequel, Demetrius and the Gladiators (D. Daves, 1954). This Greek slave, become a gladiator, prefers to the pleasures of the arena and to those of the empress Messalina the simpler joys (and less difficult to manage) of the new religion. In these two parallel destinies, the Jew and the Greek fulfill themselves only when they become Christians.
And since we are evoking the combats of the amphitheater, let us dwell (with pleasure) on that curious Jewish gladiatrix who earns her living thus in the A.D. (Anno Domini) series (Stuart Cooper, 1984). To be sure, at least if one is to believe the poet Martial, a most malicious tongue, a few women were seen in the arena under the reign of Nero, but to make of one a professional, and Jewish into the bargain! There is in fact a curious mixture there of Amazon films and saloon madams, perhaps to show that the living forces of Judaism (she will form a couple with a coreligionist colleague) can only tip over at last, and at the end of the series, into the new religion. It is thus that Ben-Hur, the hero of the novel of the same name by L. Wallace (1880), takes the head of a troop of rebels to try to free Jesus. Which the W. Wyler version (1959) does not show, unlike that of F. Niblo (1926). For—again in the cinema—the living forces of Judaism remain mobilized around Jesus.
A few decades later, in 70, the Judeo-Christians (and the pacifist or collaborator Jews) do not lead the fight against the Roman besieger and flee Jerusalem. This is what The Great Commandment by I. Pichel already showed—in conformity with one aspect of historical truth—in 1939, an exception in a cinematic production that this page of history no longer seems to interest. At bottom, the cinema acts—mutatis mutandis—like the Roman authorities, for whom the quarrels between the traditionalist Jews and the adepts of the new religion remain largely incomprehensible! And if one finds in the Gospels, that of Mark in particular, the concern to set itself apart more and more from Judaism, it is because it was not good—assuming it was written after 70—to assert one’s Jewish roots before Romans who had suffered so many losses in the Jewish war. It is at this moment, no doubt, that a majority of Gentiles will transform Judeo-Christianity into Christianity. But, oddly, one will no longer find films that still oppose Jews and Christians. There will be above all Christians facing their Roman “persecutors.” It will be the time of the Quo Vadis? Then that of the Fabiola. The Jews have practically disappeared from the screen. The Christians have taken up all the room…
One will find them again, the ones and the others, face to face, a few centuries later, in the cinematic adaptations of W. Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), notably in the film by R. Thorpe (1952), which set face to face a beautiful Jewess, Rebecca, and her old father, protected by a courteous Saxon, Wilfred of Ivanhoe, and wicked—but good Christian—Norman Templars. It is the contrary that occurs in Exodus (O. Preminger, 1960), where a beautiful Christian woman falls in love with a new warrior of the faith—but a Jewish one—gone off to the reconquest of that same land of Palestine…
Claude Aziza (Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle)