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Bible and Cinema: Fifty Key Films

At the intersection of popular culture studies with religious studies (and especially film history), Reinhartz’s Bible and Cinema: Fifty Key Films includes two categories of feature films into an A-to-Z classification: first, the obvious movie classics partly taken from the two Testaments such as The Ten Commandments (1956) by Cecil B. De Mille, the popular Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), and Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977). Of course, masterpieces such as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) and William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1958) are discussed with well-deserved praise, but the editor includes more popular, and significantly lesser quality, films as well, such as Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ (2004). The book also presents references to the Bible as a cultural artifact present in various ways in different genre movies, from Kubrick’s flamboyant 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to Superman (1978). In many of these cases, the biblical allusions are not always evident but only partial or metaphorical. It seems clear this book without illustrations was written by and for professors who want to analyze a variety of religious films in their classes, introducing useful elements for the previewing, the immediate understanding, and for further discussion in the classroom. This is not always an easy task given the lack of cinematographic culture of most students, who wrongly believe they have a wide knowledge of film history because they have seen a lot of recent Hollywood blockbusters. For example, in a comment about Henry King’s classic David and Bathsheba (1951), J. Cheryl Exum begins with this down-to-Earth remark: “my students hate this film,” partly because of its “distinctly dated feel” (p. 79). The most interesting entries provide deep discussions related to significant movies such as Woody Allen’s Crime and Misdemeanors (1990), providing a reflection about good and evil as personified by the goodwill rabbi who loses his sight and the wicked dentist who gets away with premeditated murder, since “the film disputes the scriptural theodicy that the good/wise prosper and the evil/foolish perish” (p. 76). Perhaps the strongest “modern” film echoing the Bible, Denys Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal (1989), confirms the richness and multiplicity of possible interpretations that Christ’s message transposes in a modern context, as with the modern transposition of the “cleansing of the temple” scene from a famous episode in John’s Gospel 2:13–16 (p. 149). Even though many movies were dedicated to her, Joan of Arc gets only one entry (the most recent version by Jacques Rivette was selected), while many would have preferred Robert Bresson’s version (or even Carl Dreyer’s silent version). This book’s strengths are to be found in the numerous cross-references taken from the selected movies with the exact counterpart and the corresponding illustrated verses in the Bible, for example John 12:12–18 (p. 154). These informative references are invaluable, although not all entries include such clues. At the end, we find a precious tool that is uncommon: an “Index to ancient sources” which indicates for each passage of the Hebrew