Gothic Gibson
Predatory Rock Chick
Cinematography evokes artwork of centuries past
By Alan G. Artner
Tribune art critic
March 7 2004
Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" is turning out to be many things to
many people, but to me it's primarily a film in a genre that has been deeply
indebted to other forms of visual art: painting, drawing, sculpture,
photography, printmaking.
I went to see it not to find anti-Semitism or have an epiphany but only to
discover the visual sense of the director and cinematographer, because
nearly a century of movies about Christ consistently have made a practice of
drawing on earlier artistic creations. Cecil B. DeMille's silent "King of
Kings" staged 298 paintings, and whenever D.W. Griffith did it he even had
title cards tell you which ones, so the tradition began with the very first
screen epics.
My curiosity was piqued because in the reports that seem to have attended
every stage of the making of "The Passion" was the name of one of the
greatest painters of the 16th Century, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.
The director was supposed to have asked his cinematographer to make the film
look like Caravaggio paintings. And, sure enough, in preliminary press
notes, Gibson is twice quoted as saying, "I think his work is beautiful.
It's violent, it's dark, it's spiritual and it also has an odd whimsy or
strangeness to it."
What little is known about the life of Caravaggio was treated almost 20
years ago in an idiosyncratic film biography by British director Derek
Jarman, who trained as a painter and refused to cater to a wide filmgoing
public. Oddly enough, his first feature, "Sebastiane," a homosexual fantasy
on the martyrdom of the Christian saint, was the only film before "The
Passion" in a dead language. Jarman and Gibson could not be more different,
but that they had Caravaggio and street Latin in common suggested the latter
might show an artistic sensibility beyond the usual Hollywood product.
Movie's images
What, then, did cinematographer Caleb Deschanel come up with?
The opening nocturne in Gethsemane has the hazy atmosphere of Edward
Steichen's Pictorialist photographs; Christ could be a stand-in for Auguste
Rodin's statue of Balzac as shot by Steichen at night in the Meudon
landscape. Moreover, the soft blue that suffuses all of the garden scene has
equivalents in sequences that follow: gold tinged with green in the
precincts of Roman and rabbinical authorities; gray-white in the house of
Mary; red-gold for Christ's flashbacks; approaching sepia monochrome on the
Via Dolorosa. The use of this palette is so economical and consistent you
can tell where you are almost entirely through color.
But it has little to do with Caravaggio, whose paintings of Christ are
anything but dim or hazy. Figures are set apart from each other and the
surrounding darkness by bursts of strong light or color. And drama lies as
much in these sudden displays of energy, which emphasize how massive and
solid Caravaggio's world is, as in the incidents that he depicts. Lighting
in "The Godfather" films expresses that earthiness better than the dark
diffusion of "The Passion."
Gibson underlines physicality differently. A good deal of his narrative
proceeds through close-ups and medium shots that give predominance to faces;
in crowd scenes they sometimes pack his frames edge to edge. But the people
are not part of Caravaggio's streetwise humanity. They're grotesques --
brutal, deformed and jeering. Only one such figure is in a Caravaggio
painting of Christ: the principal tormentor in "The Flagellation." Judea,
according to Gibson, is at times largely populated by them.
Caravaggio's Christ, powerfully muscled, shrinks from blows and has only two
tiny spots of red on his forehead. Then, after death, in "The Entombment" --
as tragic a work as any from the late Renaissance -- the body scarcely
betrays physical ordeal. There is no blood or trace of the scourge. Viewers
have to look hard to detect even the wounds of Crucifixion. Of the five
figures around Him, only one performs what might be construed an extreme
action, raising her eyes and hands to heaven. The rest are restrained,
quietly sober.
Action is unbridled in "The Passion," which has led many to claim excessive
violence. For me, it was misjudged, the amount of punishment causing tension
to peak during the 11-minute scene of flagellation rather than at the
Crucifixion, which is to say, much too soon. But that degree of suffering,
and a lot else in the film, has solid artistic, if not textual, foundation
-- in the art of the Northern Renaissance.
North vs. South
Caravaggio worked in Italy, where as critic David Denby rightly has pointed
out, artistic treatments of Christ shifted attention away from physical pain
to the spiritual comfort of Resurrection. In the North it was different. The
Gothic sensibility that had introduced the Dance of Death as a major
artistic subject persisted in some measure. Remember the band of flagellants
in Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal"? They punished themselves physically
in the hope that God would lift the Black Plague. Through suffering alone
they might be saved.
Any number of paintings in the Northern tradition enlarge on such suffering.
Christ staggering beneath the weight of the Cross, a panel from a mid-15th
Century German altarpiece owned by the Cleveland Museum of Art, for example,
shows the same emphasis as scenes from "The Passion." Grotesque faces packed
together, cruelty outweighing compassion, anatomical distortions
accentuating pain -- it has them all in a sequence of pictures culminating
not in the triumph of Resurrection but the torment of Calvary.
The masterpiece of that kind of vision, begun almost a century before
Caravaggio's paintings of Christ, is the "Crucifixion" from the "Isenheim
Altar" by Mathias Grunewald, an artist familiar with the works of Italian
painters but too profoundly Gothic in spirit to be influenced.
His Christ is an emaciated, scarified horror, clearly a precedent for
Gibson's. Such close-ups in the film as a gnarled (nailed) hand and blood
dripping down the Cross seem taken directly from the "Isenheim Altar" or
Grunewald's later Crucifixions, which are among the most powerful religious
works ever painted.
That a movie with so time-honored and harrowing a visual sense should become
a popular success -- especially at a moment when the last word in film
artistry is apparently the anodyne up-to-date digital world of "The Lord of
the Rings" -- is beyond all imagining.
Copyright © 2004, The Chicago Tribune
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the Renaissance artists is both extremely unlikely but more importantly
it misses the real point. Those great artists took the story of
Christ's suffering and transformed it into something beautiful,
something that transcended the bloody brutality that Gibson's film
wallows in. And that is the real triumph of good over evil.