English 285-01
Aspects of Film and literature
The bible on film
Prof. David Richter
9W3A 0676 MW 10:50-12:05 KY248 RICHTER
Great films, proverbially, are not made from great books. But what about the Good Book? This course will examine what happens to
Biblical narrative when it has been translated, not only into the vernacular
out of its original language, Hebrew or Greek, but into the imagery of the
Hollywood or independent cinema.
Adaptations are interpretations, and while many Biblical films tend to
tread carefully to avoid offending the faithful, others have posed bold
challenges and courted controversy.
The films taken from the
Hebrew Bible will include Cecil B. DeMille's two
versions of The Ten Commandments (the
silent film of 1923 and the more familiar sound film of 1956) along with the
DreamWorks Prince of Egypt (1998)
directed by Chapman. We will also see DeMille's groundbreaking "sword and sandal"
version of Samson and Delilah, taken
from chapters 13-16 of the book of Judges.
If there is time we will also do David and Bathsheba (1952), based on
the books of Samuel. Films based on New
Testament material, strictly or loosely, will include DeMille's
silent King of Kings (1927); Pier Paolo Pasolini's
The Gospel According to Matthew
(1964); Terry Jones's The Life of Brian
(1979); Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988); Denys Arcand's
Jesus of Montreal (1989); and Mel
Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004)
. We will also screen the updated and
transposed Jesus film Son of Man
(2006) set in present day South Africa.
We will familiarize ourselves in advance with the hot properties
found in the books of Exodus, Judges, Samuel and the four canonical gospels of
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The course
will begin with a “boot camp” on cinematic narrative for those who have never
had a film course. In effect we are going to have to learn three different
"dialects" of film language, that of the silent era, that of the
classic sound film during the hegemony of the Hollywood studios, and that of
the post-New Wave independent cinema.
Required written work will include contributions to a course
wiki on film techniques and terms, posting of response papers on our course
blog, http://biblefilm.qwriting.org/ and a term paper on a biblical or
religious film not shown in class, topic to be chosen by the student with the
consent and collaboration of the instructor. A filmography
to help out with this will be circulated in advance.
We will be watching clips from the films in class, but I expect students to watch the film before the scheduled date of instruction. The films have been uploaded to the AdobeExpress cloud, with the URL in our course's BlackBoard page. Students with a fast internet connection (cable or dsl) should be able to screen the films on your home computer or laptop via streaming video; those who do not may have to watch the films in one of the campus computer labs.
Learning Goals:
Gain a sense of the problems and processes
involved in the adaptation to film of a prose fiction narrative, along with the
different ends that film adaptations may serve.
Learn what special issues are involved in films portraying iconic
religious figures. Learn how film
adaptations address social, cultural, political and spiritual concerns. Learn about storytelling practices,
strategies, and techniques in film and fiction, and how they function in
fiction and film. Recognize and analyze
elements of prose fiction and film narrative, the changes in both story (fabula) and discourse (sjuzet)
that occur in the process of adaptation, and the effects of those changes.
Required Texts:
David Bordwell
& Kristen Thompson, Film Art: An
Introduction 9/e, McGraw-Hill 2009 -- 0073386162 978-007338616; earlier editions, e.g., the 8/e or 7/e,
are just as good for our purposes and available quite cheap online.
M. Jack Suggs et al., eds., The Oxford
Study Bible. Oxford UP, 1992. 0195290003 978-0195290004.
Further secondary materials (e.g.
academic articles on fiction/film) will be distributed via BlackBoard.
Schedule:
Week II. February 6th and 8th: Film boot camp. Scenery, costumes, actors. Cinematography and editing.
Week III. Wednesday, February 15th: Cinematography and editing continued.
Week IV. February 21th and 22nd: Note that Monday is a national holiday and we instead meet on Tuesday this week. Judges 13-16 and Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah.(1949), one of the great camp classics of Biblical cinema.
Week V. February 27th and 29th. Cecil B. DeMille: The Ten Commandments (1956). Supplemented with some attention to the original silent version of The Ten Commandments (1923; in this film the Moses/Israelites story is a one hour prologue to a contemporary story about two brothers who embody righteousness and sin.)
Week VI. March 5th and 7th: Dreamworks Studio's animated feature The Prince of Egypt (1998) directed by Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner and Simon Wells, and voiced by Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Patrick Stewart and a sterling cast.
Week VII. March 12th and 14th: Henry King: David and Bathsheba (1952). A psychological portrait of the monarch as the humane but guilt-ridden CEO of Israel.com, starting out with the campaign at Rabbah in 2 Samuel 11 and flashing back to the idealistic shepherd boy of 1 Samuel. Slightly trashy, always interesting. One warning: Depending on how long the boot camp goes on, this film may have to be sacrificed.
Week VIII. March 19th and 21st: Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927). Highly reverent, this became the model for the mainstream Jesus films like Nicholas Ray's King of Kings (1961), George Stevens' The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).
Week IX. March 26th and 28th: Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel according to Matthew, 1964). Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed the life of Jesus in the impoverished region of Basilicata, Italy, using nonprofessionals as his cast (an economics student from Spain was cast as Jesus), in a treatment that emphasizes the egalitarian social message. Later versions, such as the Zeffirelli miniseries Jesus of Nazareth (1977), show the intense influence of Pasolini's version.
Week X. April 2nd and 4th: The Life of Brian (1979). Brian Cohen, son of Mandy, was born in Bethlehem in the next manger over from Jesus, son of Mary and the Monty Python troupe presents the life and death of the man who kept getting mistaken for the Savior. Terry Jones directed, and it's very funny.
April 6th to 15th is Spring Vacation
Week XI. April 16th and 18th: The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) reads the Jesus story through the 1953 novel of that title by Nobel-Prize-winning Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis. Martin Scorsese's
Week
XII. April 23rd and 25th: Jésus de Montréal (1989) is set in the present day. A parish
priest in Montreal asks a troupe of actors to rewrite and restage the
traditional Easter passion play, which has been losing audience. The actors bring contemporary analysis of the
Bible to their task and the result is surprising, strange, and often
shocking. In French with subtitles.
Week XIII.
April 30th and May 2nd: The Passion of the Christ (2004)
was directed by Mel Gibson. The film was a huge box office success either in
spite of or because of the controversies that raged both around what many
considered the violence of the action and the antisemitism
of the screenplay. In addition to the
canonical gospels, the screenplay (by Gibson himself and collaborators who
translated the dialogue from English into Aramaic and Latin) has as an intertext a book of visions, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (1833) by the nun
Anne Catherine Emmerich transcribed by German poet
Clemens Brentano. Gibson used the same
Italian town as Pasolini, Basilicata, to recreate
Jerusalem.
Week XIV. May
7th and May 9th: Son of Man (2006) was the first South African film to be
entered in the prestigious Sundance Festival, was directed by British native
and current South Africa resident Mark Dornford-May,
and created in collaboration with the South African theatre company, Dimpho Di Kopane.
Week
XV: May 14th and 16th: Review and
conclusions
Written Work:
One term paper, three response papers on screened films, responses to other people’s response papers.
Term Paper Instructions
The major written work for this course is one term paper of 8-20 pages (more if necessary).
Term papers have a topic and a thesis about that topic. You get to choose the topic, although it should conform to the subject-matter of this course, which is Film Adaptations of Biblical Narratives (Television miniseries counts as film, for our purposes.)
Your
thesis can involve one film or more than one film. Compare and contrast
is one good strategy, and you will find in the filmography
many biblical film adaptations including some competing versions we will not
have screened in class. I am open to essays on films that are not strictly
Biblical but have a strong religious component, such as like DeMille's Sign of the
Cross or William Wyler's Ben-Hur or interesting films that question biblical ideas,
such as Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal
or Michael Tolkin's The Rapture.
The thesis is also up to you, although I would like to review and okay (or reject) your theses in advance. If you want to critique your thesis before you send it up to me for my own critique, you will find help at my friend Jack Lynch’s page about developing a thesis, at his website: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/EngPaper/thesis.html See particularly what Jack calls the “Well, duh!” test. His page contains links to other sites with pointers about academic writing that are very helpful. One of those wonderful sites is that created by Dan White and Jeannine DeLombard from the Erindale campus of the University of Toronto – it has all you need to know about planning, writing, citation of sources, and revision. http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/~dwhite/papers.htm
One special problem for this class may be “quoting” a movie, which involves clipping a single frame from a DVD to illustrate your thesis. You can do this by downloading a program called PowerDVD, which will play a DVD on your computer, and which has a “screen capture” feature that will copy a still picture to your hard disk. See http://classweb.gmu.edu/tec/video/powerdvd/PDstill.html for information on the process. This is by no means the only way of doing this.
All papers are due May 21st. Please submit an e-copy of the paper (send me the paper as email, to drichter@nyc.rr.com ), whether or not you submit a hard copy of the paper. Late papers will be accepted, but I may be out of the country in late May, so there may need to be incompletes and make-up grades. If you are graduating this term, this may not be an option you will want to exercise.