he dust of reviews has settled on this film and so: the time has
come, perhaps, for a more dispassionate, a more considered, a more
reflective, little review---but no less provocative than the most
provocative you've read thusfar....

THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: A Film Review by Ron Price

This film is not intended to be a masterful historical documentary
as, say, Ken Burns' work on the Civil War or one of many others done
in the first century of the existence of the cinema. Gibson's work
is far from possessing what some might call an intellectual poverty
in its pretensions at historical documentary. Shawn Rosenheim says
all TV documentaries possess an intellectual poverty. If Rosenheim
is right the visual media are simply incapable of producing
historical documentary.1 Even if Rosenheim is wrong historical
documentary of an event 2000 years ago is impossible. We simply do
not know enough.

We all know that Gibson did not take his camera crew to downtown
Jerusalem in some kind of time-warp to produce an anti-Jewish, anti
Roman clip for the evening news. Even if he had and he then produced
for us all an evening two hour special, spectacle, called "the
crucifixion," there would still be questions about visual
manipulation and the program's service in the name of directing
popular thought toward a new religious movement. New reliigous
movements have always had trouble getting popular exposure.

No one would claim that Gibson's is a neutral recording of objective
events. It is a construct operating from a certain point of view. It
is a rhetorical argument achieved through the selection and
combination of elements that both reflect and project a world, a
world view, a cosmology if you like. It is achieved by certain
cinematic conventions that try to erase any signs of cinematic
artificiality. An ideology is promoted by linking the effect of
reality to social values and institutions in such a way that these
values seem natural and self-evident. In the case of Mel Gibson's
work, a work that I found quite stimulating in its own way, the
ideology is simply and strongly: fundamentalist Christianity.

I've never been attracted to Christianity in any of its
fundamentalist forms. But I liked this film. Film can often get to
people in ways that words, ideas and simple beliefs cannot. It was
not because of its historical accuracy that I liked it. I liked All
the Presidents Men and a number of other films based on and rooted in
some historical theme. Rarely are historical films accurate; the main
reason they seem so is that the people watching them know so little
about the theme, the event, that it seems plausible to them. Sadly,
but truly, we know so little about the events of the life of Jesus of
Nazereth that a good script writer, a good cinematographer and a big
band of men and women can bring something to life that may never have
happened at all.

Bertrand Russell wrote in his Why I'm Not a Christian that, in a
court of law, there is little evidence for even the existence of
Jesus let alone his manner of death. Historicity simply does not
exist when it comes to the events in the life of a man who has had a
profound affect, I believe, on history. But what I believe and what
I know; what you believe and what you actually know about Jesus are
in two different worlds. The distance between the pulpit and the
academic chair of religion has been widening for at least two
centuries. In fact for millions of men and women these days
historicity is irrelevant to their beliefs. History has become, for
those millions, what it was for Henry Ford: bunk or was it bunkum?
Mel, you've given us a thriller. To hell with history! 5 out of 5.

As a sort of epilogue to this brief comment on the film: one of the
main reasons I am a Baha'i is that historicity is important to me. In
a religion that has grown up in the modern age historicity does not
present major issues. At least not yet. The revelation of
Baha'u'llah, confined as it is to only 6 million adherents, has grown
slowly since the mid-nineteenth century.

The originating impulse for each of the major religions of history,
an impulse that led to the phenomenon of revelation or some defining
religious experience has receded so far into history as to be
accessible to us in only a very limited and unsatisfactory degree.
Far otherwise with the work of the Founder of the Baha'i Faith. The
details of His life are massively documented. And one day film-
makers will make films about this Life that draw on historical
facticity, historical reality. But history has a thousand faces, a
thousand forms, and Mel Gibson has given us some very stimulating
ones in his film `The Passion of the Christ.' They will serve for
some of the millions who watched it to bring them closer to One whom
Baha'u'llah said: when Christ was crucified the world wept with a
great weaping.




1 The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, editor, Marcia
Pandy, the Athone Press, London, 2001.