Mel Gibson's 'Passion' What makes this film different?
Jack Miles
As a cinematic
matter, the boldest innovation in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of
the Christ," is its use of language and subtitles to create, in
a religious film, the illusion of documentary. Dialogue in a
number of recent English-language feature films has fostered
this kind of illusion by shifting into a second language plus
subtitles for a few minutes at a time. “Dances With Wolves,” for
example, shifted at several points into the Amerindian language
Lakota. But no film that I know of unfolds in its entirety in
subtitles beneath a language other than that of its primary
audience.
Aramaic and Latin, the two languages in which
the dialogue of “The Passion” is spoken, are not just foreign
but dead. Aramaic survives only in a few remote corners of the
Middle East. Latin is no longer spoken anywhere. The documentary
illusion created by subtitles under ancient languages thus
simulates a voyage not so much to a distant land as to a distant
era. To the extent that any work of art derived from a classic
must make it new by making it strange, this is a brilliant
stroke. Yet the brilliance has a deeply regrettable secondary
effect. Before speaking of that effect, I should mention that I
speak and understand Aramaic, Latin, and Hebrew, and so belong
to the over-educated sliver of the audience for “The Passion”
that can hear both “original” languages with a measure of
comprehension. Before the film’s release, Gibson and his
collaborators were belittled in learned circles for filming in
Latin. Did they not know, scholars sniffed, that Latin was a
language that Jews outside Italy did not speak? In general, the
scholars were right: Greek, not Latin, was the English of the
ancient world—every educated man’s second language. Historical
students of the Gospels have had good reason to assume that if
Pontius Pilate and Jesus of Nazareth—a Latin speaker and an
Aramaic speaker—had the conversations that the Gospels report
them having, they would have had them in Greek. And yet the
truth is that no one knows for a fact that Pilate never troubled
to learn Aramaic, the language of the common people of Galilee
and Judaea.
I call it a defensible artistic liberty then,
that Mel Gibson and his collaborator in the “Passion”
screenplay, Benedict Fitzgerald, serve up a Pilate who speaks
fluent Aramaic to the Jews who come before him. This creates the
opportunity for a moment of linguistically concealed but rather
stunning drama. When Pilate leads Jesus into his chambers for a
private word, he addresses him condescendingly in Aramaic.
(Imagine, if you will, a Hollywood producer speaking Spanish to
his gardener.) Jesus answers the proud Roman serenely—and in
flawless Latin. Did the historical Jesus speak Latin? Surely
not, but Fitzgerald and Gibson are within their rights to
choose, for artistic purposes, the Christ of faith over the
Jesus of history. Their Jesus is God Incarnate. He can speak at
will any human language he chooses to speak.
Aramaic and Latin, the two languages in which
the dialogue of “The Passion” is spoken, are not just foreign
but dead. Aramaic survives only in a few remote corners of the
Middle East. Latin is no longer spoken anywhere. The documentary
illusion created by subtitles under ancient languages thus
simulates a voyage not so much to a distant land as to a distant
era. To the extent that any work of art derived from a classic
must make it new by making it strange, this is a brilliant
stroke. Yet the brilliance has a deeply regrettable secondary
effect. Before speaking of that effect, I should mention that I
speak and understand Aramaic, Latin, and Hebrew, and so belong
to the over-educated sliver of the audience for “The Passion”
that can hear both “original” languages with a measure of
comprehension. Before the film’s release, Gibson and his
collaborators were belittled in learned circles for filming in
Latin. Did they not know, scholars sniffed, that Latin was a
language that Jews outside Italy did not speak? In general, the
scholars were right: Greek, not Latin, was the English of the
ancient world—every educated man’s second language. Historical
students of the Gospels have had good reason to assume that if
Pontius Pilate and Jesus of Nazareth—a Latin speaker and an
Aramaic speaker—had the conversations that the Gospels report
them having, they would have had them in Greek. And yet the
truth is that no one knows for a fact that Pilate never troubled
to learn Aramaic, the language of the common people of Galilee
and Judaea.