"'When violence breaks out' against Jews as a result of this film...

Films/DVD Asylum

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...Mel Gibson will have a lot to answer for."
At last, a report from the Wall Street Journal.
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Mel's Passion
Normally we'd wait until a film has been finished before daring to editorialize on its substance. That holds especially true for Mel Gibson's "The Passion," an account of Christ's last hours on earth, since this page has already featured an on-set interview. But a fresh attack imputing anti-Semitism to Mr. Gibson's enterprise provokes us to address the charge.
Though "concerns" about potential anti-Semitism have been floating about for months, the fullest broadside has just been published by the New Republic. When we caught up with Mr. Gibson in Washington after attending a private screening of a rough cut, he seemed charmingly oblivious even to what the New Republic was. But he is well aware of his critics, says they are working from an outdated script that was stolen from him, and sees their demands as an ugly attempt at public intimidation.
Ironically, all sides agree that the Christ-killer libel hurled at too many Jews by too many Christians over the centuries is a perversion of the Gospels. In this sense, the stated theme of "The Passion" should be reassuring. Which is that Christ was put up on that cross on Golgotha by the world's sins -- Mr. Gibson's and his fellow Christians' included. For what it's worth, the mostly Christian audience with whom we watched the rough cut didn't see a story of blame. What they saw was a moving testament to love and redemption.

In her New Republic piece, Boston University's Paula Fredriksen, a Scripture scholar, mocks Mr. Gibson's efforts at historical fidelity. And she notes that certain Gospel passages themselves can lead people dangerously astray. Yet for an author ostensibly sensitive to the charge of blood libel, Ms. Fredriksen manages to drag into her "scholarly" critique the nutty views of Mr. Gibson's father. "[W]hen violence breaks out" against Jews as a result of this film, she concludes, Mel Gibson will have a lot to answer for.
Yet anyone reading these criticisms might just as easily conclude that it is Ms. Fredriksen and her cohort who have an agenda, one that, as Michael Medved suggested this week in USA Today, goes "beyond honest evaluation of the film's aesthetic or theological substance." And their criticism of Mr. Gibson seems especially incendiary at a moment when actual Jews are being blown up by suicide bombers in Israel and protesters in Paris shout "Death to the Jews."
We recall that it used to be conservatives who were lectured against censorship and against condemning works of art they hadn't actually seen. Surely that was the operating liberal consensus back in the 1980s when Universal Pictures took out an ad defending Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ," declaring that the artist's "freedom to explore religious and philosophic questions" is a precious one.
The truth is that all art, even art aimed at absolute fidelity to a text, involves picking and choosing and artistic vision. "This is something I've been thinking about for 12 years," Mr. Gibson answered when we asked about the tension between Gospel fidelity and artistic metaphor. "And this [his film] is how I see it." If he's got it all wrong, he's a big boy and he should answer for his sins -- artistic, historical and even theological. But surely not until "The Passion" is done and his critics have actually seen it.

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Kimber Kable

Topic - "'When violence breaks out' against Jews as a result of this film... - clarkjohnsen 06:53:11 07/26/03 (1)

Bravo, WSJ . . n - albee33 08:16:07 07/26/03 (0)

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