The Bible (2013) - Part 5

Episode 5 of The Bible (Survival) picks up one of the parts of the book that most adaptations tend to miss, so packed into this episode is both a bit on Jeremiah and a good deal of the Book of Daniel. This is definitely one of the episodes in this series that keeps on track to covering the biblical material without getting waylaid in invented subplots.

Jeremiah's story is reduced more or less to him turning up in King Mattaniah's court wearing an ox-yoke and telling his monarch to surrender to Nebuchanezzar.  Nebuchanezzar here is played by Peter Guinness, who I've always enjoyed seeing pop up ever since Spender (1991-93). Mattaniah takes no notice of course so it's hardly surprising when just a few moments later we're treated to Nebuchanezzar putting out the king's eyes. By hand. Because, everything in this series, particularly the violence, has to be completely over the top

Jeremiah is played by Raad Rawi and appears old and shaggy looking, (in keeping with Jeremiah's likely age at this point). Certainly he's nowhere near as hot as Patrick Dempsey, from the 1998 film version, though that film focused far more on the start of Jeremiah's ministry. The contrast is all the greater, then, with the actor playing Daniel. I must admit that when I've read Daniel in the past, it never occurred to me that he might have a six-pack. I suppose I should probably blame the lack of a major-studio produced 50s biblical epic adaptation for that.

The Daniel section of the film not only includes the Lion's Den scene but also has time to show Daniel's rise to prominence via dream interpretation; Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego surviving the Nebuchanezzar's furnace (thanks to a suspiciously Jesusy-looking angel); and Nebuchadnezzar descent into madness. Guinness isn't quite munching-grass in these scenes, but that's probably because he's already had his fill of the scenery.

It's not really made clear why on top of being fed to the lions Daniel also has to undergo this trial in just a loincloth, aside from the opportunity to show off the prophet's abs. In any case what the film does do well is to show show a genuinely fearful Daniel, even if we know it will all be okay in the end. I suppose Daniel's near nakedness heightens the sense of his vulnerability. And then the Israelites get to go back to Jerusalem and there's still 7 minutes left to talk about the Romans ahead of the next episode. All in all this is one of the better entries in the series, not only covering a lot of material without getting sidetracked, but by providing one or two genuinely insightful moments.

Is Joseph Mawle the BBC Passion's Jesus?

See all posts on this film
The BBC's Passion programme (see previous posts) is filming currently somewhere in Morocco (probably Atlas Studios in Ouarzazate), but there's not much news about it so far. However, the IMDb has recently posted the details of 5 of the cast, including the all important leading role. It seems that Jesus is going to be played by an actor called Joseph Mawle.

When producer Nigel Stafford-Clark was interviewed about this film recently he was unable to name the actor who had been chosen, but he did say that he was someone who was relatively unknown. At the time his explanation that he was someone that you would know if you'd seen one of the things his been in but won't otherwise seemed a little strange, but having looked a bit at his previous roles this is actually a very good description. After starting off in the theatre, he's mainly done TV work, and has been getting more prominent roles lately including Captain Harville in last year's Persuasion, Tim in Clapham Junction and Dean Whittingham in Soundproof. He's won acclaim for all three of those roles, as well as for his earlier work on Sir Gadabout, the Worst Knight in the Land which won a BAFTA. He also featured in a Guinness ad.

There are a couple of interesting pieces of trivia about Mawle. Firstly he was born in March 1974 which means he's currently 33 (Jesus's traditional age at the time of his crucifixion). Secondly, Mawle is partially deaf, having been completely deaf from the ages of 16 to 18. This certainly gave extra significance to his performance as a deaf man in Soundproof but it will also give an interesting angle here playing a renown miracle worker who the gospels record healing those with hearing difficulties. As this film is concentrating on the events leading up to Jesus's death, I don't think it's likely that scenes such as Mark 7:31-37 will be shown. However, I do believe that this is the first time that Jesus has been played by someone with hearing difficulties.

Finally, I think Mawle has a great face for this role - something that is generally of greater significance than most commentators are prepared to admit. There's a good ruggedness about him, and whilst he's still good looking, it's in a Sean Bean sort of a way. There's no shortage of character in his face, but plenty of compassion too. He's blond, but I can't make out his eye colour. Of course both of these things can be altered these days as Mel Gibson ably demonstrated. Given some of the comments Stafford Clark made about authenticity in that interview then I'd be surprised if he appears as blond haired and blue eyed in the final production. So at this stage, this looks like a great choice.
(Thanks to "George" for the tip off).

La vie et la passion de Jésus-Christ (1898)

The first biblical films date all the way back to 1897. Albert "Léar" Kirchner's La Passion du Christ and The Horitz Passion Play by Mark Klaw and Abraham Erlanger, are now, sadly, considered lost, as is Siegmund Lubin's The Passion Play from the following year.¹ In a similar manner almost all of the 1898 silent The Passion Play of Oberammergau, which was famously shot on a New York rooftop rather than in Bavaria, has been lost, though a fragment has survived.²

The earliest remaining Bible film, then, is La vie et la passion de Jésus-Christ (The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ, available online here) by George Hatot and Louis Lumière. Shot in France 1898 when most moving pictures were little more than short slices of real life (les actualités) it retains something of that documentary feel - is this a film about Jesus or the filming of a real-life play about Jesus? Any audience is kept off screen, but the sets retain the feel of an amateur stage production. Furthermore, the placing of the camera in several scenes feels as if it is placed at the side of an audience. These aspects are perhaps most obvious in the crucifixion scene where the shadow of the cross falls not across the ground, but against the back wall. Strangely the scene that feels most like it has been made with the camera in mind - the Garden of Gethsemane - is the one shot outdoors in the most natural setting. At the time documentary footage was commonly shot outside. Drama tended to be set indoors.

Louis Lumière, of course, was the man who, along with his brother Auguste, "invented" cinema, by being the first to display moving pictures to a paying audience. The company the two founded for a while specialised in these actualités but also made comedies and the occasional reconstruction of historical events. Hatot was one of their key early collaborators, first on early documentary footage, but around this time also began to specialise in reconstructions of famous deaths including Mort de Robespierre (1897) and the execution of another religious martyr in Exécution de Jeanne d'Arc (1897).³

Whilst the title of this film is The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ, very little of Jesus' ministry is actually shown. The film starts with the Magi and the Shepherds worshipping Jesus as a baby in a manger, and is followed by a flight to Egypt scene where Mary, Joseph and Jesus stop to rest between the paws of a/the Sphinx. It's a scene that would be reproduced almost fifteen years later in From the Manger to the Cross, only that time shot on location in Egypt.

All that lies between that and Jesus' Passion is a solitary miracle - the raising of the Widow of Nain's son. This scene is rare in Jesus movies, providing neither the human interest of the raising of Jairus' daughter, nor the prophetic resonance of Lazarus breaking out of his tomb. Here though is is handled in a relatively low key manner. The adult son is brought out to Jesus on a stretcher. Jesus (Gaston Bretteau) simply raises his arm and the man sits up, his sheet falling away as he does so.

The lack of spectacle at this point is made all the more interesting by the inclusion of an invented miracle slightly later on. The Last Super scene, shot statically, from slightly close up, starts focused on Jesus' empty chair whilst various preparations are made. Suddenly there's a cut and Jesus appears in their midst. The disciples react with astonishment.

Such jump-cut reappearances were relatively common at the time. Georges Méliès was in his prime and produced numerous short films making use of the technique that same year. These included the religious picture  La tentation de Saint-Antoine (The Temptation of St. Anthony) which featured the titular saint desperately trying to keep his mind on his prayers whilst young women keep materialising to tempt him, including including a moment when a statue of Jesus comes to life. Not only did this make him a forerunner of all those directors who entertained their audiences with a potent mixture of sex and religion, but when the following year he used his camera tricks to portray one of Jesus' miracles in Le Christ marchant sur les flots (Christ Walking on the Water, 1899), he became the first filmmaker to create both a reverent film about Jesus and an irreverent comic depiction of the crucifixion.

More to the point, Georges Hatot himself, having started his career making actualité films of every life such as street scenes and military parades, began elaborating on the jump-cut technique. Whereas it is absent from his 1897 film Mort de Marat, and only used once in Métamorphose de Faust (1897). Having made La vie et la passion the following year, he then moved to Gaumont with Bretteau (who had played Jesus) to remake the Faust story. The resulting Les métamorphoses de Satan (1898), which Bretteau both starred in and co-directed made repeated use of the tec"hnique to portray as Mephistoles, Satan and a young woman continuously appear and disappear.

It's more than possible, of course, that the jump-cut scene in La vie et la passion was at one stage intended as the episode in Luke where the resurrected Jesus miraculously appears amongst the disciples, but the resulting scene here is quite clearly The Last Supper: not only are their echoes of Leonardo's painting, but Jesus distributes the bread and wine and Judas kisses him on the cheek.

The success of this film did little to dissuade other filmmakers from producing their own versions of Jesus' life and death. In particular, Pathé brought out their own tableaux-style Jesus film called La vie et la Passion de Christ in 1899 which gradually expanded (in both number of scenes and title length) through three new versions around up to 1913. There are a few posts on these films (now including this one) on this thread. The relationship between them itself is fairly complex. Hopefully I will be able to expand on it some point, but if you can't wait until then I encourage you to look up Boillat and Robert's article as detailed below.

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1 - Boillat, Alain and Robert, Valentine. (2016) "La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ (1902–05)" in The Silents of Jesus in the Cinema (1897-1927); ed. Shepherd, David. p. 27

2 - According to Kinnard and Davis, a 35mm fragment of the film remains in the George Eastman House archives. The film was produced by Rich G. Hollaman despite the fact he had never actually seen a movie before. He proved so inept at the task that the rest of the cast and crew teamed up to shoot it in the early evening once he had left for the day. These days Henry C. Vincent is credited with being the director, but this marked the first time the roles of producer and director had been separated (The Guinness Book of Film Facts and Feats).

3 - Abel, Richard (1994) The Cine Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896-1914, Berkeley: University of California Press. p.91 The observation about famous deaths is thanks to Luke McKernan.

300 Review

In our increasingly advertising targeted world, it's no surprise that you can often tell a lot about a film by what is promoted before it starts. Perhaps predictably, 300, the historical epic based on Frank Miller's graphic novel, was preceded by 2 car adverts, 2 computer game commercials, the 3 part Guinness Extra Cold advert (along with a couple for WKD and Smirnoff), and an appearance by Messers PC and Mac. Whilst the Lynx marketing department do seem to have missed a trick, the producers of the new Die Hard movie did manage to slip in a trailer before I could say "please someone, make this stop".

It's not too long before it's clear that the advertisers have invested their money wisely. The opening scenes show the future King Leonidas as a young boy. As he is dragged away to begin his military training, his mother wails in despair. Her appearance is important, as she is the only woman in the film who will manage to keep her shirt on. Like Sin City before it, the men are men and the women are fantasised sex objects.

In fairness, shirts in Sparta do seem to have been in rather short supply. Sympathising with their women, Leonidas and his troops fight bare-chested. Whilst there is some evidence that the Spartans fought in knee length boots and their underpants, it seems unlikely that they decided to forgo chest armour, and opt for wax and baby oil instead. It's not hard to see why many critics have called it all rather homoerotic, but they miss the point; Camp is part of the genre. By giving the goodies posing pouches and the baddies piercings, nipple chains and transsexual attendants, the film is simply taking the genre's 'camp' to the extremes it has taken other characteristics to, be it the spectacle, the violence, the size of the armies or the pompous speeches. Besides, Jacques-Louis David painted them fighting naked, and nobody complained about that.

One of the film's main strengths is sheer energy. As noted above, portentous speeches are all part of the territory, but all too often epic movies get bogged down in them. Here they are used to give the viewer a break from the action, but nobody takes them that seriously. Leonidas yells "no going back", or "freedom", someone gives him the option to surrender, he refuses and it's onto the next fight. The battle scenes are surprisingly short, and punctuating them with these oases of rhetoric gives the film a natural and engaging rhythm.

The emphasis on "freedom" as opposed to religious ideas means 300 is much more Gladiator than Kingdom of Heaven and more Braveheart than Passion of the Christ. In fact, it's particularly reminiscent of Braveheart: a divided group of tribes threatened by a dominant southern nation, talk of, fight for and die for freedom. Ultimately, the heroes are betrayed and deserted, but after their deaths their example and inspires others to fight again and win, despite being outnumbered. Even King Leonidas (played by Phantom of the Opera's Gerard Butler) retains his Scottish accent.

Braveheart, of course, was the film that breathed new life into the epic, and 300 follows suit. The 12 years since Gibson modernised the genre may not seem like a long time, but changes have been so dramatic in commercial cinema that it needed modernising again. 300 is not the first epic to try to use CGI, but it is the one that has realised it has far more potential than simply making things even bigger.

The movie's greatest strength is its visuals. Pretty much every review of the film thus far has mentioned this aspect, and rightly so. The sepia tones, the impressive backdrops, the alternating time lapsing photography, the grotesque characters and the comic book violence all combine to make this a visual feast. The images are bold in every respect, be they the buildings of Sparta or the crowds of soldiers. The colour filters, distorted characters, and voiced-over narration place the story firmly in mythical territory, shifting the emphasis from the facts of the history to its meaning more forcefully than any of the epics which have previously graced the silver screen.

When critics talked about The Nativity Story killing the epic they clearly lacked Snyder's vision. It's true that dull, pompous or overly melodramatic movies will struggle in the epic genre just as they should in any other genre. But, the energy and the look of 300 have set a new standard in epic films.

It's too bad that the ambitious artistry is not matched with similarly innovative themes and ideas. 300 is entertainment, impure and simple. As such it is content to give the audience what it wants without challenging them in any way. It seems to be working too. In it's opening weekend 300 broke US box office records for March, and has performed well overseas. Unfortunately, what this audience bears little similarity with the real world. Life is not simply a mix of testosterone and adrenaline. Those who head off to fight wars dreaming of glory have often found that far from being glorious, death is cruel, brutal, messy and desperate.

Snyder has of course denied that the film should be read in the light of current events, but as 300 is so heavily dependent on Miller's comic book it's largely out of his hands. Whilst it may not have been his intention, he is unable to see past the fact that he shares a common mindset with those who wage war in the name of their freedom. In their world, fighting is valiant and brave. When conflict arises real men take up arms and fight.

Whilst the violence in Snyder's film appeals to men's dreams of significance, the sex appeals to their feelings of inadequacy. With one notable exception, most of the men who have sex in this picture are grotesque traitors as if the filmmakers are projecting their audience's inner losers. Somewhat more troublingly, whilst the sex is almost always some variety of rape, it is highly eroticised. A drugged up teenage girl forced to have sex with a group of repulsive old men should never be portrayed as sexily as it is here. 300 offers a severely skewed image of women, encourage it's viewers that if you are too much of a loser to have consensual sex there will always be another way.

It's a disturbing sub-text, which, like Sin City before it, appeals to men's basest instincts and twisted fantasies. It's a pity, because it will be revisited in years to come as the film that re-booted the epic.

First Feature Length Film

Another fact from "The Guinness Book of Film Facts and Feats". The 1912 film From the Manger to the Cross is often cited as (one of) the first feature film(s) ever made. Here (p.17) it lists the earliest feature films made in the US, and From the Manger ranks fourth, with Oliver Twist being released in 7 months earlier in June 1912.

But it appears that both of those films were well beaten to the tile of first ever feature length film by a 1906 Australian Film about Ned Kelly, The Story of the Kelly Gang. Also ahead of the From the Manger is the 1909 French film L'Enfant Prodigue (which sounds like another bible based film and was the first European feature length film). Interestingly, there's no mention at all of The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ, which some have also claimed was the first feature length film.

1898 The Passion Play of Oberammergau

I recently got hold of a copy of "The Guinness Book of Film Facts and Feats". Whilst it's only the 1979 edition, and as a result many of the records will now have been broken, many of the entries are "the first film to do X", and so, baring new evidence, they still hold.

A number of the entries I've come across already relate to bible films, and the following one grabbed my attention in particular. The 1898 Passion Play was apparently the first film to separate the functions of producer and director (p.133).

The entry goes on to note how said director, Rich G. Hollaman, had never actually seen a movie, and so tried to make a series of still shots instead, rushing onto the set to shout "Hold it" whenever the cameras were rolling. Eventually, the film was shot in his absence in the early evening thanks to the cameraman convincing him the light had gone to get rid of him. Eventually they made it to two reels in time for it's opening at Eden Musee in January 1898. It seems stange that the first film to have a director was also possibly the first to have no director at all.

Huston on making The Bible

I realised the other day that I haven't blogged on a film about the Old Testament since the 5th June when I posted about the planned, Ten Commandments spoof, The Ten to star Paul Rudd. This is, of course, partly due to having time off for becoming a father, as well wanting to cover Radio 4's Silverscreen Beats series on the music of various Jesus films, as well as there being a fair bit of news about forthcoming Jesus films such as The Nativity Story, and the BBC's Passion. Anyway, it's clearly time to redress the balance.

Recently, I picked up a copy of John Huston's auto-biography "An Open Book" (which you can search inside at Amazon). My main point of interest was of course his discussion of his 1966 film The Bible: In the Beginning which is one of my favourite Old Testament films, and which I discussed briefly in my review of films about Genesis. Huston, as the title suggests, is fairly open about the various comings and goings, and is much more interested in telling stories surrounding the production that giving a careful shot by shot analysis of every scene. Although he later denied any similarity with Cecil B. DeMille, they do, at least, have this in common.¹

Huston raises a number of interesting points. Firstly, he clearly has a love for animals, and readily gives the impression that the part of the film he enjoyed most was the scenes of Noah's Ark. Of course, ultimately Huston himself played Noah, and incorporated into the final film several of the quirky habits of some of his four legged friends such as the elephant that uses his trunk to force Huston to stroke him some more, the hippo who would open his mouth as soon as he heard Huston approach, and the giraffes that would block his path until he fed them sugar. Despite his love of animals, and the high level of care and personal attention he gave to them before and during filming, Huston originally had wanted Charlie Chaplin for the role.
It would have been a strange choice, although perhaps it explains the strangely anachronistic scene where Noah gets a bucket of pitch stuck on his foot, and slides down the ark's sloping deck. That scene has always felt so out of keeping with the feel of the rest of the film. The other actor Huston wanted for the role was Alec Guinness who was at the time, popularly known as much for his (Ealing) comedy as his more serious work.

My favourite sequence of the film is the creation scene, and Huston explains how they spent quarter of a million on these opening few minutes alone. The scenes were not shot by Huston, but by stills photographer Ernst Haas, who had no experience of motion picture photography and had to go on a crash course before flying to the far corners of the globe to get his footage. Huston explains how he wanted these scenes to be shown...

...not as a single event at the beginning of time, but as a continuing, eternal process. Each morning is a new creation - something now and forever.

What is impressive about these, in addition to the jaw dropping beauty of the images, is the way they so skilfully plot a course between a seven-day literalist interpretation on the one hand, and more metaphorical readings on the other. Just like the written text, the viewer looks at the raw material and is able to apply their own interpretation. In fact, the whole film works in a similar way. the great strength of this film is how it manages to be rigidly literal to the text, whilst simultaneously suggesting a mythical reading.

When interviewed about the film, Huston was almost always asked if he believed the bible literally, and he obligingly includes his stock response that

Genesis represented a transition from Myth, when man, faced with creation and other deep mysteries, invented explanations for the inexplicable; to Legend, when he attributed to his forebears heroic qualities of leadership, valor and wisdom; to History, when, having emerged from Myth and Legend, accounts of real exploits and events of the past were handed down from father to son before the written word.

The reading of Genesis marking a movement from myth to legend to history is not uncommon, in fact CS Lewis expressed a similar view in his essay "Is Theology Poetry" for "Screwtape Proposes a Toast":

The earliest stratum of the Old Testament contains many truths in a form which I take to be legendary, or even mythical - hanging in the clouds: but gradually the truth condenses, becomes more and more historical. From things like Noah's Ark or the sun standing still upon Ajalon, you come down to the court memoirs of King David. Finally you reach the New Testament and history reigns supreme, and the Truth is incarnate.

(You can read more of this here)

Huston does reveal a few of the tricks of the film. The tower of babel was shot on two sets in two different countries. The base was built on the studio's back lot (presumably in Italy), whilst the summit was built on the top of a steep slope outside Cairo. However, to give the impression of a tall tower whilst filming at the base they used a glass shot (painting the top of the tower, in correct perspective, on a piece of glass positioned in front of the camera). He also discusses in some detail the process used to create the (seemingly unedited) creation of Adam sequence using three clay casts built by sculptor Giacomo Manzu.

There are also a few interesting quotes. He recounts, for example, what is probably his most famous cry during filming "I don't know how God managed, I'm having a terrible time". It would appear that this was caused more by George C. Scott and the Egyptian authorities, than by animals behaving as they shouldn't.

There are also a number of quotes on the nature of his faith. Perhaps the most extensive is his answer to the question "Do you believe in God?"

in the beginning, the Lord God was in love with mankind and accordingly jealous. He was forever asking mankind to prove our affection for Him: for example, seeing if Abraham would cut his son's throat. But then, as eons passed, His ardor cooled and He assumed a new role--that of a beneficient deity. All a sinner had to do was confess and say he was sorry and God forgave him. The fact of the matter was that He had lost interest. That was the second step. Now it would appear that He'd forgotten about us entirely. He's taken up, maybe, with life elsewhere in the universe on another planet. It's as though we ceased to exist as far as He's concerned. Maybe we have.

The truth is I don't profess any beliefs in an orthodox sense. It seems to me that the mystery of life is too great, too wide, too deep, to do more than wonder at. Anything further would be, as far as I'm concerned, an impertinence.

You can read more of Huston's quotes on religion, faith and God here.

1-Madsen, A., John Huston: A Biography, Doubleday and Company: Garden City, New York (1978), p. 212

The Bible: In the Beginning (1966)

The Bible (John Huston, 1966) has come to be known, somewhat unfairly, as the film that killed the biblical epic. It's a charge that somehow persists despite three major objections. Firstly, it hardly makes sense to blame a single film for destroying a genre, and even if did, that accusation should surely be pointed at The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) which blew £25 million for very little return, rather than at this. Secondly because rather than being an example of the worst of the genre it is surely one of it's best. Indeed, in concluding his masterful survey of the films of the Hebrew Bible, Jon Solomon cites it as one of the three "most representative and iconographical Old Testament depictions of the twentieth century" (175).

More significantly, of course is the fact that rumours of the genre's demise turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. Whilst Jesus Christ, Superstar, released just seven short years later, is not exactly an epic, it would have seemed hard to argue in 1973, that the Hollywood Bible film was enjoying anything other than reasonable health.

Huston himself was one of the greatest figures in Hollywood. He burst onto the scene in 1941 with the brilliant PI flick The Maltese Falcon before heading to the front line of World War II and creating a series of documentaries for the army. Key Largo and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (both 1948) reunited him with Bogart, as did The African Queen (1951) and the spoof, Beat the Devil (1953) and his catalogue of famous films extended all the way beyond Prizzi's Honor in 1985. In between times he found time to continue the Hollywood dynasty founded by his father Walter, with three of his five children (Anjelica, Tony and Danny) going on to have prominent roles in Hollywood, as well as his grandson Jack, who had the lead role in the 2016 version of Ben-Hur.

Houston acted too., Most famously in Polanski's Chinatown (1974), but also here as an amiable Noah. Both Alec Guinness and Charlie Chaplin had initially been considered for the role, but Huston brings a cheerful sense of purpose to the impending destruction of humankind.  All this however is only after a masterful creation sequence and the sight of Michael Parks and Ulla Bergryd cavorting in the altogether behind a series of strategically-placed plants.

For the opening sequences, Huston narrates the opening chapter of Genesis over a series of stunning collection of images of the natural world: molten lava bubbles and flows as the land is separated from the sea; a gigantic sun rises, and moves across the skies, as the greater light is brought forth; and swarms of fish burst through the waters of the deep, as the creatures of the seas are created.

What is impressive about the creation sequence, in addition to the jaw dropping beauty of the images, is the way they so skilfully plot a course between a seven-day type literalist interpretation on the one hand, and more metaphorical readings on the other. Just like the written text, the viewer looks at the raw material and is able to apply their own interpretation. Furthermore, even after numerous nature documentaries and a number of cheap rip-offs the sequence still creates a sense of awe, even if Huston's use of the archaic King James Version and one of the more conventional parts of the soundtrack date things a little.

The soundtrack excels elsewhere however. Following the creation of Adam, and then Eve the fall and the scenes where Cain (Richard Harris) kills his brother are accompanied by more atonal music. This combined with the bizarre poses Harris strikes, and the low and then high camera angles make this whole sequence strange and disorientating. Whilst the narration is rigidly literal to the text, the film uses the more cinematic elements of image and sound to suggest this more mythical reading.

The one exception to this is Huston's Noah segment, which goes for more of a light-hearted family comedy feel. Gone is the slavish dependence (or at least the appearance of it) on the biblical text. Instead get other characters get to speak, such as Noah's wife who doesn't quite understand what is happening and Noah's disbelieving compatriots insulting him and calling him "stupid".Noah himself gets to use words and phrases not found in the text of Genesis such as when he suggests that the tigers are "only great cats" who can survive on milk from the other animals. Interspersed with this we get Huston mugging for the camera, visual jokes about the tortoises being last on to the arc and the slapstick spectacle of Noah sticking his foot in a bucket of pitch and sliding down the top deck. It's not that these homely touches are necessarily that bad, just that they feel somewhat out of place with the broody, otherworldly tone struck by the rest of the film. Huston rarely appeared in his own pictures, and perhaps this misstep gives a suggestion as to why. With that on top of having to manage an on-set zoo, it's hardly surprising he was repeatedly heard to quip "I don't know how God managed, I'm having a terrible time" (Huston 320).

In some ways, however, the film's episodic and inconsistent nature does mark it as a film of transition. Following the poor box office performance by both The Bible and The Greatest Story Ever Told, big studios seemed more reluctant to outlay immense budgets for biblical epics. Instead the 70s were featured the broadcast of numerous made-for-TV series marking the "migration of biblical narratives into the medium of television" (Meyer 232).

The rest of the film returns to this more pre-historic feel, aided by some fantastic high contrast lighting with gives so much of the film this eerie aura. Stephen Boyd's Nimrod, complete with a painted on mono-brow, shots his arrow to the sky and quickly finds there is no longer anyone who can understand his orders and then we swiftly move on to the sight of George C. Scott's Abraham leaving Ur.

Again the film does well presenting the main stories here (birth of Ishmael, visitation of the angels, the fall of Sodom and the aborted sacrifice of Isaac) in biblically faithful fashion whilst also questioning the legitimacy of that presentation. Particularly strange is the sight of Abraham's three ethereal visitors interchangeably using Peter O'Toole's head and an orgy scene dreamed up for Sodom that is more creepy than it is titillating.

The way these scenes pan out leaves Abraham's story, which comprises almost the film's entire second act, as some sort of hope for humanity, even as it hints of the rocky, even traumatic road ahead. The jump from a scene of he and Isaac walking stealthily through the chillingly charred remains of Sodom, to preparing for Abraham to kill his child, provokes anger rather than reverence. Abraham is troubled, but also haunted by the temperamental God who commands him. His willingness to sacrifice his son is more an act of fear of what might happen if he refuses than one of faithful service.

It's a fitting end to what is - in contrast to the majority of epics that went before it - "a personal film on a gigantic scale (Forshey 146). In some ways that is far more reflective of Genesis itself. Whilst chapter one paints of a broad scale, from there on in it's the story of God with a string of individuals - Adam, Cain, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. Huston's film not only gets this, but its highly literal narration, in tandem with its dark and primitive feel, underlines the mythological nature of the texts giving much of the film a strange sense of the dawn of time, and the primitive nature of the cultures involved. Whilst the change of tone in the Noah section is a little misplaced, it's hard to deny to boldness of Huston's artistic vision.
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- Forshey, Gerald E. (1992) American Religious and Biblical Spectaculars Westport CT: Praeger.
- Huston, John (1981) An Open Book. London: Macmillian.
- Meyer, Stephen C. (2015) Epic Sound: Music in Postwar Hollywood Biblical Films, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
- Solomon, Jon. (2001) The Ancient World in the Cinema, (Revised and expanded edition). New Haven: Yale University Press.