CLAS 252 Early Christianity in Cinema

Christ's life on Earth, one lived, of course, in a complex Judaeo-Graeco-Roman environment during the early decades of the Roman Empire, has been a subject treated by cinema from its earliest years. Films produced during those same years also sought to recreate for the screen a variety of dramatic events in the Old Testament, and these latter presentations regularly -- and fittingly -- at least suggest the foreshadowing of the New Testament in the Old. The purpose of this course is to offer students the opportunity to consider closely the techniques of a "visual rhetoric," involving fundamentally camera work and editing, whereby a narrative concerning Christianity (and something of its Jewish roots) in Graeco-Roman antiquity is constructed. A wide variety of films from the end of the 19th century to the present day is included in order not only to demonstrate the evolution of a kind of cinematic language but also to point out how the tools of a "visual rhetoric" bring sacred Christian material to the screen in a manner that, in the end, may tend to destabilize theologically, doctrinally, and morally. Films, which are obviously an entertainment, as they grow ever more sophisticated technologically and influential culturally, tend to become an ever more unreliable vehicle of a sound Catholic faith.