The Bible in film
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Stories from the Bible have frequently been used as a basis for films. It is attractive subject matter for filmmakers for several reasons: 1) The Bible has a large potential audience of interested Christians willing to buy tickets. 2) A story from the Bible adds an element of gravitas and respectability that many filmmakers crave. 3) The Bible is in the public domain and can freely be used by filmmakers.
It has long been more popular to make films about the Old Testament than the New Testament. Many of the tales in the Old Testament are well suited for epic films. They contain sweeping, but relatively straightforward, narratives of good versus evil. They also feature crowd-pleasing massive battles, sword fights, natural disasters, and spectacular miracles. The stories had few enough details in the Bible that they could easily be embellished and modified without any great outcry over Biblical inaccuracy. The peak era of the Old Testament epic was the 1950s and early 1960s when lavish films with "casts of thousands" were regularly made. In the era of the production code, basing a film on the Bible allowed it to be more risqué than would normally have been accepted. Sex and violence are common in the Old Testament. Figures like Eve, Delilah, and Judith could all be portrayed as seductive temptresses. In tales like that of Sodom and Gomorrah the sinfulness of those to be punished could be lavishly portrayed on screen.
These films were some of the highest grossing during this period with the best known and most successful being Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments. These movies were made in great numbers both by Hollywood and by the Italian film industry, and many of the biggest films were joint American/Italian productions. During this period most of the major stories in the Old Testament were put on film, some multiple times. As well as The Ten Commandments epics like Sodom and Gomorrah, The Story of Ruth, David and Goliath, David and Bathsheba, Solomon and Sheba, and Esther and the King dominated the box office.
In this era the New Testament was far less frequently turned into major motion pictures. Unlike the Old the New Testament has few action scenes and little romance. Its tone is somber and earnest. The events are recounted in much greater detail, and the details are much better known by the general public, limiting artistic freedom. During the 1950s most of the films recounting Jesus' life were financed by church groups and played in churches to small but dedicated audiences. These were often film versions of the traditional Passion Play. The two major studio attempts to make a film of Jesus' life during this period, The Greatest Story Ever Told and King of Kings were both critical and box office failures.
Also at this time there were some hugely successful films that involved Jesus, but they put him at a distance from the central characters and were based on fictional novels rather than the Bible. These included 1953's The Robe and its sequel Demetrius and the Gladiators, Quo Vadis and especially the 1959 film Ben-Hur.
Today the epics of the 1950s that were once some of the highest grossing films of all time are rarely seen and new versions virtually never produced. With the end of the studio system and the changing social climate of the later 1960s the Old Testament Bible epic fell out of favour. The box office failure King David, released in 1985, is the sole major Old Testament epic released since. Growing secularism and diversity in North America and Europe, along with the ever increasing importance of the international market, meant that the Biblical epic was no longer guaranteed to appeal to a large section of the audience.
With the reduction in reverence and greater interest in experimentation new styles and formats were tried and the focus shifted to the New Testament. In 1966 Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed The Gospel According to St. Matthew in southern Italy with a cast of non-professional actors. Despite Pasolini's atheism and Marxism the film was praised by the Pope for its faithfulness. The revisionist The Last Temptation of Christ, the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, and the parody the Life of Brian were all major films of the 1970s and 1980s. These films frequently generated controversy, but were also financial successes. This era also saw frequent film versions of the Book of Revelation such as The Late Great Planet Earth and The Seventh Sign that had been uncommon in an earlier era.
During this period more reverent works were still frequently produced, but more often appeared as television miniseries or were released directly to video. One exception was 2004's The Passion of the Christ that had great success in general release. The success of The Passion of the Christ has led to a number of new Bible films being commissioned including "Mary", "Son of Man", "Color of the Cross", "The Ten Commandments" and "Nativity" all of which were scheduled for a 2006 release. The first book ever written about the subject of biblical movies was "The Bible On Film: A Checklist, 1897-1980", published by Scarecrow Press on November 3, 1981. It was created by Richard H. Campbell on June 8, 1977. Campbell co-wrote the book with Michael R. Pitts. Before this, the idea of doing a reference book about biblical movies and TV programs did not exist. Since then, many similar books have been published, but Campbell's book was the first and is copyrighted as such in the Library of Congress. Contributors to the book include the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (the Oscars), AFI (American Film Institute) and Ball University. See also: List of movies based on the Bible
