Filmowe reprezentacje ostatniej wieczerzy jako locus theologicus (trzy wizje biblijnej sceny)

The cinematic scenes of the Last Supper were treated as a challenge to visual theology. As the Last Supper, which in the films about Jesus of Nazareth (and, of course, the gospels) is the culmination (and also a turning point as an event ending Jesus` earthly activity), it is possible to see the essence of the theological message of films referring to the gospel in its presentation. The scenes of the Last Supper from three films were subjected to a comparative analysis, each of which is an individual director`s vision. These are The King of Kings (1961) by Nicholas Ray, The Passion of the Christ (2004) by Mel Gibson and The Thorn of God (2015) by Óscar Parra de Carrizosa. The selection criterion was the importance given in the films to the scenes of the Last Supper and their mutually diverse representations. It has been shown how the established new transmission of visual theology modifies the meanings determined by classical theology, basically not deviating from the framework set by it.

A imagem de Cristo no cinema

A filósofa Marie-José Mondzain, em sua pesquisa acerca do imaginário contemporâneo, faz um recuo à segunda crise do iconoclasmo bizantino para resgatar um conceito operatório comum na análise das imagens produzidas e difundidas na contemporaneidade. Partiremos desse debate, sintetizado na oposição eikon/ eidolon, para comparar a imagem de Cristo em dois filmes religiosos: Rei dos Reis (1927), de Cecil B. DeMille, e O Rei dos Reis (1961), de Nicholas Ray. A análise fílmica verificará como os dois realizadores se posicionaram em relação ao dilema da idolatria: no filme de DeMille, para evitar uma representação idólatra de Jesus, adota-se uma operação marcada por um excesso de mediações, caracterizando-O de acordo com um imaginário iconográfico prévio; já no filme de Ray, a representação exacerbada de Cristo parece refletir, como um autêntico produto de seu tempo, a imagem de uma sociedade idólatra.

In a Lonely Place (1950) in 2 Frames

USA Director Nicholas Ray Runtime 93 minutes Blu-ray USA, 2016 Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region A/1)

Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again

This chapter analyzes the film We Can’t Go Home Again (1972–1976), which the American director Nicholas Ray realized in collaboration with a class of students he taught at the State University of New York in Purchase. The film exemplifies the ability of cinema to provide access to an “elsewhere” and “elsewhen,” analyzed by Anne Friedberg in her book Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. This chapter claims that the film’s use of multiscreen projection can be illuminated through Friedberg’s notion of the virtual window, developed in The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Thanks to the collaboration on the film of video artist Nam June-Paik and the employment of techniques associated with the contemporaneous practice of “expanded cinema,” We Can’t Go Home Again is an important precursor to contemporary digital media.

Seeing through the Fingertips1

Digital technologies lead us to question anew the opposition between flatness and depth: as with 19th century modernity (Edouard Manet’s paintings in particular), it produces perceptual uncertainties, but uncertainties that are specific to cinematic representation. This chapter focuses on Jean-Luc Godard’s use of three-dimensional effects in Goodbye to Language (2014), which aims to substitute for the fluid and homogeneous space sought after in mainstream 3D cinema a disjointed, multiple, heterogeneous space. The film thus continues the project started by Nicholas Ray in We Can’t Go Home Again (1973), in which Ray experimented with simultaneous projections and aesthetic effects reminiscent of watercolour painting. In turn, these hybrid images evoke the atlas and the associated process of ‘leafing through’, hence offering themselves as the anachronistic portrait of a filmmaker who has escaped our contemporary world.