medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

His consultants certainly noticed.  The choice of ecclesiastical pronunciation was made after consideration of all the alternatives.  He and they thought things through, which your scare quotes suggest you have not.

You are still confusing artistic and realistic choices.  Both are operative in any work of art that deals with a historical topic (and even pure fiction normally employs some degree of verisimilitude).  Pilate speaking Latin, implausible, yes, soldiers no.

One is free to criticize the film as not sufficiently realistic.  On this particularly point, however, this criticism is not particularly relevant, does not tell against the film as a whole.  And before one responds, but "Gibson billed it as utterly realistic," think again.  He was very much upfront about the fact that he made such choices for both reasons--I have read his explicit account of why he chose to use Latin rather than Greek and why he chose church Latin pronunciation rather than classical (soldiers speaking classical Latin???)  We don't even know for sure how classical Latin in general was spoken and even if we did, how realistic would it have been?  What is the standard "clasical Latin" pronunciation that is taught in our schools if not a modern _unrealistic_ approximate reconstruction by historians gleaning bits of information from _written_, not spoken, sources?  But even if "classical pronunciation" accurately reflected the sounds coming from the lips of some upper-class, cultivated Roman of the 1st century, how to achieve a realistic pronuncation for (1) Pilate and then again (2) for the soldiers or others?  What dialect pronunciation of Latin would one use?

And Gibson would have had the same problem if he had chosen to use Greek--would Pilate speak Attic Greek?  While we are at it, how did 1st century cultivated Athenians speak Greek?  Do we really know?  And how much do we know about variations in pronunciation of either Greek or Latin across the Empire?  Certainly some, but do we know enough to create dialogue for this film in one of the dialects?  Which one?  To achieve utter realism in language would be utterly impossible and Gibson was smart enough to know it.

But then, why did he choose Aramaic instead of English?  _Not_ for the sake of realism.  To think that it was for the sake of realism is to utterly misunderstand his motivation.  He was explicit about this.  His purpose in choosing Aramaic (and Latin) was not realistic but artistic.  He wanted to produce a degree of alienation in his viewers, alienation from business as usual, alienation from the early 21st century.  Had the dialogue been in English (dubbed into French or German or Italian or Tagalog for international distribution), a false (in his view) sense of at-homeness would be risked.  He wanted to pull his viewers out of that without at the same time being so naive as to think he could transport them entirely back into the 1st century.  He wanted the unfamiliarity of the Aramaic to remind the viewer that this was more than anyone in the 21st century (or the 5th or the 14th or the 17th) could truly settle down and be at-home (familiar) with.  Yet he chose Latin rather than Greek knowing that one could make a case for Greek being _more_ realistic yet (as he himself tells the story of his choices) convinced that Latin was not completely implausible. He says that he chose Latin and specifically ecclesiastical Latin pronunciation because it has an element of aural _familiarity_ (at-homeness) that, he thought, artistically, meshed well with the uncannyness of the Aramaic.  Fault him for bad artistic choices if you wish, but don't fault him for _naively_ choosing unrealistic details of this sort.

Fans of the film may have and may continue to bill it as nothing but realism but Gibson never did.  If he were unable to distinguish the two and employ both, he would be unable to direct any film, much less this one.  Cultured despisers of Mel Gibson are free to be cultured despisers, but he is a competent professional film director not an amateur.  He knows that you go from book to story to screenplay to film and you do it making choices as an artist all along the way.  We cultivated folk would grant this artistic license to any other artist.  Gibson has from start to finish made clear that he was making this film as a filmmaker makes any film.  Yes, it also was an act of religious devotion, but to assume that religious devotion necessarily cancels out artistic intelligence is a bit prejudiced.  An artist who thinks that he can ply his craft purely out of religious devotion with no attention to artistic requirements is no artist and will produce kitsch.

This is not irrelevant to medieval religion.  Gibson's film is simply a continuation of medieval passion devotion, translated into this particular medium.  The combination of art and realism in medieval historical and other forms of writing and visual art is normal.  We all know that medieval artists portrayed 1st-century soldiers as if they were 12thc or 15thc soldiers; eastern Mediterranean towns as if they were French or Italian cities etc.  Would any of us think to point this out as if it told against the value of the artist?  Would any of us really think the artist was so naive that he didn't realize what he was doing?  Indeed, his motives in many cases may have been identical to Gibsons--how _would_ a 15thc Flemish painter know _exactly_ what 1st-century Jerusalem looked like?

We are the ones who somehow think that, if we've pointed out how this or that feature is "not historically realistic" we've somehow discredited some works of art (but we do that highly selectively), which would be true if the work's sole purpose were historical realism.  But only briefly in the 19th-20thc (to be historically realistic for a moment) did some historians think that such motivation (history wie es eigentlich geschehen) was plausible.  Somehow I think medieval folk might understand more readily than some of us what Gibson was attempting.

Dennis Martin

>>> [log in to unmask] 03/09/05 6:17 PM >>>
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Dennis Martin wrote:
>
> Gibson's choice to use Latin was vetted by consultants; he has
> explained that his decision was based on both artistic and historical
> considerations .

Those "consultants" presumably didn't notice that the modern ecclesiastical
pronunciation was employed.

>  Using Greek would certainly have been quite
> reasonable but soldiers speaking Latin are not implausible.

Actually, it is implausible.  And if Pilate actually conversed with Jesus it
would have been in Greek.

John Briggs

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