[I wrote this at Easter in 2003, just short of five years ago. –GSS]
Tomorrow is Easter, and all good Catholics will go to Mass. In our parish, every Mass will be packed, and there will be overflow Masses in the school cafeteria. But Catholic or not, Easter calls our attention to Jesus Christ Superstar, one of the best of the rock operas, and certainly the best of the filmed rock operas.
Director Norman Jewison delivers what is very self-consciously a film, with elaborate use of long lenses, slow-motion and stop-action photography. The central character is Judas Iscariot, played by Carl Anderson, with the Nazarene cast in the role of a loud foil, always the reactor, never the actor. This cannot be pleasing to doctrinaire Christians, but it is very effective in the film. In the same way, the turmoil of Annas and Caiphus, of Pontius Pilatus, and of Mary Magdalene and Simon Peter add drama.
But the moments of highest drama are reserved for the Nazarene. First, on Palm Sunday, the massed disciples sing, “Hey, J.C., J.C., would you die for me?” Jewison freezes for just a second on actor Ted Neely’s horrified expression. Later, on Maundy Thursday, the prayer of the Nazarene from Gethsemane is excruciating, no pun intended, all but unbearable.
But the star of this movie is always the music. There are places where the lyrics clunk, a curse of rock opera, but the rock is hard and convincing, and the voices, particularly Anderson and Neely, are fantastic.
Inter alia, apparently Jewison had some kind of anti-Vietnam message in mind when he made the film, but for the life of me I can’t see it now.
For an alternate take on the same material, you might pick up Jesus Christ Superstar–A Resurrection. This is a studio-recorded double-CD crafted by a cadre of Georgia musicians who love the rock opera and wanted to make a rock recording from it. Indigo Girls Amy Ray and Emily Saliers sing the parts of the Nazarene and Mary Magdalene, respectively. The voices come and go, but the instrumentation is inspired.
In the Passion, Saint John bends over backwards to show how the events of the last week of the Nazarene’s life fulfilled the Old Testament scriptures. My take is that this “messy death” enabled Saul of Tarsus, Saint Paul, to tell the story of Socrates in a way that simple people could understand. In any case, lovers of liberty cannot but rejoice at the defiance of the Nazarene before Caiphus, Herod and Pilatus. The story of the West is the story of a man who died rather than renounce his truth, and Jesus Christ Superstar, the DVD or the many, many CD versions, is an excellent retelling of that story.
[To that I am adding this clip. Simon Zealotes is there for Teri Lussier, just because she loves the dance as an art form — and because I love the way Jewison translates a Broadway production number to film. Pontius Pilatus is there for me. I love the way Barry Dennen handles this scene.]
Teri Lussier says:
Happy Easter to you, too!
To completely ignore the point of your post 😉 :
I had forgotten about the dancing in this film. My family spent some time yesterday watching Fred Astaire in Easter Parade. Astaire revolutionalized the way dance scenes where shot for film. Instead of changing camera angles and doing multiple takes- Busby Berkley style- he insisted that many of his dance sequences be shot in one long take. Part of this came from his Broadway background but much of it was from his insistence that dance is an art and that he was creating art, and to best showcase that the audience needed to see him performing the dance in it’s entirety- as if in a theatre, and to erase any doubt about his talent. I could on and on about that, but I bring it up because it starkly contrasts to the dancing in this clip.
The exuberance in the choreography here is astounding! Those leaps and layouts and huge movements could not have been created for anything other than film. No human being can keep up that level of all out athletic style dancing unless they were able to stop and breathe before continuing on. This is a great example of choreography made for film. As is Astaire’s. Different approaches to showing dance as art.
Which brings up the filmed version of the play Jesus Christ Superstar, filmed around 2000-01. Like comparing the dancing of Astaire and in this clip, two different approaches. I love Pilate in the latest version. He’s bigger than life- a menacing hulk of a man (and has a gorgeous voice) but his nightmare wakes him up in a cold sweat and leaves him in tears.
March 24, 2008 — 7:29 am
Greg Swann says:
Oh, very cool. It’s interesting that Superstar has these kinds of legs. The Jewison film is totally a period piece, and yet it holds up fine. Excellent in everything it attempts, even if almost all of those attempts are fashions of an age.
Changing the subject again: Pontius Pilatus was a Samnite, not a Roman of the Romans. Since he had the power to execute, he would have held the rank of Procurate, but I don’t think he had served as Curate in Rome. Perhaps by then being Curate in Samnia would have been enough. The Roman Empire was stretched very thin, which is how a loyal politician from the Socii (the “brother” tribes of the Romans on the Italian peninsula) would have been given a province — literally a license to steal. Pilate looms large in Christian apocrypha, but to the Romans he was a minor functionary, a climber but still a yokel, who was given an unimportant posting and botched it.
March 24, 2008 — 8:08 am