Collateral Damage

The persecution of Baháí’s in Iran has spilled over to a high-profile non- Bahá’í citizen, an eminent personage no less than the 2003 Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi. On April 14 the AFP reported that she had been receiving death threats pinned to her office building entry, signed by the “Association of Anti- Bahá’ís.” Ebadi is not a Bahá’í, so what’s their beef? Other groups in the country have been less than comfortable with her promotion of the rights of women and children, and her speeches made abroad on justice. But this group cites her “un-Islamic and “Bahá’í-based faith,” and include her daughter in these threats. Bahá’í-based? That’s a new one! Is this a reference to the Bahá’í principle of the Equality of the Sexes?
The Islamic Republic defends its record on human rights and its treatment of religious minorities, but it does not consider the Bahá’í Faith a religion but rather an apostasy of Islam, and therefore feels justified in denying the Bahá’ís the rights granted other minorities. The denied right currently receiving the most worldwide attention is that of higher education, and not only the Bahá’í Faith but campus groups around the globe and even the Presidency of the European Union are expressing their outrage and calling for justice. In America, a proposed bill from Illinois Congressman Kirk is gaining momentum and the American Federation of Teachers is expressing concern.

Ebadi has not been taking these threats as ideological rather than personal and has assigned a fellow colleague to defend her case.

Spirit in Celluloid

Easter brings the inevitable: children biting the ears off chocolate rabbits, and the spate of Jesus movies featuring in the starring role what look like washed-up, drug-sodden ex-rockers in the final stages of syphyllitic decline. Why is that? Even as a child I knew for certain that Jesus didn’t look or behave like those clueless indigents out of whose mouths the very words of the Son of God sounded inane.

So the Bahá’í injunction prohibiting the representation of Holy Personages as characters in a story makes a lot of sense to me. The central reason is that we cannot do them justice – cute as some find the idea, God isn’t “just a slob like one of us.” The only portrayal of a Manifestation of God that had any ring of truth to it for me was Charlton Heston (died April 5, 2008) as Moses in The Ten Commandments. But his more recent freeze-frame image was not holding up Moses’ staff, but a shotgun for the NRA. Likewise Willem Defoe moved from portraying Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ to the evil villain in Spiderman – it just doesn’t sit right. (Here’s a bit of trivia: James Caviezel – the actor portraying Jesus -- was struck by lightning during the filming of The Passion of the Christ, which somehow didn’t attract as much attention as the director’s subsequent racist remarks under the influence of alcohol, a potent truth serum.) Morgan Freeman as God? Or George Burns? Granted these were comedies, but it underscores the painful fact that Hollywood doesn’t understand God or spirituality in any meaningful way. Even Martin Scorsese’s Kundun (about the Dalai Lama), respectful, though it was, was a grand spectacle that was otherwise devoid of drama, displeasing the critics.

There are many inherent difficulties in filming religious narratives, not the least of which is that the stories from the Bible and other Holy Books are well-known, removing most of the suspense and locking in the main features of the story. (Tricks like Deepak Chopra’s recent novel of the Buddha, in which he introduces a number of fictional central characters, won’t fly with the much more vigilant Christian church authorities.) In the theatre of the past, from ancient Calcutta to the Passion Plays of European Middle Ages, this was a strength, not a weakness, and modern film-making surely can be creative within these constraints, but only if it is respectful and reverent rather than wishing to put the past into the service of contemporary ideologies or individual quirks, which Bahá’ulláh stigmatized as “idle fancies and vain imaginings.” And, speaking of Buddhism, the fabulous American Buddhist children’s author and illustrator Demi was commissioned to create a book on the Prophet Muhammad, and had her illustrations complete before discovering that Islam had a similar, though not identical prohibition. Nonplussed at first, she covered over the form of the Prophet with gold.

Classical Greek drama is replete with human actions that boggle the mind, but they were never represented onstage, but rather recounted by eyewitnesses. Now they didn’t have the resources of the Bayreuth Opera House, but we still study them today as some of the greatest examples of the thespian art. I never saw the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but I’m told that the real horror of it was that it happened off-camera, leaving the imagination to plumb its own depths of fear, while subsequent filmings of the story were weakened by the graphic gore. Mystery, suspense, drama, and intrigue can be heightened by the conspicuous absence of the God-figure onscreen, making the potency of their imminence feel even greater. Ha, if Godot can drive a plot with his non-existence, how much more the Creator of the Cosmos and His emissaries?

I am one of those people that often re-imagines a film the way I would have made it, or visualize the way a story could be put on the big screen. And a recurring technique in this inner cinema is that the camera is the eye of a witness or protagonist, making the story a first-person narrative and giving it an immediacy that no voice-over could ever give. I offer this suggestion of this rarely-used technique to any enterprising young filmmaker who can make fruitful use of it.