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WOMEN CHURCH WORLD

The mystery of the Madonna as seen by great filmmakers

How to portray the mother of Jesus

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06 July 2024

Since the dawn of cinema, Mary has often been portrayed as Jesus’s deuteragonist, with their destinies inseparably linked from her pivotal “fiat”. This portrayal can be traced from Georges Hatot and Louis Lumière’s La vie et la passion de Jésus-Christ (1898) to D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), which is a cornerstone of American cinema. The risk of veering into hagiography is skillfully avoided through an authorial gaze that, whether explicitly, implicitly, paradoxically, or provocatively, navigates between fidelity to sources and metahistorical interpretation. Departing from established stylistic norms, this approach converges on an image that blends intense emotional depth with reflective insight. It is a disciplined gaze, eschewing complacency and aiming to strip away the accumulated layers of conventional exposition surrounding the enigmatic figure of Mary.

Given the lack of sufficiently narrative sources to construct a biopic—as noted by Father Emilio Cordero, a young Pauline priest, in his Mater Dei (1950), the first Italian color film made during the Holy Year when Pius XII proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption—the author’s perspective is drawn to explore unconventional and intersecting paths.

When Father Patrick Peyton, a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross dedicated to spreading Marian spirituality through new media, proposed financing a film about the Madonna to Roberto Rossellini during a meeting in Houston in 1973. Still a little was known about the original intention, yet the director was aware of the need for innovative non-canonical integrations beyond traditional narratives seen in various film adaptations on the theme, suggested incorporating Mary into a feature film about Jesus: The Messiah (1975). The contract was signed in St Peter’s Square beneath the statue of the Pietà, a deliberate choice aimed at persuading backers that portraying Mary as perpetually youthful throughout the entire film, echoing sentiments expressed by writer Georges Bernanos, would not be scandalous. As Renzo Rossellini recounts, his father justified this approach with the words: “If Michelangelo did it, Rossellini can do it too”. The initial commission focusing on Mary was not out of place; throughout Rossellini’s filmography, Mary’s figure often appears with allusive evocations and interwoven plots that both reveal and are revealed by her, as seen in the inverted piety of Rome, Open City (1945), or the metaphorical pregnancy of Nannina in The Miracle (1948), performed by Anna Magnani.

Pier Paolo Pasolini intensified the portrayal of Mary as the deuteragonist in The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964). His deeply poetic and rich cinematic interpretation of the sacred text, was marked by ellipses and anachronisms. Pasolini’s rendition includes the dual role of Margherita/Susanna, which emphasized social advocacy for the marginalized, notably in the Flight into Egypt sequence, where Mary and Joseph are analogously depicted as refugees, which resonates with the news today. A poignant narrative departure is seen in the crucifixion scene, -influenced by an interpolation from the Gospel of John-, viewed through the raw realism of Mary’s perspective. Pasolini’s own mother, Susanna, portrays the deeply grieving Mater Dolorosa, reflecting her personal sorrow over the loss of her son, Guido—a grief mirrored in Pasolini’s tragic fate. For the role of Mary, initially portrayed as silent and pregnant, Pasolini chose Margherita Caruso, a 14-year-old girl embodying the archetype described in the screenplay’s preamble: “a young Jewish girl, dark, naturally ‘of the people’/commoner as they say; like thousands you see, with their faded clothes [...] destined to be nothing but living humility. Yet there is something royal about them: and for this reason, I think of Piero della Francesca’s Pregnant Madonna in Sansepolcro: the young mother”.

Another unforgettable cinematic moment is the dreamlike portrayal of the Madonna of Ognissanti by Silvana Mangano in The Decameron (1971), a reinterpretation of Giotto’s Last Judgment in the Scrovegni Chapel, where Mary assumes the role traditionally held by Christ the Judge.

In American industrial cinema, Martin Scorsese captures the active and dialogic mother-son relationship in the controversial film The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel and adapted by Paul Schrader, renowned for works like Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer. Mary, portrayed by Verna Bloom, plays a pivotal role by supporting her son during his temptation, embracing him, and posing the crucial question of whether he faces the devil or God. She offers the wine at the Last Supper, intervenes during the Via Crucis to protect him from stoning, and implores him to leave with her. During the crucifixion, Jesus asks her forgiveness, which reveals a dynamic where the maternal role breaks traditional molds amid a context of unsettling tension between hallucination and maternal love.

The concept of the interstice, as conceived by French semiotician Roland Barthes, serves as an interpretative framework for Mary in the poetic and spiritual films of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. In Tarkovsky’s works, Mary transcends the role of deuteragonist to become a presence imbued with pictorial resonance. In Ivan’s Childhood (1962), she appears as an icon of the Mother of God on the wall of a bomb-ravaged house. In Andrei Rublev (1966), she is depicted in the Church of the Assumption’s nativity fresco, which is reprised in color in the film’s finale. In Nostalghia (1983), Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto evokes the theme of maternity. In The Sacrifice (1986), Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi places Mary at the center, cradling the child, thus echoing the film’s central theme of the world’s salvation.

In Nostalghia, the screen penetrates the ritualistic nature of sacred representation, similar to the unparalleled naivety of Acto da Primavera (1963) by Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, one of the greatest figures in European cinema. Oliveira’s work concludes the journey of the cross with sudden images of war and nuclear catastrophe, while Cammina cammina [Keep on Walking] (1983) by Ermanno Olmi presents a striking Nativity scene, both reinterpreted on explicit sets. The primitive simplicity of Mary’s portrayal as tableaux vivants, entrusted to non-professional actors, has often distinguished auteur cinema on this theme, rendering it immune to the verbosity and spectacle typical of Hollywood epics.

The exploration of Mary within auteur Christian cinema connects to her depiction in films about apparitions and pilgrimages. In the first case, it involves evoking a presence that inherently presents challenges in exposition. In the second, it portrays an individual or collective journey—whether penitential or votive—framed as a human quest for meaning.

In La porta del cielo [The Gates of Heaven] (1944) by Vittorio De Sica, filmed during the German occupation of Rome, a pilgrimage to Loreto to implore a miracle also served to save hundreds of Jews and political dissidents from roundups by casting them as extras. Similarly, in Le notti di Cabiria [Nights of Cabiria] (1957) by Federico Fellini, prostitutes embark on a pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of Divine Love to seek grace, blending the sacred with the profane. In La dolce vita (1960), Fellini transitions from “creaturely religiosity” to a chronicle of a neurotic film set driven by the quest for sensational media phenomena. In La Voie lactée [The Milky Way] from 1969, a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, Luis Buñuel—a precursor of surrealist cinema—sensitively portrays Mary (played by Édith Scob) in a nighttime apparition after two heretics casually shoot a rosary, leading them to receive a new one in their turmoil. As the priest comments, “There is no mystery deeper and sweeter than that of the Virgin Mary.” More recently, Fatima (2020) by Marco Pontecorvo examines the children’s perception of Mary from a psychological perspective, highlighting “an extraordinary phenomenon that, as the director asserts, united believers and non-believers in a common desire for peace during the Great War”.

In modern cinema, Mary is explored in her mystery beyond simplifications and trivializations, often in paradoxical and provocative ways. Jean-Luc Godard’s Je vous salue Marie (1985) epitomizes this approach to an extreme degree. Described by Father Virgilio Fantuzzi as “one of his most extraordinary films”, it does not actualize the mystery of the Incarnation but rather the birth of every human being. Shifting from theological to mythological and psychological perspectives, Godard asserts that the film is not about Mary but about a woman named Marie who finds herself experiencing an exceptional and unwanted event. While drawing from the Marian tradition, the film delves into the conflicting dimensions of gender relations and the interplay between inner and outer realities.

In this exploration of the figure of Mary in cinema, her character is often intertwined with portrayals of victims of intolerance and war, the sick seeking healing, women in difficult circumstances, and the marginalized. This journey extends to art’s transfigurations and the compelling questions of contemporary life. The goal is to transcend the clichés of devotional imagery through the lens of auteur cinema, offering a deeper and more nuanced understanding.

I thank the film producer and director Renzo Rossellini; the co-screenwriter of The Messiah Silvia D’Amico Bendicò; and director Marco Pontecorvo for their willingness to provide interviews.

by Tiziana M. Di Blasio
Historian, lecturer of the course “Cinema and History: Film Analysis and Historical Interpretation” at the Pontifical Gregorian University - Rivista del Cinematografo