Day 29. November 10, 2006
Movement 3. Jesus Christs
Lecture 14. The Silent Cinematic Lives of Jesus (Part 2)
Widely differing images of Jesus proliferated as the silent film era wound down. With the success of DeMille's silent 1923 The Ten Commandments, a new consortium, MGM, in 1924 optioned the rights to General Lew Wallace's Ben Hur for an astounding $600,000. The resulting film, though focused on Judah Ben Hur, included many vignettes featuring a hardly human, distant, and anonymous Jesus. Following the success of Ben Hur, DeMille filmed the iconic cinematic life of Jesus, The King of Kings, which proved to be the climax of silent film epics. DeMille's Jesus appears as miracle worker and healer. Unlike the Jesus of Ben Hur, the King of Kings Jesus proves approachable, human, and huggable, as scenes with children and first-ever cinematic close-ups of Jesus dramatize.