(This is an extract from my paper "Jesus Beyond His Genre: The Non-Canonical Jesus Films" delivered to the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media section at SBL 2006 in Washington, D.C. It is minus a boatload of footnotes.)


Despite the directness of its title, Bruno Dumont’s La Vie de Jesus is not a Jesus film. And if it weren’t for the title, there is not any way that even an informed viewer would connect this to the life of Christ in any fashion. Over the last decade, Bruno Dumont has produced several of the most controversial films to hit the international scene due to his facile, even arbitrary, penchant for confrontational imagery. Critics have rightly interpreted such imagery in the context of Dumont’s humanistic concern with intimacy, loneliness, and the raw poetry of human relationship. And La vie de Jesus falls neatly within such a reading.


Dumont revealed that he took the title from Ernest Rénan’s famous 1865 book of the same name. He said: “I had the desire to tell the life of Jesus. Not to repeat what everybody knows. It is the significance of that life that interests me. I invented a story to regenerate the meaning, to show that there is a humanism in Christianity that they don't teach in the Church, in the schools.” As Renan, for Dumont, Christ is a “poetic expression of the human tragedy.” And his vaguely rewritten “Life of Jesus,” attempts to retread Jesus’ expression of humanity in the life of Freddy, an unemployed French teenager who divides his time between caring for his pet finch, playing in a local marching band, and hanging out with a girl that lives in this same lower class provincial French neighborhood. In the beginning of the film, while visiting a friend in the hospital, someone points out a faded medieval print of Jesus raising Lazarus on the hospital wall. This brief flicker of divinity soon peters out beneath the slow pace of Dumont’s gravely meditative filmmaking.


Freddy eventually kills a boy who has been flirting with his girlfriend, and the film ends as quietly as it began, leaving one to wonder where Jesus was other than in the flat image medieval image in the hospital. Yet Dumont claims: “Without the title, the film loses something. It is a very mystical film. Film has the power to touch something mysterious in the body, its secrets.” Beyond the issues posed by Renan’s reading of Jesus’ life and ministry, there is a vast theoretical background to Dumont’s statement. Dumont sees film as a way of regaining contact with the body, with the physical, in such a way that contradicts the disembodiment inherent to culture in the information age and the hyper-sexuality of advertising. There is a sense in which the film disembodies Christ by bracketing it with the unfulfilled expectation of a Christ-figure. This ironically accords with Dumont’s concern to re-embody Christ, who according to Dumont has been over-theologized by traditional Christianity, barring him from actual life, the day to day sociology of ordinary people. This can also be seen in the interplay between secrecy and revelation put into play by the title that calls to mind the work of Kelber and Kermode on the Gospel of Mark. On Mark, Kelber says, “From my perspective, the gospel encourages experimentation with a new logic in defiance of received opinion. Secrecy, or as I prefer to call it, mystery results from a disorienting-reorienting narrative which forestalls closure. Meaning is thereby not allowed to attach itself exclusively to the one, the literal sense.” Likewise, Dumont’s film ends darkly, in a shadow, disconnected from the expectation of its title. It is only the brackets created by the title that suggest the presence of Jesus in the film, the viewer invited to respond to Jesus’ subsequent absence. Dumont’s Christ-figure is only a fleeting phenomenon of the film itself, a shadowy humanist abstraction of Renan’s version of Jesus revealed to the viewer by means of a conflicting reader-response to Dumont’s imagery.