“It is enough”, says the Roman officer who is in charge of the scourging. For a relieving breathing time the sequence of thrashing that the sadist soldiers give the man who has already collapsed a long time ago – his back bloody, the street full of blood that is already forming streams – is interrupted. We have heard the thrashing. We have seen the punches that disfigure the man’s face; we have seen him being dragged away in chains, falling down a wall, panting, gasping for breath – to the amusement of his tormentors. The breathing time is over. With a broad grin, the soldiers reach for the next instrument of torture: whips with sharp metal pieces that are meant to tear the skin off the flesh. It is by far not yet enough. It is only the beginning – the beginning of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of Christ”.

Gibson tells the story of the last twelve hours of Jesus’ life, from the night of prayer in the garden Gethsemane to the death on the cross. Cinema has never seen such a passion before – so full of blood, violence and suffering. In a time that celebrates the superlative, that is so much set on the fetish of the maximum, such an outdoing alone might suffice to arouse the audience’s interest. It might also suffice to replace or even to obliterate the memory of a film gospel that was produced by a spirit of a poor ascetic cinema and set a standard – like the one by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini’s “The First Gospel – Matthew” was realistic in its moderation, symbolic in what it left out, relying on the word in its sequence and touching in its inclusion of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music. It was the work of a marxist heretic who found a counter image to his desperation concerning the present in the biblical story of Jesus’ life and death. In short, it was a Franciscan anti-cinema that was aimed  - among others - at the traditional edifying bible films from both Hollywood and Cinecittà. Gibson shot his film in the Matera of the south Italian Basilacata – like Pasolini before him – as well as in Cinecittà where the scenery for his Jerusalem was built. Gibson wants to be an heir to them both: the artistic loner and the democratic mass entertainment. The mixture of ambition and calculation produced a shocking, occassionally nearly unbearable film.

“The Passion of Christ” by Gibson is primarily and nearly exclusively the representation of an endless, bloody torture that is shown as realisticly as possible. If someone was capable to only follow the images and sounds, if someone only saw and heard as if s/he was uninfluenced by the cultural meaning, the historical efficiency and religious dimension of the story, s/he would primarily perceive a torture that has been driven to nearly unbearable extremes. A blow drives an iron thorn into Jesus’ temple. Incessant blows harrass the man who breaks down under the weight of the cross. His shoulder joint tears when he is nailed to the cross. Some of it reminds of the tests of courage that challenge the young audiences of horror and splatter movies. Who still dares to look?

Ever since its beginning, cinema has known about the disturbing attraction of violence. As a product of modern times, it has always been linked to archaic effects. It reminds us of the sensitivity and the aggressiveness of our body that we have learned to ignore, to suppress and to forget in our civil every day life – normally. Suffering and killing, fleeing and overcoming are the extremes of this affect equipment that is linked to the body. Cinema sometimes is its outlet, sometimes its amplifier. And sometimes it is also its mirror in which we discern more about ourselves than we wish to know.

Gibson’s film uses these cinematic effects, but it goes further than that. “Mad Max”, the greatest lunatic - that was the title of the film that made Gibson famous: an apocalyptic show in three sequels in which he played the saviour of the remains of a reduced humanity that has to live by the bare necessities after a catastrophe that they caused themselves. Thus, Gibson represented a saviour figure before, a role that was to become his destiny when one considers his cinema career. Violence and suffering, a sadomasochist basic pattern, is a constant in his cinematic oeuvre, whether he is the Scottish freedom fighter in “Braveheart” (that he got an Oscar for) or the anti-colonial American rebel in “The Patriot”. Now, with “The Passion of Christ”, this pattern experiences a sacral, intensified exorbitation.

It is easily understandable that the audience has been shocked by the previews. Violence in cinema rarely misses its effect, over and above all esthetic quality. Especially a naïve audience succumbs to the illusion of reality that cinema suggests. It forgets that even the most powerful impression has been artificially produced: by camera, lightening, special effects, colour, scenery, models, make up, mixture, post editing, all the technical things that – as Hitchcock once said – can make the audience scream. It forgets that the blood on the screen is no real blood.

In the blood that is spilled from the wounded body, suffering and violence are intermingled. Gibson has turned it into the central symbol of his film, and in one of the few and short flashbacks that show Jesus’ life and teaching, he links it to the beginning of the Last Supper. The women, Mary and Mary Magdalen – like us shocked spectators to the martyrdom, wipe up the blood with white cloths as if they were saving a relic. Their faces are shown like those of pre-Christian priestesses. Several times, the film shows us Veronica’s cloth, soaking with blood – a legendary ingredient of the passion. The legionary who hits Jesus with his lance is showered with blood, cleansed and purified by it. And over and over again the camera shows us Jesus’ body, covered and streaming with blood, up to a point that we do not wish to see anything anymore. In the sight of the blood, the terror is supposed to make way to a religious tremble. Gibson celebrates a cinematic cult of the blood sacrifice that creates a new myth of the passion. A short sequence that alludes to the resurrection no longer relieves the audience in the end. The sense of a narration also depends on a sense of measure. Gibson’s religiously inspired excessiveness violates the proportions of the story that the gospels tell. And it is exactly these that hand down a message that overcomes the sacrality of the sacrifice.

Seen in this context, the reproach of anti-semitism that worried representatives of Jewish organisations raised against the film,  gains its importance. It is not important if Gibson accuses rather the Jews or the Romans of Jesus’ death. The director tried to refute this reproach saying that  - to him – we all were responsible for this death. The film holds the Jewish high priests who mercilessly demand Jesus’ crucification, morally responsible, the Romans for the execution. It is Gibson’s ignorance as far as the reception history is concerned that is much more important – the reception history that the passion engendered in the Christian world. It assigned to the Jews a never-ending blood guilt that justified one pogrom after the other. Heinrich Heine’s “Rabbi of Bacharach” is a literary evidence that denounces this lust to kill, born out of blood fantasies. After the Nazi holocaust that could also rely on Christian anti-semitism, the Christian churches have assumed their responsibility for the crimes committed against the Jews. Ever since, theology reflects Jesus’ Jewish origins. Mel Gibson and his “The Passion of Christ” know nothing of this responsibilty. It is beyond his horizon in his naivety and his religious zeal.

One of Gibson’s sources of inspiration comes from German Romanticism to which Heine was obliged even in contradiction and in exile. This source has not been taken into consideration in most of the reviews. The director himself has never kept it hidden. On the fan website of the film, its translation into English is expicitly propagated. It is a book – a book that was popular in the 19th century, translated into several languages and later forgotten: the vision of crucification by the stigmatised Augustinian nun Anna Katharina Emmerich (or Emmerick), a vision that has been written down by the Catholic and pious poet Clemens Brentano and was published under the title “The bitter sufferings of our Lord Jesus Christ”. Brentano, one of the most lyrical poets of German Romantic poetry, dedicated several years to the writing of these visions that the bedridden nun had. It was a religiously inspired “folie-à-deux”, a mutually increased psychic state of excitement and trance that connected the two – an enmity towards the body that engendered the inspiration. With Brentano, this was fed by a repentance of failed erotic passions, with the nun, it manifested itself in her infirmity.

The sources have by no means dried up. Our enlightened, saturated time shakes its head over a raging bulimia, over an ascetic fitness training, over young girls who cannot stop hurting themselves. It turns away from TV images that show Shias who scourge themselves, are rapt in their pain and who go on pilgrimages to the holy shrine in Nadshaf. It perceives therapeutic advertisement promises of “out-of-the-body-experiences” as marginal phenomena. With Gibson’s “The Passion of Christ”, a related disposition appears right in the middle of  our public, with the whole power of cinematic effect. “The broad description of Jesus’ - the “dearest groom” as the traditional mythical topos goes - sufferings is hardly to be outdone in its cruelty of the representation of the torments”, says a literary lexicon of Emmerich’s visions of crucification. One could think, one was reading a present review of Gibson’s film.

These images were born in Dülmen/Westphalia and not in Hollywood. Or to put it differently: they were ready at hand. And suddenly they are ejected into our world by an artistic medium that – like no other - seems to be made for a visionary perception in which reality and reflection are submerged. Anna Katharina Emmerich – autosuggestively excited and inspired by the imitatio of Jesus’s sufferings – believed that she was the witness of the supertemporal event of the passion – a truth that goes beyond reason. Brentano believd to have found his mission in its literary creation. Mel Gibson believes to own the instrument, the camera, that is able to show visionary states – immediately and with the suggestive effect on a mass public. The cinematic experience is supposed to be a mystical show. When the church discovered the cinema, it hoped to be able to use it for missionary purposes. Now the church encounters the phenomenon that shows that humans do no longer draw their faith from services and bible lectures, but from a cinema that follows a mission of its own.