Catherine O’Brien is senior lecturer in film studies and French at Kingston University in the United Kingdom. She has published widely on the intersections between Marian theology and secular culture.
The Celluloid Madonna is possibly the first book to analyze the life of Mary —the Mother of Jesus— as portrayed on film. Focusing on the challenge of adapting Scripture to the silver screen, O’Brien discusses mainly those films that are Mary hagiopics —films that focus on the life, or some part of the life, of a religious hero versus representations of the Jungian archetype of the ‘Eternal Feminine’ or Virgin Mary archetype. She examines the often quite different ways in which Marian episodes have been portrayed in such films as Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927), Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth (1977), Jean‐Luc Godard's Hail Mary (1984), Jean Delannoy's Mary of Nazareth (1994), Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004), Catherine Hardwicke's The Nativity Story (2006), and Mark Dornford‐May's Son of Man (2006). O’Brien analyses the cinematic portrayal of Mary from the intersection of Mariology (particularly that of a feminist critique) and secular culture that has inspired some of the most intriguing and contentious visions of this icon in cinema history.
The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter one presents the foundations of Marian hagiography mostly from the Gospel narratives but also from the long traditions of tales about Mary (including from the Koran) and the centuries of apparition stories. Chapter two offers us the different interpretations of the Annunciation and Visitation episodes. Chapter three analyses the depiction of the relationship between Joseph and Mary, particularly Joseph's reaction to Mary's unexpected pregnancy. Chapter four explores the life of Mary from the journey to Bethlehem to the Flight into Egypt (the ‘hidden years’ of Jesus's life) and Mary's response to the (‘possible’) divinity of her son. Chapter five studies the presentations of Mary during Jesus's public ministry to his passion and death. O’Brien concludes her book with Joseph Cheah's argument that ‘when Christians talk about Mary, the first question should not be ‘Who is Mary?’ but rather, ‘Who is Jesus?’‘ (p. 162). She ends by stating that, although Hollywood is only partly successful on its portrayal of Mary, it still continues to pose these questions and invites the audience to respond.
O’Brien is to be commended for being the first to deal with the difficult portrayal of Mary on film or any other mass media. The book takes up the challenge not only of listing and commenting on films about Mary but tries to offer biblical and theological contexts for the key representations of Mary on screen. However, I would disagree with some reviewers (viz., Columbia University Press) that O’Brien offers solid biblical and theological contexts for the key representations of Mary. As a matter of fact, I would claim that the main weakness of the book lies in its Mariology that tends to be more from the ‘First Wave’ Feminist School, which limited itself to analysis of images of gender, than that of contemporary feminist critiques that are formally more sophisticated drawing on such methods as psychoanalysis and semiotics. The book also simply skims through a more traditional Catholic Mariology. This deprives the reader of a stronger point of reference to judge the different portrayals of the Virgin Mary on the big screen. Her Mariology becomes just one more interpretation of Mary as that of the film directors. Although the book claims in the introduction to explore the portrayal of Mary in Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Marxist, and atheist contexts, the book focuses mostly on films from a Catholic perspective thus leaving us dissatisfied regarding representations of Mary in other religious and non‐religious contexts. From the films’ perspective, O’Brien neglects to give the director's viewpoint or reasons for portraying Mary or a Marian scene in a certain way (which could be drawn from interviews and DVD ‘extra features’); nor does she engage in a ‘political valuation’ of the films that would take into consideration the social, political, economic and religious milieu in which these films were produced (see Douglas Kellner's Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and Postmodern). This would provide us with a richer insight on why a specific film chose to portray Mary in a particular manner.
Overall, the general public will find the book quite engaging and straightforward. It should be read by anyone interested in gender or religion in film, and equally by anyone concerned with the reception of religion in a secularized world.
