The Celluloid Madonna: From Scripture to Screen by O’Brien, Catherine (review)

As an off-shoot of interest in Jesus movies, critical interest in cinematic portrayals of the Virgin Mary deserves its own volume. Catherine O’Brien’s book fulfills this need with its focus on how Marian iconography in films from the silent era to the current period reflects the universal cross-cultural appeal of the mother of Jesus, with various filmmakers adapting this icon according to the ethos of their age.

O’Brien’s book especially considers the varying cultural contexts in which the Virgin Mary is enacted in cinema. Noticeably, she does not limit her contexts to the Bible. She also includes the Qur’an, which venerates Mary as Jesus’s virgin mother; apocryphal texts including the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Nicodemus; contemporary Marian dogmas of Divine Motherhood (announced in AD 431), her Perpetual Virginity (AD 649), her Immaculate Conception (AD 1854) and her Assumption (AD 1950); the Second Vatican council of the 1960s; and contemporary liberation and feminist theology’s focus on the subject’s emancipation from socioeconomic and patriarchal oppression. Her acknowledgement of Thomas Merton’s gloss on Mary, that people’s views about Mary do not reveal as much about Mary as about themselves (10), suggests the book’s direction, wherein Mary is a trope marshaled culturally for ideological purposes.

The other chapters are fittingly divided into foci on the different moments of Mary’s life, and the life-changing roles she assumes, such that the book reads like a meta-critical biography of Mary. Indications of this meta-critical tendency, through titles like “Announcement and Commission,” “Mary and Joseph,” “Virgin and Mother,” and “Mother and Disciple,” suggest a trajectory according to which Mary is adapted in line with cultural demands of the directors studied. For example, O’Brien juxtaposes cinematic examples of Mary’s response to the archangel Gabriel’s Annunciation, such as the silent era The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ (dir. Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonquet, 1905), the 1912 From the Manger to the Cross (dir. Sidney Olcott), and Carol Hardwicke’s The Nativity Story (2006). Here, O’Brien highlights how Mary evolves from “a silent icon in the days of early cinema” into a more complex character who “openly [questions] her readiness for motherhood” (40). The question of whether Mary received the Annunciation passively, or actively decided to partake of it, becomes a loaded question which potentially points to a co-optation of Mary as a religious icon into the causes of feminists and liberation theologians, who see her as cooperating with God freely and demonstrating exemplary qualities of faith, hope, and love which are to be emulated by those striving for social justice.

O’Brien’s cinematic examples dictate her argument, and she takes care to choose from a range of films, including non-European films made by non-Christian directors, such as A. Bhimsingh’s 1978 Dayasagar and Mark Dornford-May’s 2006 Son of Man. However, her choices suffer from an overwhelming focus on European and American examples, to the point of excluding regions like South America. This predominantly Eurocentric focus does occasionally show in the lack of attention to issues such as the racial identity or ethnicity of Mary (and Jesus), and its implications for audiences. For example, she mentions the Black Madonna motif in Dornford-May’s Son of Man (69), and the way in which this establishes an unconventional link between blackness and comeliness of appearance. However, she glosses over the issue of racial blackness and its implications for audiences in regions like Africa and Hispanic-predominant South America, where non-Eurocentric images of the Virgin Mary, such as a darker and tanned Lady of Guadalupe, or an African Madonna, are intrinsic to their cultures.

Notwithstanding, O’Brien’s book is a commendable study of cinematic portrayals of the Virgin Mary amidst a paucity of such critical studies, and is worthy...