- Obscured by the furor surrounding Mel Gibson's "The
Passion of the Christ" is one relatively mundane bit of trivia: Last
week's debut marked the widest release ever of a subtitled film in North
America.
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- The subtitles were actually Plan B. Gibson originally
intended to show the movie without them, letting the sound of the Aramaic,
Hebrew and Latin -- not to mention the spattering blood -- speak for itself.
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- "He was real hard-set against them," said Alan
Nierob, Gibson's publicist. "He initially thought they would be a
distraction... It's a very visual movie."
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- Gibson also wanted to avoid the phony air of British
English that has plagued so many film renditions of the life of Jesus Christ,
Nierob said.
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- For clarity
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- But after early screenings of the film without subtitles,
Gibson decided to insert them for the sake of clarity.
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- "I'm glad he did," Nierob said. "It is
a better movie with them. I've seen it both ways, and it's great [either
way], but it's much better with subtitles, I felt."
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- The task of achieving linguistic authenticity fell to
Rev. William Fulco, a Jesuit priest and professor of ancient Mediterranean
studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Gibson got Fulco's
name from Yale University, where Fulco received a doctorate and taught
Aramaic.
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- "I got a call while I was in Jerusalem: 'Hey, Padre,
It's Mel, I got a job for you,'" Fulco said. "I said, 'Mel who?'
We talked for about an hour. He told me about the project, and I couldn't
pass it up."
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- In 2002, Gibson gave Fulco the script written by Benedict
Fitzgerald, mostly derived from the Gospels, and asked Fulco to translate
it into Aramaic , Hebrew and Latin. Fulco later translated the script back
into English subtitles.
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- The use of multiple languages in the film reflects the
linguistic diversity of Palestine during Jesus' life. Most people spoke
Aramaic, which the Jews adopted while exiled in Babylon in the 6th Century
before Jesus' birth. Hebrew, their language before the exile, was retained
in religious writings and liturgy (and is spoken by Jesus in prayer in
"The Passion"). Latin was spoken by the Roman soldiers occupying
the region. Greek was spoken throughout the Roman Empire, thanks to Alexander
the Great, but was seen as a sign of secularization and thus resisted by
many Jews.
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- Fulco left Greek out of "The Passion," substituting
Latin in occasional cases where Greek might have been used. He also made
mostly imperceptible distinctions between the elegant Latin of Pilate and
the crude Latin of soldiers, thanks to an X-rated source he found on his
shelf.
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- "I tracked down some obscene graffiti from Roman
army camps," Fulco said. "Somebody who knows Latin really well,
their ears will fall off. We didn't subtitle those words."
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- Fulco even confessed to some linguistic mischief.
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- "Here and there I put in playful things which nobody
will know. There's one scene where Caiaphas turns to his cohorts and says
something in Aramaic. The subtitle says, `You take care of it.' He's actually
saying, `Take care of my laundry.'"
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- Other linguistic tricks of Fulco's serve a function in
the script.
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- For example, he incorporated deliberate dialogue errors
in the scenes where the Roman soldiers, speaking Aramaic, are shouting
to Jewish crowds, who respond in Latin. To illustrate the groups' inability
to communicate with each other, each side speaks with incorrect pronunciations
and word endings.
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- Later, "there's an exchange where Pilate addresses
Jesus in Aramaic, and Jesus answers in Latin. It's kind of a nifty little
symbolic thing: Jesus is going to beat him at his own game," Fulco
said. "One line [in that exchange] I kind of enjoyed is when Jesus
says, `My power is given from above, otherwise my followers would not have
allowed this.' That's [spoken in] the pluperfect subjunctive."
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- Appreciating the niceties
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- It takes a linguist to appreciate that grammatical nicety
as remarkable for being uttered by a Palestinian Jew who mostly spoke Aramaic
and Greek.
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- For the relatively few Middle Eastern Christians who
still speak Aramaic, "The Passion" may sound riddled with mistakes
-- spurring Fulco to point out, "modern Aramaic dialects are as different
[from ancient ones] as Chaucer and modern English."
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- Still, now that the movie is in general release, Fulco
fully expects to get an earful about his use of languages.
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- "We linguists are a crazy bunch," he said.
"The more obscure the language, the more people try to prove their
territory worthwhile and say, by God, we're going to sniff out errors."
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- Copyright © 2004, The Chicago Tribune
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- http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/movies/mmx-040304
0033mar04,0,3912206.story?coll=mmx-movies_heds
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