Just finished watching "The Bible in Movies" on either The History Channel or Biography, I forget. The title is self-explanatory and the show did a nice job of tracing how Hollywood (and the world film industry in general) has depicted the Bible since motion pictures were introduced.
The first silent films (including Cecile B. DeMille's The King of Kings from 1927) took their cue from Renaissance art and depicted Christ as a bearded, sallow-faced European with long curls.
Then when Technicolor arrived, Christ got a complete Hollywood makeover, including piercingly Nordic blue eyes, a pristine white robe from Wardrobe (just what you'd expect a carpenter to wear) ... and learned to speak with his fingers arranged to symbolize the Trinity.
And more often than not when Christ speaks in the movies, he's speaking Shakespearan (King James) English because, I suppose, "Whether thou goest" somehow sounds more scriptural and reverent than "If you go".
Contrast that familiar depiction of Jesus with the Christ portrayed in Dayasagar (aka Karunamayudu a 1978 production from India). Christ was played by an Indian actor speaking Telugu. Dayasagar used actors, language, costumes and symbols [see the attached frame from the Ascension scene) to make Christ accessible to its intended audience ... and was neither no more nor no less indulgent in that respect than our films use cultural familiarities to make him accessible to us.
During the 1960s several films depicted Jesus as a revolutionary and social activist ... and left his divinity out of the picture completely.
The point is that we want to make Jesus into ourselves ... as if Christ ever looked into a mirror, he'd see our reflection ... our hair, our skin color, our mental image of Him staring back.
We want Christ to belong to us instead of belonging to Him ... and use our conceptions of Him to turn Christ into a far off, stagnant icon who speaks to us in cryptic, 400-year old English from inside the King James box.
Because we're more comfortable and feel more self-righteous keeping the Creator of the universe inside the box we built than we are in actually opening the box ... and feeling His voice speak to our hearts and lives instead.
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