Episode 35: Release the Schrader Cut

Details, credits, errata: For Holy Week, we have decided to be a bit daring and look at Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, the much-maligned work of two Christians, Scorsese and Paul Schrader, based on the work of a third, Nikos Kazantzakis, who published Last Temptation in 1955, two years before his death. With us is dear friend and author of The World Only Spins Forward and The Method, Isaac Butler.

We re-recommend Alissa’s excellent interview with Schrader here, which we also mentioned during our episode about his film First Reformed. (Also check out episode 10, if you like, in which we discuss Scorsese’s Silence.)

Our image for the week is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s oil-on-oil painting The Procession to Calvary, made freely available through Wikimedia Commons, which Sam thought was appropriate because it’s all about the circumstances around Jesus and the cross, just like this movie. Jesus is actually a little hard to clock in this painting despite being in its exact center. Bruegel died in 1569 just as the Dutch War of Independence — also known as the Eighty Years’ War — broke out after years of bloodshed and public executions of the kind Jesus would have seen and, eventually, been subject to. Massacres, executions, and biblical scenes feature prominently in his work; it’s profoundly appropriate for him to paint such a sweeping work about the most famous execution in the Western world.

Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Last Temptation of Christ is copyright 1988 Universal City Studios and Cineplex Odeon Films Canada. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review and no other copyright is intended or implied All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.

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