The Greeks employed a distinction in their use of words that we seem to have lost sight of. So is religious meaning, which is why it is best done through music or silence, and only ever through film if the director knows when to look away, something Cecil B de Mille never learnt how to do.Īnd it is all because people don’t know how to interpret religion’s most persistent genre: myth. Emily Dickinson said truth is best told slant. But to reduce one of the most mysterious moments in spiritual history to a voice speaking out of a gas fire to an opulently bearded Charlton Heston was a failure of imagination. It would have been better had we been allowed to look away or to the side, or even to be taken inside Moses’s mind to hear the voice that prompted him to his great decision. Even if viewers have no doubts about whether God actually did speak to Moses out of a burning bush, it doesn’t work artistically to play the scene literally the way de Mille did in his movie. But it is the supernatural set pieces that prompt the giggles, as well as some serious thinking about how art might better communicate religious ideas. Filming the Bible can have a constraining effect on even the most hard-bitten film director, which is probably why The Ten Commandments is a stilted affair in which the actors move through the spectacular scenes in a kind of reverential trance.
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