Land Passion War of
the Dead Christ Worlds
An Arrangement by J.
Hoberman
What
do Tom Cruise, the beating of Jesus, and the zombie apocalypse have to do with
each other? Apparently a lot, or enough to justify a screening by the famous
film critic J. Hoberman. Part of Film Comment Selects as Film Society at
Lincoln Center was a special late screening of the curiously titled Land Passion War of the Dead Christ Worlds.
If
that title sounds a little insane, pulling it apart actually gives you a sense
of what you’re actually watching: Land of
the Dead, Passion of the Christ,
and War of the Worlds. The idea for the
screening is something Hoberman, who covered experimental cinema for over forty
years at the Village Voice before being laid off earlier this year, has done in
classes at Cooper Union and New York University for years. Instead of forcing
students to sit through “bad” movies (his pejorative, not mine), why not choose
similarly linked films and project them at the same time?
And
thus, Land Passion War of the Dead Christ
Worlds is a bizarre experiment in examining three unique works of post 9/11
cinema. The film isn’t so to say a film—Hoberman called himself more of an
arranger than a director, as his work was done less on the screen than signaling the cues up in
the projection booth at Walter Reade. The film began even before we entered the cinema, as
classic country and Bernard Hermann scores filled the airwaves, and the screen
filled with an ominous blue picture of a house and a title card reading “Today”
(actually an early still from George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead). It remains on screen as Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ began to play
(silently, though the subtitles for the film’s Aramaic dialogue) meant we could
still follow it. Eventually, another projector began playing the first tripod
sequence from Steven Spielberg’s War of
the Worlds, which some may remember as an intense thrill ride filled with
9/11 imagery. And then the sequence played again. And two more times.
