BODIES OF ESTRANGEMENT

Abstract

:The bulk of Mel Gibson's output as filmmaker consists of a trilogy on historical subjects: Braveheart, The Passion and Apocalypto. This article points to a degree of imaginative consistency underlying Gibson's work. It seeks to acknowledge a personal vision of the nature and significance of human events – a vision articulated through the choice of recurring cinematic techniques and visual-thematic motifs. All three films inculcate a sense of history as fundamentally dependent on acts of ritualization, at the centre of which lies the sacrifice of the individual. They share an authorial vision which hinges upon the question of death and transcendence (equated either with the resurrection of the individual or with the continuity of a family or an ethnic group). Gibson's oeuvre foregrounds the conviction that human experience is patterned in accordance with archetypal narratives whose seemingly universal validity is suggested by the presentation of cross-cultural analogues in successive films.