Insights from Filmmaking for Analyzing Biblical Narrative by Gary Yamasaki

Abstract

Reviewed by: Insights from Filmmaking for Analyzing Biblical Narrative by Gary Yamasaki Mark Roncace gary yamasaki, Insights from Filmmaking for Analyzing Biblical Narrative (Reading the Bible in the 21st Century; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016). Pp. x + 160. Paper $29. Yamasaki proposes that reading a biblical narrative is akin to watching a film. Given our voluminous exposure to movies and television, we naturally learn to experience cinematic stories in a particular manner. For instance, we understand the story worlds of movies as distinct from the real world, and we encounter them as events to be experienced in a particular sequence through time, rather than as objects to be studied. Biblical stories, however, are rarely viewed through this natural mode of experiencing stories. Thus, Y. sets out to develop what he calls a “cinematic-story paradigm,” which gathers insights about how we watch movies and applies them to the analysis of biblical narrative. The first chapter is a selective chronological overview of biblical films dating back to 1912, and it also considers a few recent Christ-figure movies. Although this chapter may serve as a broad overview for the uninitiated—and Y. claims it is necessary to highlight the need to forge a new direction in Bible and film studies—it seems entirely superfluous to Y.’s project. In the second chapter, Y. develops his cinematic-story paradigm as a way to build on narrative criticism, which he sees as having largely failed to make a significant impact on biblical studies. Here Y. explains the components of his new approach under the following [End Page 699] headings: (1) Every Movie Creates Its Own Story World; (2) The Story of a Movie Is Intended as an Event, Not an Object; (3) A Movie’s Plot Is More than Just a List of Its Events; (4) The Characterization of Movie Characters Is a Dynamic, rather than a Static, Process; (5) The Details of a Movie Are Filtered to the Viewers through Particular Points of View; and (6) An Assessment of the Movie Needs to Be in Its Final Form. In the third chapter, Y. applies the insights of the cinematic-story paradigm to Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. He begins with a review of scholarly commentary on the passage, pointing out deficiencies in the various methods. For example, source critics fail to address the narrative workings of the text. Structuralists who see a chiastic pattern in the chapter miss the point that “it is beyond possibility” that a listening audience could detect such a structure. (Y. gives no consideration whatsoever to the skills that an audience, ancient or modern, might have.) Further, the many critics who draw parallels and insights from other passages (intertextual readings) fail to recognize that the story world of Genesis 22 is a “self-contained entity” and that therefore appealing to texts outside of it confuses “the analysis of the Genesis story-world with data not intended to be a part of that world” (p. 99). Similarly, for Y. the whole Bible—apparently as if it is analogous to a single, superlong film—is to be experienced sequentially, so for commentators who consider passages in Leviticus in order to shed light on the Aqedah, he asserts that “readers at Genesis 22 would not yet be aware of the Leviticus passages, and so could not possibly draw the ideas expressed in them into the interpretation of the Genesis passage” (p. 106). The twenty-four-page review and criticism of previous commentators is followed by an eight-page discussion of the insights offered by Y.’s cinematic-story paradigm. This amounts to two points. First, all moviegoers understand instinctively that any given scene is to be understood in the context of the data presented to the viewer up until that point; each new scene should not be interpreted in isolation. For Y. this insight means that one must analyze the material in Genesis prior to chap. 22. So Y. does this, noting that the theme of “covenant” is central to the stories of Abraham. Armed with this notion, Y. argues that the first verse of the chapter, “God tested Abraham,” would shock the reader. A second facet of Genesis...