Eddie Tamir has to finish the interview by six because it’s Friday. At sunset he will need to be home from work for the Sabbath. He is a prize-winning film-maker: one of his films, Lilliput Café won a Protestant film award in the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, and this year his latest, Father, will be shown at the St Kilda Film Festival. He is also the owner of two small suburban cinemas. One is the Classic, in Elsternwick, the other the Cameo in Belgrave which he bought recently, and refurbished. He picked out the most controversial film of the year for the Cameo’s gala opening. The film was Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
It has been doing, he says, ‘back-to-back box office’. I ask what that means and he tells me that it’s when someone goes to see a film, comes out when it’s over, goes straight back to the box office to buy another ticket and goes back in to see it all over again. That is one extreme of the range of views that Gibson’s film has engendered. The other reaction is of antipathy, ranging from aesthetic judgements (‘really bad film-making, tedious and boring’) or moral/theological ones (it is inaccurate, dangerous and even anti-Semitic).
Before seeing the movie, I tell him, I wondered how on earth anyone could blame Jewish people for the death of Jesus: it’s like blaming Danes for the death of Hamlet. Then when I saw it, I realised that the depiction of Jews might, despite Gibson’s small attempts at balance, still be offensive and dangerous.
Why show it then? ‘The Jewish response has a whole other level. I think,’ Tamir says, ‘that the question of the piece of art versus the actual artist—a lot of Jewish commentary has enmeshed that.’ We talk for a while about the fact of Gibson’s father being a Holocaust denier; I worry because it seems to me that Gibson has, in interviews, publicly affirmed his rejection of that position, but doesn’t want to go to the extent of saying that his aged father is either deluded or intentionally in grave error.
But it goes deeper: Tamir has seen and heard comments after the movie that concern him. ‘Someone said, “the Jews didn’t actually kill him but they made it happen”’. He fears that some people believe, as Gibson’s father is said to, the evil and ludicrous conspiracy theory of