Mary enters the Temple: four films
Mary enters the Temple: four films
An apocryphal tradition about Mary growing up in the Temple has been dramatized in a number of Italian films... and in one Muslim film from Iran.
Hey there, this is going to be one of my more informal posts.
I’ve been attending Eastern Orthodox churches for almost 20 years now, and for a while I’ve been thinking it could be fun to combine my Orthodoxy with my interest in Bible movies by doing a series of posts on movies about the Twelve Great Feasts—or, more precisely, on movies about the stories that lie behind those feasts.
Thus, when I started on Substack last summer, I made a point of writing about movie depictions of the Transfiguration (August 6), the death of Mary (August 15), and the birth of Mary (September 8)—though those last two subjects technically fall outside of the Bible, per se, and into the realm of apocryphal traditions that are much less likely to have been filmed. In fact, in the case of the birth of Mary, I could think of only one film that had dramatized it, and it was a Muslim film from Iran!
Then I ran into other hurdles. The next feast, the Exaltation of the Cross (September 14), commemorates the discovery of the cross in the 4th century AD—it’s the only feast that commemorates a post-biblical event1—and I am not aware of any film that has depicted that, so I didn’t write anything at all on that day. And as I looked at the remaining feasts, I saw a weird mix of stories, from the almost-never-filmed (such as today’s topic) to the arguably over-filmed (such as the birth of Jesus).
So it’s a very uneven set of topics, and I would have to adjust my approach to each feast as it comes, indulging my completism in some cases and putting the brakes on it in others. It would, in a sense, require a lot of mental gear-shifts on my part.
On top of that, it is difficult to find time when one’s schedule is packed with other things. And so we come to today’s feast, the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple (November 21), which commemorates an apocryphal story about Mary being taken to the Temple by her parents as a very young child. I had hoped to say something about this feast today and the small number of films that have dramatized this tradition—yes, there are a few!—but I got so swamped by the need to cover The Chosen Season 3 in recent weeks that my project fell by the wayside.
And it didn’t help that this feast required a bit more ground-up research than the others. With the earlier feasts, I was essentially cherry-picking scenes from films that I already knew pretty well. But with this feast, I had to watch a couple films that were entirely new to me, and I feel I haven’t quite processed them yet. Indeed, the only film about Mary’s childhood that I had already seen was the aforementioned Muslim film from Iran—and even that film, I felt I needed to revisit, sort of, because it is also available as an 11-episode miniseries and I wanted to watch the whole story. (As it stands, I have only watched the first five episodes so far.)
Still, I figured I should say something before this day is over. So here goes.
I am aware of four films that show Mary being presented in the Temple.
The first, and by far the oldest, is the Italian film Mater Dei (1950).2 I cannot find it in English anywhere, so I have not watched it beyond the first seven minutes or so, but this film has a very brief depiction of Mary being presented to a priest:
The other three films I’m aware of all have at least one thing in common: namely, they follow the western artistic tradition of showing Mary walk up the Temple steps by herself, while her parents or guardians watch from the bottom.
Mary, Daughter of Her Son (2000) has a brief flashback to this moment. The low camera angles emphasize how steep the stairs might seem to young Mary:
A priest tells Mary’s parents, “If the child climbs the staircase of the Temple, never once looking back, your offering will be pleasing unto the Lord.” And then a tracking shot follows Mary as her tiny legs conquer those huge steps:
Then there is Mary of Nazareth (2012), in which Mary ascends the Temple steps before the opening credits have even finished. An establishing shot shows how high the steps are, but it also shows they aren’t very steep; indeed, they seem more like a ramp:
We see the priests at the top, but they have no dialogue at all:
Mary says goodbye to her parents at the bottom, and then runs to the top:
And unlike that other Mary, this girl does look back—and she waves at her parents:
Finally, there is Saint Mary (2000). I must admit I am fascinated by this Iranian miniseries and would like to give it more attention down the road. (It was already the main subject of my post on the birth of Mary.) But as far as Mary’s entrance into the Temple is concerned, this film, too, focuses on Mary walking up the steps.
First, she is dropped off at the bottom of the steps by her uncle Zechariah (in this film, Mary’s father is already dead, and Zechariah is her guardian):
There is at least one close-up on Mary’s feet as she climbs the steps:
There is a second flight of steps that leads to the priests; notably, many of these priests have already objected to Mary’s presence in the Temple, but Zechariah insisted that they need to let her live there (and you can probably get a sense of how iconic this image of Mary on her own is, even to a Muslim audience, from the fact that Zechariah does not accompany her to protect her from the other elders’ hostility):
Mary pauses when she reaches the top, and then there is a close-up of her deliberately putting her foot on the very top step, as the music kicks in:
She then walks past the priests and across a courtyard to another flight of steps…
…and then she stops at the bottom of these steps, and kneels:
And then we cut to a wide shot, with the Holy of Holies in the distance:
And that about covers it.
I would like to say more about a number of things here, from Saint Mary in particular to cinematic depictions of the stories behind the Great Feasts in general, and maybe I will, down the road. For now, though, this will have to suffice for today.
Note: the screen captures above are only a sampling of the shots from the sequences in each film. But I think they convey a sense of how each film handles this subject.
If you want to watch the films for yourself, Mater Dei is on YouTube:
The relevant scene from Mary, Daughter of Her Son comes at the 4-minute mark:
The relevant scene from Saint Mary comes at the 12-minute mark in Episode 4:
It also comes at the 26-minute mark in the feature-film version of Saint Mary:
And you can rent or purchase a digital copy of Mary of Nazareth at Christian Cinema.
One could argue, if one wanted to, that the death of Mary is also post-biblical, insofar as it takes place after the last biblical reference to Mary, but tradition has always held that she died during the period covered by the book of Acts, so it’s within the biblical timeframe.