How are the female characters treated in the various films that depict the life of Jesus Christ? As a visual sign in these films, how is She represented and gazed? How can Laura Mulvey's insight into gaze and the visual pleasure of films help us decipher the various levels of floating and suppressed desires of the gazing subject? In this paper, I shall briefly survey the development of Jesus films, distinguish between Jesus films to select for further observations.
Then, I shall proceed to examine the different strategies directors used to present their female characters in these selected Jesus films, and try to interpret such differences, with a focus on discussing why women are simplified as Woman, and how it could be possible that the visual pleasure in gazing the female shifts onto gazing a feminine Jesus figure.
