Great Lights, Seen in Darkness: The Passion of Milo Rau and Yvan Sagnet

Abstract

Milo Rau’s 2020 film The New Gospel, based on the Passion of Christ, is a triumph of twenty-first-century religious and political art, one whose release heralds new directions in the landscape of contemporary global performance. The work defies any clear genre, drawing together elements of documentary cinema and theatre, metacinema and metatheatre, neorealist film, modern agitprop art, Brechtian Lehrstück, Beuys’s social sculpture, and the medieval mysterium. It debuted as part of the 2020 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam under the German title Das Neue Evangelium only two years into Rau’s new artistic directorship of Belgium’s NTGent. (The premiere streamed online due to Covid-19 restrictions.) The film is now widely available in DVD format, introducing audiences worldwide to an artist already being hailed as “the world’s most controversial director,” and helping extend that artist’s influence to a global scale.1