La vie et la passion de Jésus Christ

I have always been fascinated by silent films. There is something about seeing actors and actresses from 100 years ago performing. Jaded by today's high-tech special effects, I always try and imagine what it was like to watch a particular film at the time of it's original release. It helps to appreciate the crudeness of early cinema.

"The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ" is a very charming production from Pathe, originally filmed in 1902, but expanded and finally released in 1905. Imagine a series of famous religious paintings coming to life, separated by title cards, and you will have a pretty good idea of what this film is like. For example, the scene in which Mary and Joseph rest as they are escaping to Egypt, is almost identical to Luc Olivier Merson's 1879 painting "Rest on the Flight to Egypt", right down to Mary sitting on the famous Sphinx. While some might find these "living paintings" an unimaginative cop-out, I found them to be very charming, and very nostalgic.

The sets and costumes appear to be right out of a stage production of the life of Christ. Possibly from and elaborate passion play of the day. The make-up on the cast is very theatrical, so much so that a close-up of Jesus is almost comical. Again, where others might be bothered by the cudeness of them, I was quite charmed.

Having been filmed over a period of 3 years, the continuity isn't too bad. The biggest flaws are in the casting changes made over that time. The characters of John the Apostle and the 12 year old Jesus change in mid scene, much to the audiences surprise!

The best unintentional humor, of the film, is in the Birth of Jesus scene. The baby LITERALLY appears, as if by magic, in the manger between Mary and Joseph. Maybe it was simply my frame of mind at the time I viewed it, but I laughed out loud! If only child birth were that easy!!!! To top it off, the actress who plays Mary looks bored through the whole scene (actually, through the whole movie), as if this sort of thing happens every day! My, how times have changed!

As simplistic as this film is, compared to today, it's really a wonderful window into the past. I recommend it!

Life and Passion of Christ, The (1903)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Decent telling of the story of Jesus from his birth up to the resurrection. This early French feature is full of wonderful imagination and the use of color is a real added bonus. The visual are all very nice and the set decoration is among the best I've seen in any silent film of its era. The biggest problem is that the feature runs just over 40-minutes and it seems like a bunch of short films edited together. There's really no consistent storytelling but instead just various segments from the Bible.

From the Manger to the Cross (1912)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Early Warner Bros. film is the typical telling of Jesus, as the title says, from the manger to the cross. This is a really boring, dull and pointless telling of the story but I guess the studio wanted to make a feature and stretched everything to the limit. The film uses quotes from the New Testament but this gets tiresome very quickly as well. The film was shot on location all around the world and from a historic standpoint, this here is interesting but the rest of the film isn't.

This is an interesting film in a few respects, if not necessarily a very good or entertaining one. It's an early filmed passion play and chronicle of the life of Jesus Christ and is of both religious and film history interest. It becomes more of curio because of its length and extravagance for a film made in the early 1900s. It seems to be the longest story film made to that date. There had been some actuality, or documentary, films already made that were longer, including some boxing matches and a series called "Army Life" (1900) by R.W. Paul. Nevertheless, film subjects lasting near or longer than 40 minutes were rare until the 1910s.

Jesus has been a popular subject throughout film history, perhaps nevermore so than in the beginning of its history. Before this film, quite a few passion plays had already been filmed. Moreover, these films were generally longer and more elaborate than were other subjects. In 1897, when the cinema was barely more than a year old and when nearly every film was one shot-scene and under a minute in length, a Frenchman named Léar filmed a passion play of 12 scenes, which received popular distribution in Britain and the US, as well as in France. George Hatot's "La Vie et la Passion de Jésus-Christ" (1897/1898), produced by the Lumiére Company, had 13 tableaux. An American passion play, featuring Horitz villagers, was supposedly even grander and longer. Shortly thereafter, "The Passion Play of Oberammergau" (1898), which probably didn't have much of anything to do with the plays performed in the village of Oberammergau, contained over 20 scenes. Sigmund Lubin also made a passion play claiming, but lacking, authenticity to the Oberammergau performances. With a lecturer and magic lantern slides, these films would provide as long an entertainment as does the modern feature-length film. In 1899, Alice Guy made "La Vie de Christ" in 11 tableaux for Gaumont, and again, in 1906, made a passion play of, reportedly, 25 scenes. Pathé, in fact, had made a film on Christ before this picture; their 1900 release consisted of 16 scenes. They, too, would go on to make another one after this, in 1907.

According to film historian Richard Abel ("The Ciné Goes to Town"), there were a few versions of this film sold to exhibitors, and exhibitors may have had the option to purchase individual scenes and may have further edited various passion plays together (these were common practices back then, when exhibitors retained much editorial control over films). Abel says Pathé filmed this over three different periods; others say this production lasted from 1902 to 1905. Actors and styles changed during shootings. The version available from Image Entertainment seems to be complete, if not more than (with the title of "Passion and Death of Christ"). Abel says the longest version was 32 tableaux. Yet, I counted 35 tableaux separated by title cards and 46 total shots in the version from Image Entertainment.

In the beginning of the history of cinema as an international business, Georges Méliès was the most popular and innovative filmmaker, and, consequently, his films were the most often imitated. Supposedly, this film avoided any reference to prior theatrical productions, says Abel. Upon a second viewing of this film, however, I noticed that this Pathé production, like so many other Pathé films, significantly copies the féeries/fairy films of Méliès. This is especially evident in the soft, fanciful set designs, and the device of female angels guiding characters and events being a variation of the female fairies in Méliès's fantasy pictures. Additionally, the use of stop-substitutions and superimpositions for trick effects, moving props, and dissolves between scenes and trick effects were trademarks of Méliès adopted religiously by Pathé. The use in this film of many actors or extras to fill and decorate some scenes, which often serve no narrative purpose or biblical fidelity, was also done in Méliès's féeries. This imitation of Méliès's films makes this passion play stand out from the drab, realist set designs that seemed to have been used in other such early passion plays and the location shooting used in later films such as "From the Manger to the Cross" (1912) and the Christus films made in Italy. They're also in stark contrast to the more realist painted sets used by Ferdinand Zecca, the co-director of "The Life and Passion of Christ" and Pathé's studio manager for a time, in "Historie d'une crime" (1901).

Most of the technique and style in "The Life and Passion of Christ" is common of film-making in the beginning, but there are some notable exceptions. Not many prints from this period exist with tinting, which doesn't seem to have been a prevalent practice yet ("Scrooge; or Marley's Ghost" (1901) is another early example). It's also an early example of Pathé's patented stencil coloring, and their use of bold, red lettering and the rooster logo in the title cards. Pans are used often, including in the Nativity scene, where a pan and tinting changes move the scene between the indoor action of the nativity and the outdoor action of the approaching wise men and gang. Another example of three scenes in one via panning is the Mount of Olives/Kiss of Judas tableaux, where the camera follows Jesus into and out of the woodlands. I haven't seen this kind of extensive panning anywhere else in story films this early in film history (extensive panning was widely done by actuality filmmakers). The use of a window to show outside action is another example of early alternatives to scene dissection (of which there is very little here or in most early films). There's also a match-on-action shot in The Holy Family at Nazareth tableaux, and two medium insert shots later in the film, which are rather unexpected departures from the film's mostly fixed camera, head-on long shot framing tableaux style. I certainly recommend this for those interested in the history of Christianity and cinema.

This is one of the earliest versions depicting the life of Christ. And what a film it is! It's partly colourised (but only parts of most frames). So you get a movie made over a hundred years ago hand coloured and 44 minutes long which is much longer than the average films of the time (1-5 minutes). This was made to last, you can tell - the effort it took to hand- colour hundreds of feet of film and shoot that length with so many decorations.

The opening scene - The Annunciation is clearly made in a setting inspired by the Italian Renaissance art, just like the Last Supper scene later in the film. And if you put yourself back in those days where film was just coming out of its embryonic state, as it were, people were used to seeing paintings, pictures and frescoes, and of course, those films were made to look like those paintings only moving, which was in a way a miracle of a painting coming alive. Static camera shots (there was no zooming or panning of camera at the time) only add to that effect. In this film, however, they used camera panning in two of the scenes.

As I mentioned, it's whopping 44 minutes long and the director managed to fit the events of entire life of Christ into it - from Annunciation to Ascension (Mel Gibson had 2 hours of running time and managed to fit only a quarter of the events - just teasing). So it is like a visual Bible reminiscent of those stained glass windows in cathedrals called the Poor Man's Bible made not only for beauty and inspiration but also for those who couldn't read (which was the vast majority of the population as books were rare and very expensive). So the film is also made of stand-alone parts or scenes, just like those windows. The other thing to mention is that it is made in a fashion of passion plays (hence the English name of the film). In good old days those were very common throughout Europe for many centuries wherein actors performed scenes from the life of Christ and saints in towns around the holy days. So, clearly the settings in this film look very much like open theatre stage decorations. However, the progress, it seems was made in shooting some open air scenes as well. They also used special effects - combined shots. Some are really incredible for the time, like the walking on water in the catching of fish scene or transfiguration scene or or the scene with lightning on Calvary. And so... the development in film-making continues...

The film runs at normal speed so there's no fast moving comic effect everyone is used to. And the actors face quite a difficult task: there was no speech possible as they were used to in theatre and had very limited use of facial expressions (there were no close-up camera shots at the time, although they made two here), so they only had to make use of their body language and arms, which looks a bit over the top at times. There are no title cards in the film apart from the scene titles, so the viewer is meant to know at least the basics of the four Gospels, which was, I'm sure, a lot more common back then than today. Enjoy, highly recommended.

This is not exactly what you'd expect to see in an average film from 1905. First off, the length, which was utterly bizzare for it's time (44 minutes) made it worthy of the title of a "feature-length-film", of which it was the first, at least as far as we know. Moving on, the nativity scenes were extremely well done. I actually did a stop motion animated version of my own using this film as a template. Also by watching this film I finally learned how to do a few photographic dissolves, although the filmmakers of this one did a much better job on te dissolves, fades, etc. than I ever would. This film also offers a glimpse at the elaborate Pathe hand-coloring process in it's early stages of development. It also proved that you can certainly do a lot with only four colors. It took three years to make this picture, now God only knows how long it will take to uncover a list of the cast. But even without it, this is the best telling of the story of Christ I have ever seen.