The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ

Few people, I think, appreciate how the bible has been reinvented in the last century. Until this very film, what we had were words, stories in words. For centuries, those written stories were illustrated in static icons and symbols complex and simple. With this film, we began a new era, where religion is cinematic. American Fundamental Christianity and Indian neoHinduism are currently in the lead, nearly completely transformed by the moving icon and the ghostly eye. Prayer has literally been redefined and no amount of thumping will restore the imagination as a personal relationship with God again. Not one with an INNER eye.

Its why the Fundamentalist Film School down the road from me at Pat Robertson's empire is so interesting. They change the thing by bearing witness, in a sort of quantum effect.

It all started here, but you won't find much to indicate so. What we have with this first instance are two things. First is the implicit proposal that as "the greatest story," it deserved the greatest, fullest, longest treatment.

The second is the interesting stuff. This is literally closer to moving stained glass than films of today. Its quite beautifully painted if you see it that way. Its staged as tableaux, with little movement and none from the camera which is at eye level. There are "miraculous" appearances and disappearances, which is how the filmmakers would have seen the promise of film. The much noted fades are harder to notice. I'll take the historian's word that these French fellows invented the fade. It is remarkable how they worked it though with the color. Because you see the color fade, so they must have painted before optically splicing. Its a mystery to me.

I'll just take it on faith.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

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.

The story of Jesus Christ from the proclamation of his Nativity to his crucifixion. Impressive scenes and dynamism of the actors prelude to the Italian colossal movies of the silent period.

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.

This film must rank as one of the most important of its time, even though it doesn't occupy the same place in the public consciousness as other early landmarks such as Melies' Voyage to the Moon and Porter's The Great Train Robbery. At 44 minutes long it is one (if not the) earliest example of a near-feature length film, even though it was often sold as individual scenes so that many audiences in 1903 never actually got to see the film in its entirety the way we do today. The use of stencil colouring is effective and enlivens what otherwise becomes a rather dull series of tableaux from the life of Jesus, all filmed with a static camera that captures the 'exaggerated gesture' school of acting that was considered outdated long before the age of the silent movie was over.