La Vie et la passion de Jésus Christ (1903)
Directed by Lucien Nonguet, Ferdinand Zecca

Film Review

At the time it was made, La Vie et la passion de Jésus Christ (a.k.a. The Life and the passion of Jesus Christ) was the equivalent of one of today's multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbusters.  Running to five reels (44 minutes) in its final form (arrived at after several years of tinkering), it was an extraordinarily ambitious film for the studio that made it, Pathé, and its worldwide success added greatly to the company's prestige.  Not only was the film longer than the vast majority of films that were available at the time (few ran to more than one reel, or ten minutes in duration), it was also partially coloured, using the stencil colour process which Pathé had invented (Pathéchrome).  This involved the painstaking task of hand-painting individual objects within a scene, frame-by-frame.  Today, the results are far from spectacular, but for someone watching the film in 1905 this early experiment with colour must have appeared wondrous.

The film was crafted by two of Pathé's star directors, Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca, an unlikely pairing as Nonguet's forte was slapstick (he directed several Max Linder films) and Zecca was renowned for his naturalistic dramas.  Sacred art from the Middle Ages onwards was presumably the strongest artistic influence on the production, with scenes carefully constructed to resemble paintings that would have been easily recognisable to the film's audience.  This explains why in almost every scene (each depicting an incident in the life of Christ) the camera is static and the characters are arranged in a theatrical fashion.  On only a few occasions does the camera move within a scene, with a modest tracking shot to another part of the set, and edits within a scene are just as rare.  It is also to be noted that there is no dialogue - the only intertitles that are used in the film are those which introduce each of the scenes.  This would have posed no problem at the time, as the predominantly Christian audience would have been familiar with every part of the story being told.

Despite its technical simplicity, La Vie et Passion du Jésus Christ is a polished and enchanting example of early cinema.  Whether you subscribe to Christianity or not, the film has considerable charm and its effects, whilst primitive by today's standard, are imaginatively used to instil a sense of wonder in the spectator.  The Transfiguration sequence is remarkably effective, as is the one depicting Christ's ascension, and it is surprising how the same effects which were used in other films of this period for comic effect (the films of Georges Méliès spring to mind) could also be used to inspire awe.  There have been numerous cinematic accounts of the life and passion of Christ since, but for all their overblown grandeur few of these are as satisfying as the one that those great pioneers at Pathé came up with at the dawn of cinema.

Film Synopsis

The life and passion of Jesus Christ, presented as a series of tableaux taken from the four gospels of the New Testament.  Beginning with the Annunciation, the film relates the story of Christ from his birth in a stable in Bethlehem to his betrayal and execution, ending with his resurrection and triumphant ascension into Heaven.