The Weirdness and Wonder of Cinema’s First Biblical Epic
Before the Christian film industry and its hoaky blockbusters based on chain e-mails, Christianity was a prime subject for mainstream movies. The most famous religious blockbusters were Cecil B. DeMille’s mid-century sword-and-sandal epics, but there is a long line of lesser God movies with greater or lesser degrees of piety. These movies dealt with Christian themes for the same reason most movies don’t today: they wanted to be inoffensive. The Bible was something that was respectable and universally recognizable, and had at least a few moments of action.
Fernando Zecca’s 1903 film The Passion Play (also known, more descriptively as The Life and Death of Christ) wasn’t the first movie based off the Bible, but it was the first feature film to do so. In fact, it was the first feature film to be based off anything: at the time of its release, its 43-minute length made it the longest narrative film ever. The Passion Play was early film’s first attempt to see if it could tell the type of long-form stories told in novels instead of stories about, like, a train going into a tunnel, or an old man playing a prank.
(Okay, technically it wasn’t a feature film, as it was composed of dozens of short films that could be combined into a larger narrative, so technically the first feature is 1906 Australian movie The Story of the Kelly Gang. But technicalities are for nerds.)
The Passion Play treats the Christ story with the characteristic exaggeration of silent film. Jesus is born, and quickly becomes a wild-haired man who somehow always has wine and asks people who the real sinner is, man. When he throws out the moneylenders from the temple, it has all the physical rowdiness of a Buster Keaton sequence. Zecca wasn’t the master of effects that his countryman and contemporary Georges Melies was, but he did manage a (unconvincing-looking) cross-fade to create the image of Jesus walking on water.
Zecca also cinematically re-staged da Vinci’s famous The Last Supper. In doing so, he was hearkening back to the long tradition of religious painting, and not-so-subtly suggesting that cinema could attain similar greatness and be worthy of similar acclaim. Unfortunately, there were no captions of the conversation where Jesus insists that everyone sits on the same side of the table.
Later, of course, Jesus is captured by those nasty Romans. Like future Jesus movie directors Martin Scorcese and Mel Gibson, Zecca is obsessed with Christ’s suffering. The sequence of Christ’s abuse and ultimate death goes on and on, to the point where it becomes almost comedic. Jesus’s teachings may have been about kindness and forgiveness, but on film it is easier to depict suffering. Or perhaps this reflects a deeper pattern in Christianity, where suffering is valourized by religious leaders who don’t have to suffer much. Zecca was, it must be remembered, operating in Catholic France in a deeply religious period, not long removed from the Dreyfus Affair.
From a modern perspective, The Passion Play is mostly a bore, unconvincing and dramatically uninteresting. For me, the highlight of the film was the spot colour later added to the. Technicolor was still thirty-odd years away, but film directors could add colour by laboriously painting dyes onto individual film cells. The results, as in the colour films by Melies and Alice Guy Blanche, had a ethereal tone completely different from any kind of film colour that came afterwards.
The Passion Play did not spark a rash of feature-length films. Likely the process was too laborious for a form audiences weren’t used to. But we can see traces of it in all of the Biblical movies that came afterwards, specifically their struggle to translate the ineffability of Christian doctrine to the visceral medium of film. And, if nothing else, it gave us this amazing comment thread on YouTube.
(I’m pretty sure they aren’t actual babies. But hey, Edison killed an actual elephant for a movie in the same year, so who knows.)
