Since the beginning of the film several production contracts awarded to its directors on the payroll of prestige films about the life of Jesus, with the aim of being "the" movie on the subject. This is the case of the "lives and passions" of Lear and Basile (1897), Georges Hatot and Louis Lumière (1898), Méliès ( Christ marchant sur les flots , 1900), Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet (1903), by Alice Guy (1906) or Louis Feuillade (1910). Despite their good intentions and put everything art film of the era could, none can compare in impact to the impact of the Manger to the Cross ( From Manger to Cross, 1913) by Sidney Olcott, a film of great beauty and efficiency that the Kalem Company wheel to achieve a higher degree of fidelity than their predecessors, in Egypt and Palestine. The success of this film, which offers the look Protestant history, leads the Catholic Church to sponsor three years later a version that adheres more to their perspective. Cinemas check the hand for that of Giulio Cesare Antamoro, a director who was hired in 1910 and had previously directed several comedies and melodramas Polidor. Later films devoted to the figures of Francis of Assisi (1926), which we in this cycle, and Antonio de Padua (1931).
The vocation of this tape to accommodate the most widespread iconography for painting appears Catholic from the first frame, where the Annunciation is represented with a carbon copy of the Annunciation undisguised, especially Annunciation of Fra Angelico . Also inserted the Dinner Da Vinci and the various scenes surrounding the Crucifixion, the most obvious of them which refers directly to the Pietà d'Avignon or Michelangelo, even respecting the position of the characters. That intention makes the film a series of vignettes, more dynamic than it could have led to Pathé Zecca, but bearing a similar result in weight in style: he does not lie in rhythm, or the camera, but in the composition table, almost academic position of the characters (more figures than actors on location) and the impact of light on them.
light precisely chairs underlined much of the film, both for its technical and artistic implications as for its symbolic function, to represent the impact of the divine in things. That light permeates scenes like Christ walking on water, the miracle of Lazarus, or, especially, the whole end of the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ. They also have a visual impact through the use of transparent disclosure to shepherds (with a chorus of angels appearing to a herd and their caregivers), the dream of the Emperor Augustus (which is revealed through his statue revived) and the massive journey in the desert, large-scale epic. The latter and other external moments were filmed apparently also in landscapes of Palestine and Egypt (the pyramids appear and walk the temple of Karnak Sphinxes). The part of the meeting between St. John the Baptist and Christ have moments that remind imaginary L'Inferno with supernatural touches.
They are all diverse and cross-references, but almost always static, in a movie in which images and moments happen almost no time to get excited with them. The film is presented as an attempt to build the representation of the most known of the life and death of Jesus, to sculpt her iconography in the film medium, but this makes him a title to be seen, but to be lived, since no passenger (except that of the Passion) hard enough beyond its presentation as to call an emotion. In Olcott tape that is much more efficient within the parameters more or less stringent than required to tell a story as familiar as this.
Its release in November of 1916 was a great success and was staged over a year, something not very common then. Imagine now.
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