La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ (Pathé-Frères, 1902–05)

An edition of the Life and Passion of Christ (La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ) was produced by the firm Pathé in the early years of the twentieth century, making it one of the oldest religious films to be preserved. ² As an extension of our earlier research on the film, we propose here to examine its principal material and aesthetic aspects. ³ Given the proliferation of Passion Plays during the early years of the cinema, ⁴ the role they have played in historical and theoretical discussions of the period ⁵ and the complications of their study (e.g., nothing resembles Jesus more than another Jesus), ⁶ we believe it would be useful to contribute to the knowledge we have today of this body of work by focusing on this one film. We will do so in two stages: the first part will be devoted to questions of a philological order and to observations regarding the material qualities of the film, which will allow us to gauge the degree to which each of the “tableaux” ⁷ making up the film can be viewed as autonomous; in part two, we will examine the aesthetic consequences of our historical observations. Our task is to examine how the visual qualities of the film are the result of a desire to create a “tableau-effect” which situates this film within a broader genealogy. We will thus be able to use a concrete case to observe the ways in which the “cinema” of the period was the site of convergences among a variety of cultural series. Consequently, the film should be seen as forming part of a “meshing” phenomenon described by André Gaudreault in the following manner: “At the beginning of the twentieth century, intermedial meshing was so fertile in the world of kinematography that a great number of animated pictures paid tribute to other media or media spaces, if only in the topic they were addressing.” ⁸