ABSTRACT
The history of Jesus on film can be traced to the earliest years of cinematic history when silent films were popular attractions in the fairgrounds, lecture halls and cinema palaces of Europe and North America. It was a time when biblical films drew crowds as readily as the trick films, chase films or erotica of the period. Consisting primarily of filmed tableaux, early movies of Jesus’s life were simultaneously episodic in form and, consciously or otherwise, informed by the narrative and visual influences of illustrated Bibles, centuries of Christian art, and the long standing European Passion Play tradition. They were in many respects the animated visual equivalents of literary harmonizations of the Gospels, the earliest and most recognized example of which is Tatian’s Diatessaron. A telling phrase from Rev J. Hamlyn Hill’s English translation of Tatian’s harmonization is applicable to the Jesus film tradition generally, and to this study in particular. “In a few instances,” Hill noted, “a verse assumes such a composite character that no single reference can adequately express its source.” 1 The same may often be said of scenes from early silent movies of Jesus’s life, whose mise en scène often reflect a bricolage of the visual, literary and cinematic sources available to their creators. Moreover, a tendency on the part of studios to release a few scenes of Christ’s life and ministry at a time, coupled with their distributors’ practice of buying and splicing films together at will, made possible myriad cinematic harmonizations of Jesus’s story.
