The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ (Pathé Frères, 1903)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles was already at home when I returned from the Bears San Diego party last night, and we ended up watching an intriguing movie he’d stumbled upon online: The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUcQmM8qrOA), a French film made by Pathé Frères in 1903. This was one of at least three films about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ made in 1903 – the others were a straightforward filming of the annual Horitz Passion Play in Horitz, Bohemia (now it’s called Hořovice and it’s in the Czech Republic) and an American production by Sig Lubin that was cut up and released as a series of shorts because Lubin was a member of the Motion Picture Patents Trust and their policy was based on the idea that no one would sit through a movie longer than one reel (10 to 12 minutes at silent film speed). This was particularly interesting to me because after we watched The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ YouTube showed a cheerily irreverent video about Jesus films hosted by self-proclaimed atheist Steve Shives (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60vCFjbWCTs) that proclaimed 1912’s From the Manger to the Cross from the American Kalem company as the first film ever made about Jesus. The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ runs 45 minutes (unusually long for 1903) and it’s a film shrouded in mystery. It had two directors, Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca, and imdb.com lists credits for two cinematographers (Camille Legrand and Wormser) and two art directors (Gaston Dumensil and Vasseur), but the only actors credited are “Monsieur Moreau” as Joseph and “Madame Moreau” as his wife Mary, the Virgin Mother of God. (I like the irony of casting a real-life married couple as Joseph and Mary, and wonder if that’s been done in any Jesus movie since.)

Since it was made in 1903 it’s a set of pretty static tableaux and it would be utterly incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t know the story already, but it had a certain degree of charm. It begins with the Annunciation, the visit to Mary from the Angel Gabriel telling her that she’s pregnant with the Son of God, and ends with a surprisingly effectively filmed scene of the Resurrection even though it was done with simple double exposure of the rock moving and a platform device to show Christ rising from the tomb. Double exposure was also the technique used in an earlier scene showing Christ walking on the water. Nonguet and Zecca pushed 1903’s primitive effects technology to the limits, including an animated Star of Bethlehem – in this version the shepherds and the wise men don’t follow the star, the star follows them – and a quite good shot (probably done by masking part of the image so two separate scenes could be shot on the same strip of film) of the angels in their heavenly host looking down on the action featuring Joseph, Mary and Jesus. The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ is also noteworthy for the extensive early use of stencil color in some scenes. Stencil color was a process invented at Pathé by which watercolor-like dyes would be applied to the film using stencils to make sure the colors ended up where they were supposed to be. This was an improvement over the hand-painted colors used in a few American films like The Great Train Robbery (also 1903) but it was basically the same principle as was frequently done with still photos in the early days: a black-and-white print was painted over with watercolors to create the illusion of color. For some reason the colorizers (I can’t help but use the term!) of The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ decided to make all the Roman soldiers’ uniforms yellow, but for the most part the use of stencil colorization in this film is quite inventive and adds to its appeal even though the only colors routinely featured are yellow and blue. The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ is an engaging movie, well done within the limits of 1903 (both the technology and the creativity; this was well before the “grammar of film” developed and directors learned to change camera angles, shoot close-ups, and use intercutting – though William K. Dickson had pioneered intercutting in The Great Train Robbery to indicate different actions happening at the same time the same year The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ was made), and I was glad to have been able to watch it and to do so with perfect timing during the evening between Good Friday and Easter!