Jesus and the spread of the Gospel were among the very first subjects for motion pictures. In the late 1897, stage director Henry C. Vincent oversaw filming of The Passion Play of Oberammergau on a New York City rooftop. The finished film was part of a program assembled by Edwin S. Porter that included Magic-Lantern slides and a live choir. Several countries were quickly producing Gospels and short film versions of bestselling 19th century religious novels. Ferdinand Zecca, of the French film company, Pathé, directed the first screen version of Quo Vadis (1901) and a year later, La vie et la passion de Jésus Christ. Soon Porter would be introducting some of the first truly cinematic editing in his films, but Zecca's Passion remained essentially a series of tableaus — wide shots of figures who move primarily to pose a picture, against two-dimensional sets, each scene (that is to say, each shot) separated in this 1912 American version by titles: "The Annunciation," "The Flight to Egypt," etc. The effect, accentuated by hand-colored elements (like those lovely golden angel wings), is of an early Renaissance painting come to life. The simplicity of this parade of images is naïve and delightful, though the titles break up the flow. And some may find the ocasional Méliès-type special effects a little distracting: angels suddenly popping into the picture, a Resurrection in which Christ rises from the ground as if on an elevator. The thick wig and fake beard on Jesus doesn't help. My favorite moment is, ironically, the most naturalistic: on his way home with his father after cutting wood, little Jesus struggles manfully with a large axe on his shoulder.

From the Manger to the Cross (or Jesus of Nazareth)  (1912)
Directed by Sidney Olcott
Scenario by Gene Gauntier
Robert Henderson-Bland (Jesus), Mary (Gene Gauntier), Alice Hollister (Mary Magdalene), Samuel Morgan (Pilate)

   This American life of Christ is a very naturalistic interpretation, filmed on location in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, "and other authentic locations in Palestine." The "Flight to Egypt" shots feature Mary and Joseph with the actual Pyramids and the Great Sphinx in the background — something I don't recall seeing in any other version, and which seems now a great missed opportunity. The treatment is further rooted in reality by a mostly-discreet depiction of the miraculous: the viewer does not see the angel Mary sees, though Jesus' face lights up as he changes water into wine. Almost every episode is made up of a single wide shot, and these intercut with Scripture verses on title cards, making for a staccato rhythm of word and image. The limitations of the primitive film era are offset by certain unique strengths. Since the camera never moves in close, we're never given reason to doubt this Jesus is a creditable match for traditional conceptions of how Christ actually looked. And one place where the absence of cutting actually enhances the effect is the scene where people wait in line to be healed by Jesus: a demoniac jerks around in the lower right corner of the frame during the entire long take, so that when his turn finally comes, his healing is particularly effective. A rare scene involving more than one angle on the action features Mary and Joseph looking vainly for Jesus among the crowds coming down the road, then pushing against the flow to return to Jerusalem — there is a documentary-like realism in the power of just one or two cuts that must have been astonishing to the viewer. Then again, one wonders what this motion picture Gospel must have meant to people who had never seen any depictions of before this of Jesus with the wind blowing his hair, or his very human collapse of face into hands to weep over Lazarus.

A couple years later, director Sidney Olcott was to borrow costumes from the Metropolitan Opera and film the first short screen version of Ben Hur (1907) in Manhattan's Battery Park — but that even that film was not much more of an epic than this modest life of Christ. It would be the Italians, appropriately, who were to invent the screen spectacle, no doubt inspired by the ever-present ruins and reminders of ancient glory, and intrigued by the possibilities of cinema in bringing them back to life.

Quo Vadis  (1912)
Directed by Enrico Guazzoni
Scenario by Enrico Guazzoni, from a novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Amleto Novelli (Vinicius), Gustav Serena (Petronius), Amelia Cattaneo (Eunice), Carlo Cattaneo (Nero)

   The birth of the motion picture epic is generally dated to the 1908 Italian film The Last Days of Pompeii, based on one of a standard set of 19th century religious novels that would be made and remade over the next half of the 20th century. Pompeii launched a steady stream of Italian epics set in ancient Rome, Babylon, Carthage, Nineveh — ever longer films on ever larger sets with ever more extras, leading the film industry worldwide until World War I. One of several specialists in the genre, Enrico Guazzoni filmed this second version Quo Vadis?, the prime exemplar of a subsidiary genre to "Life of Christ" films, one that might be called the "Christ vs. Caesar" genre. The title of this film means "Where are you going?" and the question is posed by the Ascended Christ to Peter in a vision as the latter departs Rome on the eve of an Imperial persecution. The main story, however, focuses on a Roman commander, Vinicius, who falls for a Christian girl, Lygia, and is so drawn into the underground Christian community, experiencing a personal transformation along the way.

Meanwhile, would-be-poet emperor, Nero, burns Rome for his inspiration and blames the tragedy on the Christians, bringing the conflict between Christ and Caesar, as always, into the arena. The inevitable meeting of the Roman arena and motion pictures matched the first worthy successor to the former in thousands of years. The Biblical Epic has proven a way of having the best of both worlds, an excuse to dwell upon the gory spectacle in all its gaudy sex and violence, then wash it all clean with a religious martyrdom. And while Quo Vadis? is ostensibly about choosing directions, the film somehow contrives to have it both ways, both Christian martyrdom and political revolution, with Vinicius leading the choice not so much for Christ as against Caesar.

The arena scenes here introduce epic scale in terms of extras in the stands, variety of action and performers (including animals), and depth of composition. But film directors still hadn't figured out that they could actually move the camera — there's not so much as a simple panoramic shot here — so the epic mode at first was generally utilized by passing elements through the frame: marching soldiers, a massive boat floating by Nero's summer home, people fleeing the fires of burning Rome. In a couple sequences, we see some experiments in cutting the action into smaller angles, including point of view shots, but these are the exception to the rule, which involves static medium-wide shots separated by title cards — which are more often than not redundant in merely telling us what we're about to see. The original story is a bit more complicated and shaded than is able to be communicated in this silent film, despite the epic number of reels — twelve, a new record for the cinema, making this film the very first "feature-length" movie. Thus while this film expanded the possibilities of cinema, it also bumped up against the limitations of that era.

It would take an American filmmaker named D. W. Griffith to expand the possibilities of cinema further. Inspired by the Italian epics, Griffith was to combine the revolutionary techniques he'd been experimenting with and the Italian sense of scale to make his own bit of epic history.