This is one of the earliest versions depicting the life of Christ. And what a film it is! It's partly colourised (but only parts of most frames). So you get a movie made over a hundred years ago hand coloured and 44 minutes long which is much longer than the average films of the time (1-5 minutes). This was made to last, you can tell - the effort it took to hand- colour hundreds of feet of film and shoot that length with so many decorations.
The opening scene - The Annunciation is clearly made in a setting inspired by the Italian Renaissance art, just like the Last Supper scene later in the film. And if you put yourself back in those days where film was just coming out of its embryonic state, as it were, people were used to seeing paintings, pictures and frescoes, and of course, those films were made to look like those paintings only moving, which was in a way a miracle of a painting coming alive. Static camera shots (there was no zooming or panning of camera at the time) only add to that effect. In this film, however, they used camera panning in two of the scenes.
As I mentioned, it's whopping 44 minutes long and the director managed to fit the events of entire life of Christ into it - from Annunciation to Ascension (Mel Gibson had 2 hours of running time and managed to fit only a quarter of the events - just teasing). So it is like a visual Bible reminiscent of those stained glass windows in cathedrals called the Poor Man's Bible made not only for beauty and inspiration but also for those who couldn't read (which was the vast majority of the population as books were rare and very expensive). So the film is also made of stand-alone parts or scenes, just like those windows. The other thing to mention is that it is made in a fashion of passion plays (hence the English name of the film). In good old days those were very common throughout Europe for many centuries wherein actors performed scenes from the life of Christ and saints in towns around the holy days. So, clearly the settings in this film look very much like open theatre stage decorations. However, the progress, it seems was made in shooting some open air scenes as well. They also used special effects - combined shots. Some are really incredible for the time, like the walking on water in the catching of fish scene or transfiguration scene or or the scene with lightning on Calvary. And so... the development in film-making continues...
The film runs at normal speed so there's no fast moving comic effect everyone is used to. And the actors face quite a difficult task: there was no speech possible as they were used to in theatre and had very limited use of facial expressions (there were no close-up camera shots at the time, although they made two here), so they only had to make use of their body language and arms, which looks a bit over the top at times. There are no title cards in the film apart from the scene titles, so the viewer is meant to know at least the basics of the four Gospels, which was, I'm sure, a lot more common back then than today. Enjoy, highly recommended.
