The Ascension of the Lord: My favorite screen depiction

The story of Jesus is told in a series of 30 or so vignettes, identified in intertitles: “The Annunciation,” “The Wedding at Cana,” “Peter’s denial,” etc. There are no other title cards, no dialogue; the Gospel scenes are depicted visually. At a time when most films were only a few minutes long, Life and Passion runs a remarkably lengthy 44 minutes.

Vignettes are staged like a theatrical pageant, with painted backdrops and theatrical props, filmed from the center of the front row by a fixed camera that seldom moves or cuts within a scene. (A few limited camera movements and intercut close-ups are among the film’s innovative touches.)

Compositions are inspired by sacred art, notably the popular works of the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré, whose well-known biblical wood engravings for an 1866 edition of the King James Bible are among the most familiar images of biblical scenes. The effect is thus of sacred art brought to flickering life.

The film’s use of color is worth noting. Like many films of the period, Life and Passion uses tinting, for example, to suggest night by dying an entire scene blue — but Pathé had also developed a special stencil process for coloring individual objects in a shot: gold for an angel’s wings or for the holy star, reds and greens for robes, etc.

Stencils approximately matched the shape of each object, but the dyes had to be painstakingly applied by hand to each frame in a shot — hundreds of frames for each minute of film — and each print of the film had to be individually colored! For obvious reasons, this technique was used sparingly, but when it is used — as it is in the Ascension — the effect is glorious.

What I love about the Ascension shot is the way it blends the film’s two principal influences of Christian sacred art and theater. As in other scenes in the film, the depiction of the Ascension imagines a medieval three-story cosmos with heaven above and hell below, visualized through the exigencies of stagecraft. (The Resurrection scene works the same way; Christ does not emerge horizontally from the sepulcher, but literally rises up from Sheol on a stage elevator, like a ghost or demon appearing from the underworld in a play.)

In the film’s final shot, Jesus (a rather hefty Monsieur Moreau in a stage wig and beard) blesses his disciples one last time; then, as the disciples kneel in homage, Jesus is surrounded by a golden nimbus and halo-like cloud which rises slowly and recedes from the camera.

Then, just when you wonder where Jesus can possibly go, the heavens are opened in the sky above the disciples, with Jesus sitting down on the right hand of a white-bearded God the Father with a dove over their heads, surrounded by angels playing musical instruments. It’s a transcendent finale to a remarkable early film that is equally accessible to the very youngest and very oldest viewers.