A Film Canon

 

 

This is a masterful adaptation of Lew Wallace's novel, translating its slave galleys, sea battle and chariot race into the most spectacular historical sequences since Intolerance, and construing its numerous crowds as variations on a single, infernal mass, culminating with the Hadean 'Valley of Lepers'. Combined with the graphic depictions of violence, this allows for a critique of imperial bondage worthy of Wallace's non-denominationalism, and evident in the refreshing heroism granted to the Jews, who are not only exonerated at the moment of crucifixion (the road to Calvary is pointedly lined by all the "nations of the world"; that is, by the ambit of the Roman Empire), but clarified as the matrix from which Christianity originally rose; its immediate ancestor, rather than its immediate enemy. That said, the conflation of Jew and Christian is a form of subjugation in itself, and can be read as simply eliding two thousand years of conflict, rather than attempting to remedy them. It does, however, pave the way for Niblo's most striking innovation: the condensation of Christ to a shimmering tactility - light in the shape of a hand - as if the disembodiment of the Ascension had been translated directly into cinematography. This is most poetically encapsulated at the moment of his birth, when moonlight, comets, shooting stars and the giant, crucifix-shaped, guiding star gather into a halo around Mary's head, forcing the first of a series of colour tableaux, most of which are modelled on iconic Renaissance paintings.