They had a brief glimpse of Christ at the end of Birt of a Nation, but looking over the history books, it appears as if this is the first feature length film to depict the miracles and the Passion of the Christ. There was a series of short films by Pathe Review detailing the life of Christ in different chapters, but this looks to be the first feature length film to do so.
shareI believe this was the first. I am not a film historian (just a film fan), so I am not precisely sure. There is an Italian silent feature, CABRIA from 1914, that gave a lot of inspiration to Griffith (mostly for the Babylon sequences). Now, I've never seen it, but I doubt that movie featured Christ.
shareI was surprised the way this story disappeared in the second half. They just came back to it a few times when they needed to draw a comparison to the other stories. Anyway, thanks for the reply.
shareNope they had depictions of Christ in the Late 1800s, little known fact is Churches often where used a Theaters when the Art form was developing.
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As another poster already said, no, it wasn't the first feature-length passion film, although it might've been the first such film made in Hollywood. There were numerous films made about Christ since nearly the beginning of the medium. As to feature-length films, films of hour length or so weren't very common until around 1913. By 1916, California had just became a location for film production and still wasn't the centre of the industry.
Regardless, what some consider to be the first feature-length film is Pathé's La Vie et la passion de Jésus Christ, which they worked on from about 1901 to 1905 and releasing several versions--reaching somewhere around 45 minutes in length in some versions. This film is still available today. Here's IMDB's page for it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0127962/
Just about every other major film company made similar passion productions, and many of them were extraordinarily long for their time. This particular Pathé film, however (and they made more than one passion film), seems to have been the longest to date.
Additionally, one of the earliest American feature-length films is From the Manger to the Cross (1912), and I think it's over an hour in length. On a DVD, this film is available with the Pathé film. Here's IMDB's page for it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0002199/
"The cinéma is an invention without a future," said Louis Lumière.share