Les Martyrs Chrétiens, released in English as Christian Martyrs, plunges viewers into Nero’s arena in the aftermath of a Ben-Hur-like chariot race whose traces still litter the Circus: the film begins where a famed painting of an upturned chariot ends. A procession of ‘those who are about to die’ advances before the emperor, culminating in the arrival of the Christian martyrs, one of whom is both crucified and devoured by a lion through a cinematic trick that inspired one of the earliest ‘behind-the-scenes’ reports in film history. The tableau continues with a lion tamer confronting his beast in the guise of a gladiator painted by Gérôme. The scene is described, and perhaps narrated, using words from the novels Quo Vadis? and The Last Days of Pompeii. Even the panoramic camera movement that opens the film, seemingly proclaiming the novelty of cinema’s gaze upon antiquity, ultimately reveals itself to be rooted in a network of pictorial and lantern-slide traditions. By tracing such connections, this analysis shows how Christian Martyrs exemplifies the inter- and multi-mediality of early cinema, situated at the crossroads of literary, performative, pictorial, and spectacular traditions through which the medium appropriated and refashioned the ancient world.

The Vitagraph Company, established in New York City in 1897 as one of the first film production companies in the United States, had begun making film versions of historical narratives and literary classics in 1908. After several adaptations of Shakespeare and well-known ancient themes (Virginius, Saul and David) early in 1909, they produced The Way of the Cross in the summer of 1909. The basic premise parallels that of the Polish novel Quo Vadis, naming the Roman military officer protagonist Valerius instead of Vinicius, the Christian woman Leah instead of Lygia. But the conclusion parallels more closely the English melodrama The Sign of the Cross in that these protagonists submit to martyrdom in the arena to conclude the story. Director J. Stuart Blackton employed his characteristic scheme of creating multiple sets (17) and filling them with as many as 50 actors and extras in a single scene (e.g., the gladiatorial arena). The film resembles some of the others on this website by including black slaves and a tableau modeled after a widely familiar Gérôme painting. The lone copy of the film is held by the BFI, albeit with German intertitles as it comes from the Joye collection.