The Nativity

Louis Feuillade, 1910, for Gaumont's Film esthétique series: the Nativity as nine painted tableaux, from the shepherds to the Flight into Egypt. Renée Carl, Alice Tissot, Maurice Vinot. Feuillade skips the Annunciation and goes straight to the child, Herod, the Magi, the massacre. The last scene, a rest beside a sphinx, was close enough to Luc-Olivier Merson's 1879 painting that the painter sued Gaumont for plagiarism and lost on appeal. Released in the U.S. as Herod and the Newborn King. Fourteen minutes of a director who would invent Fantômas three years later, practicing how a picture can be a stage and a painting at once.