Pope Leo XIII Being Seated Bestowing Blessing (1898)
★★½ — Pope Leo XIII Being Seated Bestowing Blessing (1898)
There is a reasonable argument that the single most historically significant thing about Pope Leo XIII Being Seated Bestowing Blessing is not what happens in it, but the simple fact that it exists at all. Produced in 1898 by the Lumière Pictures company, this one-minute film is widely regarded as one of the earliest known recordings of a reigning pontiff, capturing Pope Leo XIII seated in a chair, attended by guards and other figures, before offering a blessing to the camera. For anyone with even a passing interest in the history of cinema, that alone is worth pausing on.
The man behind the camera was William K.L. Dickson, a figure whose place in the story of early film is considerable. Dickson had been instrumental in the development of motion picture technology during his time working with Thomas Edison, and by the late 1890s he was producing short actuality films across Europe. His earlier work includes pieces like Annie Oakley (1894), which gives some sense of the kind of brief, observational filming that was the order of the day. The subjects tended to be whoever or whatever was interesting enough to point a camera at, and in 1898, a sitting Pope very much qualified. Leo XIII himself was by this point in his eighties, having been elected to the papacy in 1878, well before the motion picture camera existed as a practical device. That a man born in 1810 ended up preserved on film, even fleetingly, is the sort of historical accident that makes early cinema so peculiar and fascinating.
As a production, there is not a great deal to assess in conventional terms. There is no script, no narrative, no cinematographic ambition beyond pointing the apparatus at a notable subject and letting it run. The film sits in a long tradition of short documentary recordings from the period, the kind of actuality footage that predates any real distinction between film-as-art and film-as-record. For context on where documentary film has travelled since, the gap between this and something like Next Goal Wins (2014) or Ben Fogle and the Buried City (2023) is rather enormous. What Lumière Pictures captured here is better understood as a historical document than a film in any modern sense, a brief, grainy record of a moment that would otherwise have vanished entirely.
A-Z World Movie Tour Vatican City https://youtu.be/3IVQ-1t92hA?si=w8pWiZ2eJKWXhIHB Pope Leo XIII became Pope around 10 years before moving pictures were even invented (around 1888) and was born in 1810. This makes Pope Leo XIII arguably the earliest person ever caught on film. All this shows, is the pope sitting around and waving. It's not even a film really. However, we do what we gotta do for the green map.
And really, that is the only honest way to come at this one. The "green map" completionism is a pursuit I have a lot of time for, and Vatican City was always going to throw up something unusual, but even by the standards of early actuality films this is thin material. The historical footnote quality of it is genuinely interesting for about thirty seconds of reflection, and then there is simply nothing more to say. Sometimes a film turns up on a list and you watch it, tick the box, and move on. This is very much one of those. A curiosity, no more.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1898 | Watched: 2025-09-15
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from William K.L. Dickson: Annie Oakley (1894)
More from Italy: Nightmare City (1980) · Cemetery Man (1994) · One Way or Another (1975) · Chicken for Linda! (2023)
More from the 1890s: Annie Oakley (1894)
More documentary: Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Style Wars (1983) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)
