Pope Leo XIII Being Seated Bestowing Blessing (1898)
★★½ — Pope Leo XIII Being Seated Bestowing Blessing (1898)
What does the oldest living person ever caught on film look like on screen? Mostly, he just sits there and waves. And honestly, fair enough. He's the Pope.
This is my Vatican City entry for the A-Z World Movie Tour, and I'll be straight with you: calling this a film is generous. It's a short snippet of footage, barely a minute, showing Pope Leo XIII seated in what I assume is some corner of the Vatican, offering a blessing to the camera. He raises a hand. He sits. That's your lot. Roll credits, if there even are credits.
But here's the thing that genuinely stopped me in my tracks when I looked into it. Pope Leo XIII was born in 1810. He became Pope around 1878, which is roughly ten years before the very concept of moving pictures even existed. The man was already well into his papacy before a single frame of film had ever been shot anywhere in the world. And yet here he is, captured on camera, moving, breathing, waving. It's an extraordinary thought when you sit with it for a moment. You're looking at a man born over two hundred years ago. That's not nothing.
In terms of pure historical weight, this sits alongside something like Annie Oakley (1894), where the thrill isn't really in the filmmaking craft, it's in the sheer fact of existence. The footage exists. Someone pointed a camera at one of the most powerful figures in the world in 1898 and pressed record, and by some miracle we can still watch it today on YouTube at no cost whatsoever. That's remarkable, even if what's actually on screen wouldn't keep a toddler entertained for more than thirty seconds.
Because let's not pretend otherwise. As a piece of cinema, there's nothing here. No composition to speak of, no drama, no narrative thrust of any kind. It's a document, not a film. The camera is planted, the Pope does his thing, and that's the end of it. I've seen more compelling footage on a supermarket CCTV system.
And yet I can't bring myself to be too hard on it. The A-Z World Movie Tour throws up entries like this occasionally, things that exist on the outer fringes of what we'd normally call a film, and part of the fun is sitting with the discomfort of that. Vatican City is not exactly a prolific filmmaking nation. This is what's on offer, and so this is what I watched, green map tile duly coloured in.
Two and a half stars feels about right. One and a half of those is pure historical curiosity, the other is a small, genuine moment of wonder at the fact that film technology and a very long-lived pope happened to overlap just enough for this to exist at all. The rest is, I'll admit, just me doing what I've gotta do for the map.
If you fancy more early film oddities from around this era, my thoughts on Annie Oakley (1894) are worth a look. A similarly slim runtime, a similarly massive historical footprint.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1898 | Watched: 2025-09-15
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from William K.L. Dickson: Annie Oakley (1894)
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More from the 1890s: Annie Oakley (1894)
More documentary: Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Style Wars (1983) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)
