The Christian epic: a film tradition

Abstract

Among the different aspects of the Classic Culture that the cinema has transmitted from 1895, there is a not contemptible amount of movies that reports the relationship between the Christianism and the Roman Empire. Inspired especially in the novels written in the years following the bloom of the archaeology, they range between the Christian piety and a political interpretation. In any case, they form specific epic cycles inside the wide filmographic spectrum that expands a genuine classical tradition of the XXth century, which closed an important cycle at the beginning of the 1970’s; it raises again in the shape of television series in the eighties and it seems to have given way to the political epics in the dawn of the third millenium.