Page - 11 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/01

lievers to be not representations but rather direct traces of the divine and thus invested with a unique performative power. More generally, the approach al- lows us to recognize the role of textiles as powerful and controversial parts and products of cultural practice. At the center of Wyss-Giacosa’s essay is the book De linteis sepulchralibus Christi servatoris crisis historica (About a historical decision on the burial shrouds of Christ the Savior, Antwerp, 1624), a hitherto neglected treatise in which the Besançon physician and scholar Jean-Jacques Chifflet wrote about a competitor of the shroud of Turin, a large cloth preserved in the Franche-Comté capital that was considered to hold an “imprint” left by Christ’s body on his burial linen. More specifically, the article focuses on the highly effective illustrative strategy deployed by the author in his argument for his local shroud. Discussion of the cloth’s rendering in a remarkable engraving is accompanied by analysis of the high circulation, use and impact of Chifflet’s selection of images, and the broad implications of their reception. Visual imagery also has a significant role in the last two articles. They deal with the modern period, offering analyses of the Gospel narrative as conveyed through the prism of the new medium of cinema. Cristiana Facchini’s article explores the relationship between select early silent films devoted to the life of Christ and the historiographical debate about the “historical Jesus” that had been so influen- tial throughout the nineteenth century. Both were a product of the impact of modernity on religion: while the former was indicative of the historical turn and an increased interest in precisely reframing the history of Christianity through a methodologically sound analysis of the past, the latter was the outcome of tech- nological innovation’s exploitation of the possibilities for the re-presentation of the past for a wider audience. The article explores the interaction between these realms of modern culture, claiming that in terms of representations of religion and a historical past, the trajectories of the “historical Jesus” and the “cinematic Christ” had features in common as they became public knowledge for an incip- ient mass culture, although they deployed different methodologies and analyti- cal devices in order to convey historical realism. While scholarship exploited the powerful tools of philology and textual analysis that were combined with increas- ing attention to how historical sources might be used, cinematic depictions re- lied upon visual imagery, music and a literal transposition of the Gospel narrative. Facchini’s essay offers new insight into these two historical imaginations, observ- ing that although the two representations might share certain features and over- lap, more often they generated different results and contradicted each other. Finally, the last article, by Nicola Martellozzo, deals with what is probably the most famous film on this topic, Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, IT/FR 1964) by Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. Viewed against the backdrop of the highly conflictual politics of Italy’s post- war period, the film is analyzed partly as the outcome of a long process of ne- Editorial | 11www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1, 7–21