Cinema Before 1300. 2023. USA. Directed by Jerome Hiler. DCP. Courtesy of Harvard Film Archive. 100 min.
Like his discovery of cinema when he was a child, the encounter with medieval stained glass windows was a revelation for Jerome Hiler. The filmmaker, also a stained glass artist for years, traveled to France and England in the 1990s to study and photograph the windows of the great cathedrals and chapels built in the XII and XIII centuries. His insightful commentary and a selection of 35mm slides illustrated Cinema Before 1300, a lecture on the sensually spiritual language of stained glass, simultaneously a devotional art and “mass media.” Under the initiative of the Harvard Film Archive, Hiler expanded the original lecture, which he performed live in different art centers and universities, and transformed it into a feature-length motion picture. Cinema Before 1300 is a branching meditation on the significance of this (and all) light-based projective art.
“More than eight hundred years ago, a confluence of technological, philosophical and financial upswellings converged to create the most advanced form of mass media the world had known: stained glass. Built en masse across France, Spain, England and Germany, great cathedrals were designed to display giant windows that told stories through light, color and form. Every day, thousands of viewers arrived to marvel at the glorious colors and hear stories recounted beneath their realization in light. This program looks at the first 100 years (or so) of stained glass’s magnificent birth and culmination” (Jerome Hiler).