ZECCA, FERDINAND

(1864-1947)

Director and film pioneer. Ferdinand Zecca was born in Corsica in 1864 and later moved to Paris with his family. His father was a machinist at the Funambule and later a stage manager at the Theatre de l'Ambigu. Zecca originally followed in his father's footsteps, becoming at first a performer and stage manager himself, and later venturing into the new world of cinema. Zecca had a few brushes with the cinema early in his career. He did voice recordings of speeches forPathéphono (his sister worked for Pathé as a projectionist) and acted in Pathé films for the Dufayel department stores (for whomMélièsalso made films). He was also hired on atGaumont(byAlice Guy) for a brief time in 1898, during which he made his first film,Les Méfaits d'une tête de veau, often credited to Guy (ironically, one of the few she is credited with but that she actually did not make).

Zecca's big "break" came in 1898 during the Paris Exposition, when he was hired byCharles Pathéto run the Pathé pavilion at the exposition. Pathé was so impressed by Zecca that he immediately hired him on as head of production at Pathé, and Zecca would ultimately become studio director at the enormous Vincennes studio when it opened in 1902.

In his early filmmaking career, Zecca made mostly very popular copies of films by other people. Two of his early successes,Ce que l'on voit de mon sixième(1901) andPar la trou de la serrure(1901) were copies of English comedies. Several of hisféeries, includingLes Sept châteaux du diable(1901), were clearly "inspired" by Méliès. And yet Zecca also demonstrated very early a talent for filmmaking in his own right and an ability to innovate and move film in completely new directions. His fantasy filmA la conquête de l'air(1901), about a flying machine flying over Paris, is a silent film classic, for example.

Zecca is also credited with developing the sentimental social melodrama, one of the best known of which was the very successfulHistoire d'un crime(1901), which recounts in several tableaux the fall of a gambler and his subsequent crime and punishment.The film is noteworthy both in its social and moralizing dimension and in its attempt to develop an extended narrative in film. However, even in this area, one might note the influence of others. Two of Zecca's other well-known social melodramas,Au bagne(1906) andL'Honneur d'un père(1906), are near exact copies of films by Guy,Un cas de divorce(1906) andLe Fils du garde chasse(1906).

The film widely considered to be Zecca's masterpiece is the four-partLa Vie et la passion de notre seigneur Jésus Christ(1907). The film was codirected withLucien Nonguetand featured the cinematography ofSegundo de Chomon. Composed of thirty-eight scenes or tableaux,La Vie et la passionwas made in the way that other long epics were made at Pathé, of reels of various lengths consisting of various combinations of scenes. This structure allowed theaters to decide how much of these long films they wanted to show and how much they would pay to do so.

Apart from its variable structure,La Vie et la passionis noteworthy in that it is one of the few life of Christ films made that was not inspired by the passion plays. Zecca and Nonguet created the story directly, inspired by paintings of the life of Jesus found in museums around Paris. In fact, many of the scenes in the film directly echo or represent such paintings. The same is true of Nonguet's epic biopicNapoléon Bonaparte. Another genre in which Zecca was a pioneer was that of the reconstructedactualitéor newsreel. Such films represented events that were in the news. The most famous example is Zecca'sCatastrophe de la Martinique(1902), which was not actually newsreel footage but instead recreated the eruption of Mont Pélé on the island of Martinique.

Over the course of his filmmaking career, Zecca made several hundred films and trained many, if not most, of the key directors at Pathé. He worked most closely with Lucien Nonguet in the beginning and withRené LePrincenear the end, but he collaborated at one time or another with many of the directors at Pathé. Among Zecca's other films areL 'Enfantprodigue(1901),Histoire d'un crime(1901),Quo Vadis(1901),Ali Baba et les quarante voleurs(1902),La Belle au bois dormant(1902),La Fée printemps(1902),Les Victimes de l'alcoolisme(1902),La Grève(1904),Brigandage moderne(1905),Le Pêcheur de perles(1905),Rêve à la lune/L'Amant de lune(1905),Excursion dans la lune(1908),Cléopatre(1910),La Fièvre de l'or(1912), andCoeur de femme(1913).

As time went on Zecca became more and more involved in the business of the studio and less involved in filmmaking. By 1915, he had given up filmmaking altogether and was sent all over Europe and the United States attending to Pathé business. He returned to France in 1923, where he took over control of the Pathé Baby division, a manufacturing and marketing branch that sold home movie cameras.