The trajectory traced by these films is far more than a retrospective devoted to Saint Francis: it constitutes a genuine history of the cinematic gaze upon the sacred. From Il poverello di Assisi by Enrico Guazzoni to Chiara by Susanna Nicchiarelli, passing through Francesco giullare di Dio by Roberto Rossellini and Fratello Sole, Sorella Luna by Franco Zeffirelli, we witness over a century of cultural, aesthetic and spiritual transformations.
The earliest films – Il poverello di Assisi by Guazzoni, Frate Sole by Falena e Corsi, Frate Francesco by Giulio Antamoro – belong to a moment in which cinema was still in the process of securing its cultural and symbolic legitimacy. In choosing Francis, the new medium aligned itself with an already consolidated iconographic horizon, a visual genealogy that enabled the cinematic image to root itself in a pre-existing tradition. The saint occupies the centre of the visual field, determining its moral and compositional order. Sanctity coincides with the stability of the image, with its formal harmony and semantic clarity. At this stage, the sacred presents itself as shared evidence, as the principle that organises representation and guarantees its coherence. In Antamoro’s film in particular, Francis acquires a more overtly spectacular dimension, revealing how early cinema negotiated between devotion and visual display.
With Rossellini, the gaze undergoes a structural transformation. In Francesco giullare di Dio, holiness takes shape within the concreteness of everyday gestures, the simplicity of bodies, the texture of communal life. The film dissolves iconic rigidity and introduces a new mobility, composed of episodes, encounters and imperfections. Francis moves through the world with quiet discretion, exposed to contingency and to the fragility of human experience. Poverty becomes an aesthetic principle as well: austerity of framing, sobriety of mise-en-scène, trust in the expressive power of minimal gestures. The sacred emerges as immanent experience, as a mode of being together, as a shared practice.
During the 1960s, reflection deepens and acquires heightened historical consciousness. Francesco d’Assisi by Liliana Cavani and Uccellacci e uccellini by Pier Paolo Pasolini situate the Franciscan figure within the tension between charismatic impulse and structures of power. Francis becomes the site at which the distance between evangelical radicalism and institutional organisation is measured, between the desire for renewal and the complexity of history. In Pasolini, the Franciscan legacy assumes an allegorical and critical dimension: it becomes a means of interrogating the present and of reflecting upon the transmission of a message that perpetually risks losing its original force.
With Fratello Sole, Sorella Luna, Zeffirelli engages the sensibility of an era marked by a search for authenticity and a widespread longing to return to essentials. The figure of Francis is inscribed within a poetic imaginary that dialogues with the cultural aspirations of the 1970s, assuming a symbolic function capable of speaking beyond strictly religious confines. The saint becomes a figure of reconciliation between the individual and nature, between interiority and the world.
When Cavani returns to the subject in Francesco, attention is directed towards the inner complexity and historical dimension of the character. The film explores the process through which a charismatic experience confronts the necessity of organisation, structure and duration. Sanctity appears as a field traversed by tensions and responsibilities, in which original radicalism measures itself against the concrete reality of choice.
More recently, Il sogno di Francesco by Renaud Fely and Arnaud Louvet and Chiara by Susanna Nicchiarelli orient the gaze towards relational and communal dimensions, restoring centrality to the plurality of voices that shaped the Franciscan experience. The attention devoted to Clare allows Franciscanism to be understood as a shared space of meaning, as a collective construction in which identity takes form through encounter with the other.
Taken together, these films do not merely recount the story of Francis; they reveal how each epoch feels compelled to appropriate and reinterpret him according to the spirit of its own time.