SINDON: The Shroud of Turin, a film by World’s Fair Pictures
The Shroud of Turin
The face on the Shroud as it appears on Secondo Pia’s 1898 photographic negative: a bearded man with closed eyes, pale against dark.
The record behind the film

THE SHROUD OF TURIN

A length of linen, fourteen feet long, with the faint image of a crucified man on it. Photographed for the first time in 1898. Examined for five days in 1978. Carbon-dated in 1988. Still unexplained.

Secondo Pia, May 1898. Musée de l’Elysée exhibition copy, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Giuseppe Enrie’s 1931 negative of the face: the image most people know, a face with shading and closed eyes.

What is known

The cloth, the image, the blood, and the examination of October 1978. Everything measured, with the source.

The Image
Two full-length negative prints of the Shroud displayed side by side in a church.

What is argued

The medieval date, the repair theory, the painting theory, the energy theories, and the Church's own position. Both sides, at full strength.

The Debate
A ballroom of the Royal Palace with chandeliers and a painted ceiling.

What the film invented

SINDON is a film, not a documentary. Five composite characters, a sealed room, a chalkboard and a page to sign. Here is the line between the record and the story.

Fact and Film

Seven things no serious party disputes.

  1. The image on the cloth is a photographic negative. Discovered by Secondo Pia, 28 May 1898. Documented Pia

  2. The image encodes three-dimensional information. Discovered on a VP-8 Image Analyzer by John Jackson and Eric Jumper, 19 February 1976. Documented Schumacher

  3. In October 1978 a team of American scientists examined the cloth around the clock for about 120 hours in the Royal Palace of Turin. Nothing like it had happened before and nothing like it has happened since. Documented Chronology

  4. In 1981 the team concluded that the image "is not the product of an artist" and that how it was produced "remains, now, as it has in the past, a mystery." Documented STURP 1981

  5. In 1988 three laboratories carbon-dated a corner sample to AD 1260 to 1390, and the Church announced the result itself. Documented Nature 1989

  6. The Church has never declared the Shroud authentic. It has owned the cloth since 1983 and calls it an icon. Documented JP II 1998

  7. No one has produced a full-size copy that matches all of the image's measured properties at once. Documented STURP 1981 Vatican News 2026

SINDON The Shroud of Turin

SINDON: The Shroud of Turin. A feature film from World's Fair Pictures. October 1978. Five scientists, one room, five days, and a page that needs five signatures.

Fact and FilmThe deck, by invitation

This site makes no claim about what the Shroud is. It reports what has been found, by whom, and what is still argued. Where it is wrong, write to info@worldsfairpictures.com.