Upload of illustrations in progress

By PANTELIS MICHELAKIS

(Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford)

This essay concerns eleven of the BFI National Archive’s Greek-subject films that have little in common. They were made across a quarter of a century, in four countries, by companies with very different ambitions. The shortest is George Méliès’s Le Parapluie fantastique (Star-Film, 1903). It runs for three minutes and is a conjuring act featuring a magician who turns himself Greek and produces nine women from an umbrella. The longest is L’Odissea (Milano Films, 1911), which runs for some forty minutes, is based on Homer’s Odyssey, and travelled to America behind one of the most elaborate publicity campaigns the trade had yet mounted.

The others are Amour d’esclave (Pathé frères, 1907), about a slave sent to dance for a jaded master and poisoned by his jealous wife. Two Luis Feuillade one-reelers for Gaumont follow: Idylle corinthienne (1909), about a girl sold from a Corinthian courtyard into an Alexandrian slave market and recognised by the tune she once danced to; and La Légende de Midas (1910), about a king given ass’s ears and a barber who whispers the secret into the earth. Two subjects by Società Italiana Cines follow: La morte di Socrate (1909), about the sentencing of the great philosopher to death and his final hours; and Antigone (1911), about the young tragic heroine who attempts to bury her brother’s body and refuses the freedom obedience offers. Elettra (1909), by Aquila Films, focuses on another tragic heroine who waits for her brother’s return to take revenge against her mother. La caduta di Troia (1911), by Itala Film, is an epic about Helen being carried to Troy and the subsequent destruction of the city. Léonce Perret’s L’Esclave de Phidias (Gaumont, 1917) is a melodrama about the Greek sculptor Phidias whose inspiration comes from his slave and whose ruin is brought about by his mistress. Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Helen of Troy (1927) is a comedy about Helen and the war fought to recover her, of which some thirty minutes of eighty-seven survive (BFI collections record 150030263; AFI Catalog 11468).^[1]

Almost half of the films exist only at the BFI (Idylle corinthienne, Elettra, La Légende de Midas, L’Esclave de Phidias, and The Private Life of Helen of Troy), and three of the relevant prints are among the 1,128 titles that reached London in 1977 from the collection assembled by the Abbé Josef Joye for teaching at a Basel seminary. A body of films gathered with ‘no particular collecting philosophy’^[2] (Dixon, analysis 36) has no clear organising principle. Provenance only explains why these prints are in London. ‘Greek-subject’ is also a label applied from outside, and it tells us little about how the films themselves represent or engage with ancient Greece.

These films could be studied through two different approaches to film history, but most have received little attention from either. Histories of early cinema approach antiquity films as evidence for industrial development (Abel, 1994), for the emergence of narrative (Brewster, Jacobs, 1997), or for the trade’s search for cultural legitimacy (Uricchio, Pearson, 1993). Classical reception approaches them through adaptation (Winkler, 2009), accuracy (Solomon, 2001), nationalism (Wyke, 1997), or the afterlife of a text (O'Rawe, 2022). Both approaches treat classical material as content carried into a new medium. Between them they explain why L’Odissea and The Private Life of Helen of Troy have some bibliography whereas Le Parapluie fantastique and Idylle corinthienne have almost no bibliography at all. The question runs in two directions: what did early cinema contribute to the ways ancient Greece was conceived? and what did an engagement with ancient Greece do to early film practice? This analysis is primarily concerned with the second element of the question, though the two prove hard to keep apart, since the inherited material set problems cinema had not chosen, and the answers it found became part of what later films could use. My claim is that Greek antiquity functioned for these films less as a body of stories than as a repertoire of operations: a stock of things that could be done with a body, a costume, a pose, a substitution, a frame.

What reached the studios was never a recoverable Greece, but a composite one assembled out of canonical texts in translation, academic painting, neoclassical sculpture, theatre, opera, ballet, photography, archaeology, and the practices of exhibition. None of the eleven prints attempts to strip the layers back towards an original ancient culture. Individual films can be seen making the substitution of post-classical content as a deliberate strategy: Ivo Blom and Maria Wyke show the Pineschi Saffo of 1909 situating ancient Greece in the Villa Borghese at a temple built in 1789 and a fountain of the 1830s, ‘authenticating the classical by means of the neo-classical’.^[3] Although the travelogues of this period were filming the Acropolis and other archaeological sites, the costume subjects went elsewhere, to a vocabulary of performance they already had from works of reception.

I qualify ancient Greece as ‘composite’ to describe not a set of sources but the condition in which it reached the studios. Adaptation focuses on identifiable source texts, while reception examines successive reinterpretations, and intermediality explores relations between media. What concerns me here is the repertoire that had accumulated before any specific reconstruction of a place or time, or adaptation of a text, began: a stock of Greek matter detached from any recoverable original, lodged as much in what a body could be trained to do as in what could be looked at, and available to be worked on. The cinema of attractions is not the frame here either: nine of the eleven prints postdate the period for which the concept was framed (Gunning, 1990). Greek material reached 1900 by many routes, and each transmits something different. A photograph gives access to a site, a painting to a pose already fixed, a novel to an interior life. Opera and ballet had carried the same material for a century and a half, the pantomime and the féerie had made it a stock of transformations, and by the 1900s the loose idiom known as ‘Grecian dance’ had converted it into a trainable manner of moving a body (Michelakis, 2018: 194-212). Such traditions carried stories and settings but, most importantly, they also transmitted a set of things a body can be taught to do: a way of standing, drapery in motion, a hand laid on a lyre, a solo performance around a statue while a pipe plays. Cinema could draw on this rich repertoire, both to enhance it and to challenge itself.

The eleven films discussed here are only a small selection, and what they support is an argument about what the material made possible rather than what was typical. They are valuable because they survive as objects with recoverable histories of colouring, translation, circulation, and exhibition, which allows performance, reception, and archival transmission to be examined together rather than separately. Three decisions about evidence govern what follows. First, the print is the primary unit of analysis. Second, the record of production, exhibition, and circulation is treated as evidence about the viewing experience rather than context for it, since a film coloured in a stencil workshop and then finished in the hall by an accompanist and a lecturer was not a stable thing that circulation subsequently modified. Third, the claims are limited to what the BFI prints of the eleven films can support. Where the argument reaches past them it goes through prints of the same films held elsewhere, the filmographic and trade record, or through analyses published elsewhere on this site and beyond, rather than through readings of films outside this group. Four sections follow. ‘Composition’ asks where the repertoire came from, and finds the films mixing civilisations into one world and marking distinctions only where the plot requires them, with accuracy beside the point in both cases. ‘Operation’ asks what each print does with this material, and gives each film a verb (manufactures, listens, withholds, stills) naming what the film finds not yet stabilized in the medium: something it could not yet do, or something it could do with no settled use. ‘Agency’ focuses on action that falls to figures and objects the stories do not credit (a slave, a lyre, a stand of reeds) rather than to the men who own them. ‘Circulation’ finds that nothing moves unaided, either outside the films or inside: a tune needs a trained body, a secret needs reeds and witnesses, a film needs a hall and a lecturer.

Composition

This section looks at examples of how an ancient world is assembled out of disparate materials that do not naturally belong together. The term ‘composition’ describes the films’ actual method without demanding historical accuracy, a demand that has historically yielded little insight. Rather than keeping the distinct civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean or the varying strata of the classical tradition apart, these films mix them as a deliberate technique.

Ivo Blom’s account of Itala shows the company recycling sets, costumes, and actors between productions, so that scenography from La caduta di Troia reappears the same year in Clio e Filete (1911).^[4] A décor that circulates is evidence about a stock room rather than about the distinct iconographic identity of this or that civilisation: the props contribute to a generic look rather than evoking a specific place. Mostly the mixing is unmarked and total. La légende de Midas takes a Phrygian king from Ovid and dresses him in what the period reads as Greek drapery and Romanising costume, in a pastoral landscape with nothing in it to fix a place or time. In Caserini’s Antigone, what a spectator reads as Theban sovereignty is an iconography of Roman office, complete with civic architecture, columns, soldiers, and ceremonial entries [figs. 1, 2]. Le Parapluie fantastique takes the logic to its limit. The conjurer shakes women out of his umbrella one after another, their costumes shifting from the folkloric and the modern towards Greek drapery, and then unmakes each of them, so that the sequence is bracketed at both ends by the world of 1900.^[5] The scenery follows rather than precedes the costume, since the painted booth behind the figures becomes a Greek temple only after the bodies in front of it have already become Greek [figs. 3-5]. Here Greece operates less as a place than as a performative repertoire, authorising a sequence of transformations rather than providing a historically defined setting.

The strata of the classical tradition are mixed on the same principle, a modern object standing in for an ancient one each time. L’Esclave de Phidias builds fifth-century Athens out of a Riviera villa and Italianate gardens,^[6] and its actors pause in poses that echo the statuary around them until still bodies and figures carved out of stone are hard to tell apart. Amour d’esclave takes its Athens from the nineteenth-century ‘neo-Grec’ revival in painting (Abel, 1994: 166-67), and its dream sequence, in which a soloist and a corps of eighteen dancers turn their veils into a wheel of colour, from the ‘Grecian dance’ of the period rather than from anything Attic [figs. 6-9]. That idiom was diffuse by design, reducing Greece to a pictorial mode bound to a pose, a temple, a white robe, a classical name (Michelakis, 2018: 197, 200-201). Movement is itself an iconographic marker here, aligned with the robe and the temple and reinforcing them.

Where worlds are separated, the separation performs a narrative function. In Idylle corinthienne, the Alexandrian scenes are distinctly Egyptian, furnished with the Egyptianising panels, costume, and turbaned figures that the period’s Egyptomania had made legible at sight [fig. 10].^[7] The Corinthian scenes evoke Greece without being in any way Corinthian: a flock driven through a courtyard, a garlanded bust, flowers, a girl in white, a solo dance in stylised procession around the statue while a pipe plays [fig. 11].  It adds up to a coherent world, but a pastoral one, assembled from bucolic poetry and neoclassical genre painting rather than from anything that would place it at Corinth. Both halves are marked in different registers: one iconography points at a place, the other at a manner of moving and feeling that makes the recognition at the end of the film legible. Neither is archaeological. The film reproduces a pre-existing division, making visible to a spectator, in one story, the nineteenth-century arrangement by which some pasts are given a specifiable location, costume, and physiognomy, to be identified and held at a distance, while others are being treated as less foreign. The licence these films take with Greek material, to perform it rather than reconstruct it, begins in that division, which is colonial on both sides of the divide.

Two films reach for crowds, monumentality, and scale rather than for what a single trained body can do. La caduta di Troia stages a Homeric subject in a register the Italian historical film was still developing. What lends the myth the authority of imperial history is mass scenes and processional entries rather than any distinct iconography [fig. 12]. L’Odissea does the same with spectacular sets, special effects, and landscapes [figs. 13-14]. A third film inverts the composite instead of supplementing it. In The Private Life of Helen of Troy, anachronism becomes the joke. Helen’s Sparta is furnished in the decorative idiom of 1927. The mismatch is a cue to the film’s method: ‘private life’ is a modern category, and the title signals that Helen’s epic story will be recast as domestic material.

Hervé Dumont’s filmography (Dumont, 2009) allows the distribution of films set in ancient Greece and Rome to be stated in figures. He gives Greece 126 pages of his survey and Rome some 365. Within the Greek portion, two thirds of the films concern mythology rather than history; for the first fifteen years he counts some fifty brief mythological films ‘with barely sketched scenarios’, from Edison’s Cupid and Psyche of 1897 onwards, made for the most part in France and Italy. Feuillade competes with Pathé in this line until 1911-12, when epic subjects take over and the feature establishes itself.^[8] Dumont explains the resulting affinity between Greek myth and the trick film by subject matter: metamorphosis is what these stories are about, so a medium interested in substitution takes them up. While that is true, it accounts only for the mythological subjects of our corpus which also includes a philosopher’s death, two tragic stories, a sculptor’s romance, and a comedy of manners. Although none of these films depends on a metamorphosis, they nevertheless approach Greece in much the same manner as the trick films do, treating it as a performative construct rather than a place to be reconstructed. This holds true even for the epics L’Odissea and La caduta di Troia, which opt for magnitude without historical or archaeological specificity.

Homogenise for legibility, differentiate for plot. Homogenising is what lets the same set serve two films in the same year, and allows a landscape to remain free of any markers that would anchor it to a particular place or historical moment. Differentiating is what lets Idylle corinthienne mark Egypt off from Greece when the story needs two places. Differentiation depends on homogenization: a difference registers quickly only against a background that is otherwise uniform. Accuracy is not among the criteria governing either operation, which is why measuring these films against it yields so little insight.

Operation

Each film can be read from something small and repeated: a gesture, an object, the arrangement of bodies in the frame, a manner of performing. Such features do several things at once; one of them is of particular concern here. Each film can be understood through a verb naming the operation by which it tests a possibility of the medium. I focus on operations rather than categories because the films are grouped here not by what they are about (genres, themes, motifs) but by what they ask of the medium. The repertoire of the medium was undecided in three different ways: some things a moving picture plainly could not do, some it could do without a settled use, and some did not become capacities or limitations until a film established what could be done with them. The operations described here are not a competitive celebration of cinema’s capabilities over those of other art forms. A silent film cannot play a melody; Idylle corinthienne distinguishes one melody from another through a body that stays still for one and moves to another. Stencil colour was already widely used by 1907 but had no settled narrative function: Amour d’esclave gives it one preserved in one of the film’s prints held by the Library of Congress, colouring, for instance, the flame that marks the narrative transition into a dream [fig. 7]. Whether a film needed to show what it was about was still an open question. L’Esclave de Phidias makes a statue central to its story without ever showing it.

Le Parapluie fantastique manufactures, converting the single miracle of Pygmalion into a production line that turns out classical bodies at a rate of one per shake of an umbrella. La légende de Midas and Idylle corinthienne listen, which a silent film cannot do, and both make listening visible as bodily response: Midas turns it into a choreography of turned heads and raised hands and gives the reeds an intertitle instead of a sound, while Idylle corinthienne makes a recognition depend on a melody: the spectator has already seen the enslaved dancer refuse to move to the Egyptian ensemble, so that her stillness there makes the Greek pipe recognisable when she hears it again. Amour d’esclave animates with colour and dance. In the master’s blue-toned dream where the women he cannot have are turned into a corps de ballet of eighteen, the dancers’ veils resolve into a wheel of stencil colour, movement and tinting animating the same shot [fig. 6]. The same film’s faun is not sculpture but a living performer, their living body held still to be looked at as sculpture [fig. 8], whereas the last thing the film animates is the body it has already killed, with Chloë continuing to dance after taking the poison and dying in the middle of doing so.

L’esclave de Phidias withholds, building a film about the making of an image around the one image it never shows, so that what survives of Phidias’s art is a draped pedestal (the sculpture of Venus is never the focus of the story).^[9] La morte di Socrate inscribes. A philosopher famous for talking, in a medium that cannot carry talk, ends by writing: instead of the conversation that makes his death significant in the classical tradition, the film shows a body registering the poison (gesticulation, faltering movement, loss of balance) and seeking a tablet to record a final instruction [figs. 15-16].

Antigone choreographs sovereignty, its columns dividing the frame and its crowds opening and closing around Creon, so that a spectator reads authority from where bodies are allowed to stand [figs. 1-2]. Painting had done this for centuries; what was open in 1911 was whether film would keep doing it in the frame or hand the work to editing. Elettra deposits memory, transferring into a tomb, an inscription, a sword, and a bloodstain what the tragic stage had assigned to speaking characters. Tragedy keeps memory in speech; a silent film has to put it into things. L’Odissea and La caduta di Troia crowd the frame with marvels, multitudes, architecture, and words. No acted scene will hold a siege or ten years at sea, so the epic compensates for these limitations through hundreds of extras, a Cyclops made by superimposition, and forty-seven busy intertitles. The Private Life of Helen of Troy follows a reputation that arrives before its subject. The title names her, John Erskine’s novel it adapts had been a bestseller for two years, and the film can assume rather than explain. At the end of the film, as Helen grows restless again and turns to the Prince of Ithaca, Menelaus is given a remark about ageing that the final scene disproves, ‘the face that launched a thousand ships could never do it again’ [figs. 17-18].

Agency

Agency here should be understood as causation rather than intention: who or what makes an event happen, regardless of whom the story credits. This distinction is crucial because these films consistently separate intention from action. Following the verbs uncovers a clear pattern: agency rarely lies where the story claims it does.

L’Esclave de Phidias is full of statues but never shows the statue of Venus its plot is supposed to produce. Inside the story, the inspiration Phidias cannot find is supplied by a slave with a lyre [fig. 19]. Outside it, Athens is supplied by a Riviera villa and the sculptural look by a camera that holds a composition until the actors’ poses are indistinguishable from statues. A film about one man making an image is itself made by all of these [figs. 20-21]. Le Parapluie fantastique stages the same asymmetry as a joke. Its magician appears to conjure nine women out of an umbrella, which requires costume, timing, posing, machinery, and the stop-camera substitution. The umbrella conceals in two ways. It hides how each woman arrives, which is what a conjuring trick is for. It also makes one man the author of work undertaken by nine visible female performers, which no trick requires. Opened, the umbrella is a mobile dark surface that closes one image and opens another, a visible mask inside the shot for an operation the film performs out of sight [fig. 22].

The redistribution of agency is not confined to films about creation. In La caduta di Troia the myth’s most famous stratagem has no single human author. Menelaus, Paris, Priam, Helen, and a Greek called Sicheus are named, but Odysseus, who devises the horse in every version of the myth, is not individually emphasised; Achilles, Agamemnon, and Hector are irrelevant and unmentioned (Michelakis, 2013: 151). The work is done instead by a prop made legible at a distance (built to be read in long shot, rising above the figures around it, and dominating the horizon) and by the decision of the losing side to pull down part of their own defences to bring it inside the city [fig. 23]. In La légende de Midas the barber, unable to keep the secret his king has put him under oath to hold, confides into a hole in the ground. The eventual transmission of the secret is likewise distributed across four elements: reeds as props that make no sound [fig. 24], female performers that embody the reeds through gestures [fig. 25], an intertitle that supplies the rustling and the laughter and the words [fig. 26], and the bodies of witnesses who listen and pass it on [fig. 27]. In Idylle corinthienne the recognition is credited to a melody the film cannot play, yet depends on a slave’s decision about when to dance and when not to. Agency here belongs to the person the plot treats as property [fig. 28]. In Elettra the sister stages the oath at Agamemnon’s tomb, waits ten years, leads her brother to their sleeping mother, and reaches for the sword when he hesitates. The film distributes the act of matricide between two people: Electra makes the crucial decisions, while Orestes delivers the blow [figs. 29-30].

Arguably, none of this is peculiar to Greek subjects. The dramaturgy of 1910 disperses agency more generally: the tableau holds a whole situation within one frame rather than isolating an actor, and the trick film, by definition, assigns its effects to machinery. What Greek material supplies is not the dispersal but plots in which the dispersal stays visible. In conventional plotting, when events follow from what one character wants, the other figures in the frame become instruments of that desire: the tableau disperses agency compositionally, while purposeful plotting recovers it narratively. These films depart from that logic. Fantasies, idylls, and recognitions turn on events that no single intention can produce. For instance, in L’Esclave de Phidias a named artist with a settled iconography, in a film with a firm chain of cause and effect, is not the one driving it: the inspiration is that of his model Callyce, and the decisions that end his career are taken by others.

The redistribution of agency is social as well as formal. This broader understanding of agency helps clarify a recurring difference between narrative credit and causal agency. By ‘credit’, I mean whose story the film presents as its subject, the person named in the title or identified as its protagonist in a plot summary. By ‘causation’, I mean whose actions actually set in motion the plot. In several of these films narrative credit and causal agency belong to different people. More strikingly, this division often follows the social hierarchy of ownership: the person who receives the credit is the one who owns the person whose actions drive the plot. Amour d’esclave takes its title from the master’s love but depends on the slave’s dancing: she dances, he becomes infatuated, his wife poisons her, and both die. Idylle corinthienne has its female slave bought because her dancing attracts attention, then freed because she dances again, yet the film attributes that freedom to her master’s generosity. L’Esclave de Phidias is named after the well-known Greek sculptor and identifies Callyce only as his slave, while the inspiration he cannot find is supplied by her and her lyre. Le Parapluie fantastique credits one magician for an illusion that nine women perform. The Private Life of Helen of Troy can be seen as the exception. Menelaus decides to ignore Helen, a refusal to repossess played for comedy, while the fame that drives the plot to its conclusion is hers, as is the title.

The role these films give such a woman and what they allow her to do in performance are not the same thing. The discrepancy is visible in the film prints but not in the synopses. The BFI’s catalogue description for Idylle corinthienne records a slave bought, sold on, and set free, three transactions with a man behind each, and reads her stillness as grief. The print makes that stillness the mechanism of the recognition. For Amour d’esclave, the Library of Congress record gives more than two hundred words to the fiction, naming Polymos, Chrysis, and Chloë, and only four words to the people who performed it: ‘Gabriel Moreau, Darenne Bennard’, with no roles assigned. What survives in the modern catalogue, and indeed dominates, is the studio’s original sales description: ‘summary is translation of description in Films Pathé frères, supplément, May 1907, p. 202–203, as taken from AFI STAR database record’ (LCCN 2006642150). A description written to sell had no use for the performer who danced.

Circulation

Circulation means movement through carriers: the practical steps required for something to pass from one hand, place, or market to the next. Treated as evidence about the viewing experience rather than as context around the film, this movement allows a cue sheet, an intertitle, and a plot to be read together. In this corpus, circulation is both what the films depict and the condition of their survival: they exist as they do, in London, at these lengths, with these intertitles, because of how the trade moved them.

Inside the films, people are almost never the initiators of movement. In Idylle corinthienne the Corinthian girl is bought and shipped, in L’Esclave de Phidias Phidias is sentenced and escorted to the coast under guard, and in L’Odissea Odysseus is driven around the Mediterranean by a god he has offended. What appears to travel unaided appears to be immaterial: a musical tune, a secret, a memory, a reputation. However, each needs a carrier at every stage. The tune reaches Egypt inside a trained body and is played there by a man who has taken a place among hired musicians. Midas’s secret requires a barber’s trade for access, a hole for deposit, a stand of reeds for storage, and witnesses for retransmission. Helen’s fame requires a court to maintain it and princes who travel to see her. Agency is not transferred from people to things but distributed along a relay, and these films keep every stage of it in the frame rather than concealing it between shots. The routes are not geographic. In each of these journeys, what separates two places is not physical distance, but a transaction: a sale (Idylle corinthienne), a verdict (L’Esclave de Phidias), a grievance (L’Odissea), or an oath (La Légende de Midas). Where that separation is commercial, the infrastructure that circulates the immaterial is the same that circulates bodies as property.

Outside the films, the competence needed to read them was being assembled in the halls where they were shown. A parish hall in Basel, with an audience assembled for pedagogic reasons, and the picture palaces of the following decade, which were beginning to resemble Greek temples or Egyptian tombs (Michelakis, Wyke, 2013: 8), taught different things. The first taught that a film was an illustration to be explained, whereas the second that antiquity was the very space the audience already inhabited. For most of the people in these spaces a Greek world arrived through a screen, a lecturer, a booklet, and a live accompanist rather than through Greek lessons or a museum. La légende de Midas sets itself a task the medium cannot perform, a secret told aloud by reeds, and solves it by training the eye. An intertitle states that the reeds whisper, the image that follows is almost motionless, and the surrounding figures turn their heads, lean, raise hands towards an ear. Nothing is heard, and a spectator who has watched the sequence has learned to treat an arrangement of bodies and gestures as evidence of sound.

La morte di Socrate undertakes the reverse task, asking an audience to read stillness as active content at a moment when the primary attraction of cinema was that it moved. The philosopher grows less mobile as the bodies around him grow more animated, so what the spectator learns to read is the difference between them. Antigone trains a third competence, and one that has been read as a defect, its ‘heroine silenced as much by the busy theatricality of the mise en scène as by anything Creon decrees’ (O'Rawe, 2022: 2). Read as adaptation, this is a failure to dramatise a tragedy. Read as instruction, it is a film teaching an audience to locate meaning in the relative position of bodies in a deep frontal space, a skill the cinema of the following decade would rely on and then make invisible with the help of editing. These prints are most revealing where they appear least accomplished, because their apparent deficiencies register a competence still in the process of being constituted rather than one already assumed.

The instruction was not confined to the print. L’Odissea was made for the Turin exposition of 1911, where it took a prize in the educational section, and the American campaign that followed supplied exhibitors with souvenir booklets, editions of the poem, and a lecture to be read aloud while the film ran. Monopol, which held the American rights, advertised the material under the heading ‘In Any Quantity’: booklets, plaster busts of Homer cast in Italy from six inches to seven feet, Grecian costumes for the lecturers made in Turin, and twenty million pieces of printed matter ordered for the campaign (Moving Picture World, 10 February 1912, vol.11, 502-504; 24 February 1912, vol. 11, 706) [fig. 31]. The composite antiquity described above on screen was also being assembled in the foyer, sold at the door, and offered to the lecturer engaged to explain the film, which is a record of the moment when narration was being negotiated between the screen and the hall, and audiences were learning what the film could tell them without help.

The rest of the finishing was chromatic and acoustic. Amour d’esclave was released mostly in colour, in an effect of stencilling and toning that no two prints reproduced identically (Yumibe, 2012: 78-97), accompanied by music no two screenings shared. Eight prints of it survive (FIAF, Treasures from the Film Archives), some in black and white, including the BFI’s, others in colour at the Eye Filmmuseum^[10] and at the Library of Congress, where the film sat for years under the inventory title ‘Unidentified hand colored drama’ (LCCN 2006642150). Of the acoustic finishing no archive holds anything at all, though the film was performed in Montreal as a talking picture, its French dialogue spoken live by actors concealed from the audience, and in February 1909 the Nationoscope’s conductor, Jean Goulet, wrote a score for it that was reported as a sensation (Véronneau, 1999: 428). At the other end of the period the instruction is explicit: James C. Bradford’s cue sheet for The Private Life of Helen of Troy runs to sixty-seven cues and splits the film between an antique and martial register for the epic machinery and the popular songs of the moment for Helen, who has Ajax kneel at her feet to ‘She’s Got “It”’.^[11] The joke the film makes with art deco is made again in the music, by a cue sheet compiled outside the studio and an accompanist who chose to follow it, rather than anyone involved in the making of the film.

The circulation of the prints has left physical traces in them. They were retitled for export, cut to different lengths, reissued, and miscatalogued, and each transformation bears not only on cataloguing but also on interpretation. The industry of the 1900s sold films outright rather than hiring them, which is why the surviving collections look arbitrary and why a film made in Turin or Vincennes is now in London. Because the only language in a print was on its intertitles, these were reprinted in the tongue of the place of exhibition, and the majority of the Joye prints carry German titles.^[12] Reprinting was not only translation. A new set of cards could redistribute motive, cause, and blame. The narration a market received was composed locally. Gaumont’s Idylle corinthienne reached English-speaking markets as The White Slave and as The Greek Slave’s Passion, so that a pastoral idyll was sold as a story about the buying of a woman, with the racial term arriving with the English release rather than with the French. The BFI print of La caduta di Troia lacks its last shot: the restoration of the Italian edition establishes that every copy distributed in 1911 carried the scene in which Helen weeps over Paris’s body while Menelaus reprimands her (Marotto and Pozzi 2006) [fig. 32]. The London copy ends with a city destroyed [fig. 33]. The 1911 edition ends with a woman repossessed. The missing shot is therefore not merely damage to a surviving print: it marks the difference between two endings, and between two ways of imagining Helen’s fate. The reels themselves were no safer. The Moving Picture World (2 August 1913, vol. 17, 519) warned exhibitors against a four-reel feature marketed as The Last Days of Pompeii, which consisted of two reels of the old Ambrosio film, large portions lifted bodily from Itala’s Fall of Troy, and a quantity of medieval battle footage with no bearing on either, released under a claim of copyright. Three unrelated pasts had been spliced into a single marketable antiquity by a firm with a pair of scissors. The composite described here as a matter of costume and décor turns out to have a material counterpart at the level of the reel.

Conclusion

The eleven films discussed here were held together neither by their sources for ancient Greece nor by nation, genre, or the accident of a Basel seminary’s collection. What cinema found in Greece was not a historical past waiting to become more accessible through the representational qualities of a new medium. It was a past that had long stopped requiring accuracy, a past whose vividness came from representational strategies associated with the fantastic, the pastoral, the choreographic, and the spectacular. The fidelity question assumes a stable object and asks what cinema did to it. What the prints show is material constituted by movement arriving in a medium defined by movement, projection, and repetition, at a moment that medium was working out what it could do.

A repertoire transmitted for a century and a half by institutions of performance reached, around 1900, a new medium preoccupied with transitions between states, identities, and worlds. These crossings become events that film must both make and show: a costume put on, as the conjuror turns himself into an ancient Greek; a fire stoked before a dream can begin, as in Amour d’esclave; a love fallen into, as Phidias falls for the slave who plays to him; a tune recognised across a sea, as in Idylle corinthienne. La caduta di Troia opens with a bard declaiming to a lyre, a singer whose song the film cannot convey [fig. 34], while the lecturer hired to narrate L’Odissea stood before the screen in a Grecian costume ‘made of Rovilo & Co. of Turin, Italy’ (Moving Picture World, 24 February 1912, vol. 11, 706), doing in the hall what the bard does in the frame. If these films dealing with ancient Greece construct imaginary worlds, they do so less by transporting viewers to particular times and places or by retelling ancient stories than by exploring what a body, a costume, a pose, and a frame could do in a medium still discovering its possibilities.