This article explores Gli Ultimi Giorni di Pompei (1926) as the culmination of silent-era cinematic representations of Pompeii, arguing that the film transforms cinematic fiction into a valuable source for understanding ancient architecture and urban life. By the 1920s, these layers converged in large-scale historical epics, enabling cinema to function as a medium of virtual time travel in which the spectator assumes the role of a beholder-traveller. Through close analysis of scenography, the article examines the reconstruction of streets, the Forum, public buildings, domestic interiors, baths, and the amphitheatre. It demonstrates how spatial organisation, architectural accuracy, decorative detail, and crowd scenes created immersive environments that animated Pompeii as a lived city rather than a static ruin. While acknowledging moments where fictional composition departs from archaeological precision, the article emphasises the film’s exceptional attention to material culture and its partial use of real locations. Ultimately, the study contends that Gli Ultimi Giorni di Pompei (1926) represents both the apex and the conclusion of silent Pompeii cinema, where spectacle, architecture, and narrative converge to produce a cinematic document of enduring archaeological and cultural significance.

This analysis gives some background to the holdings of the BFI National Archive - how the films came to be in the collection, the physical nature of films during the silent period and how conservation and preservation practice affects them (particularly regarding completeness, titling and colouring). Some context is provided on antiquity as a theme in the various types of films in the archive (such as drama, comedy, interest film, and newsreels) that were produced over the period from the 1890s to the late 1920s, when sound film became the industry norm. This analysis is written from the perspective of the history of silent film, what was being screened in Britain, and what survives in the BFI’s collection.

This essay focuses on eleven Greek-subject films in the BFI National Archive, made between 1903 and 1927 in four countries, and argues that ancient Greece functioned for early cinema less as a body of stories to be adapted than as a repertoire of operations: a stock of things that could be done with bodies, costumes, poses, objects, substitutions, colour, and frames. What reached the studios was never a recoverable antiquity but a composite already assembled from translation, painting, sculpture, theatre, opera, dance, archaeology, and exhibition practices, which these films homogenise into a single world and differentiate only where a plot requires it. Each film is then read as testing unsettled possibilities of the medium, and is given a verb naming the relevant operation. Causation rarely sits where these stories assign credit, falling instead to slaves, objects, and uncredited performers whom the surviving records seldom name, and circulation is at once what the films depict and the condition of their survival, since colour, intertitles, lengths, and endings varied from copy to copy and are what each print has kept or lost. Read from the prints rather than from the synopses, these films are not attempts to reconstruct antiquity but records of a medium finding out what it could do.

This analysis treats three of the early films on martyrdom in Roman antiquity that survive in the BFI National Archive: La Fille du centurion (Radios, 1910), Dall’amore al martirio (Cines, 1910) and Santa Cecilia (Cines, 1911). All three are responsive – in different ways – to general conceptions of Christian martyrdom and their representation in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. Together they demonstrate that, while the practice of remembering martyrs continued to be a living feature of Christian worship in the early twentieth century, the representation of Christian martyrdom on screen could not resist the draw of its nineteenth-century fictionalisations – whether they were performed on the stage, narrated in a novel or magazine or depicted in paintings and on postcards. The three films are also differentiated from each other by the national cultures in which they were produced, the degree to which studios engaged with Catholic institutions, their relative proximity to the key sites of martyrdom around Rome, and their relationship to new cinematic technologies such as location shooting or the elaboration of an antiquarian eye for sets and props in which to place martyrs and their persecutors.

Nero has occupied the cinema screen more than any other figure of Roman history, creating for spectators a multisensory experience of the emperor as image, movement and sound. The background of these Neros goes back to his wide circulation in the cultural imaginary of the nineteenth century, in restagings of operas and plays as well as the performance of new ones, in paintings and postcards, novels, circus shows and lantern slides. But, across the first decades of the twentieth-century, cinema shaped its own Neros better to suit the specificity and needs of the medium, its changing technologies and industrial practices, and the differing cultural contexts of his reproduction. This essay puts the four prints in the BFI archive that concern Nero - namely, Nero or the Burning of Rome (Nerone o L’incendio di Roma, 1909), Way of the Cross (1909), Quo vadis (1913) and Quo vadis (1924) - within the context of the eleven silent films about the Roman emperor that have survived from the early years of cinema. The essay reflects upon differences that emerge between these cinematic representations across time and nation and, in doing so, explores more broadly why silent cinema was so attracted to him.

This article focuses on four of Itala Film's first silent films, preceding the famous epic Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, Itala 1914), but already developing an iconographic vocabulary on antiquity, especially through the search for scenic elements. All prints used stem from the collection of the British Film Institute but are analysed in comparison with prints elsewhere. Giulio Cesare (Giovanni Pastrone, Itala 1909) is contextualised by its roots in theatre and painting, but also its recycling of sets, costumes and even actors from a previous Itala production, Principessa e schiava (dir. unknown, Itala 1909). Both films mark Itala's debut in films about Roman antiquity. Confirmation of this recycling by Itala can be found in two films both set in ancient Greece instead: the famous film La caduta di Troia (Giovanni Pastrone, Romano Luigi Borgnetto, Itala 1911) and the lesser-known Clio e Filete (Oreste Mentasti, Itala 1911), with the latter reusing parts of the scenography and costumes of the former. This analysis considers the sources of the ancient worlds designed by Itala, the style of its reconstruction, the use of recycled materials, and what all this says for Italian filmmakers’ visions of the ancient world in 1909-1911.