Appearing in the Pathé catalogue in March 1908,  La Vestale (The Vestal) is a Pathé adaptation of Gaspare Spontini’s opera, based on a libretto by Barbet de Jouy. The film, credited to Albert Capellani, marks a revival of the opera of the same name. Famous during the Empire, Spontini’s version was rarely performed in the second half of the 19th century. Kicking off the revival of a classic work, the 1908 film La Vestale can be seen as a film produced for the sake of spectacle, its production methods mirroring those of the theatre. It can also be viewed as the end of an era. Indeed, Pathé did not participate in the adaptation of the bestsellers published during the same period, which were snapped up by other production companies, particularly Italian ones (Quo vadis?, The Last Days of Pompeii, and Fabiola or the Church of the Catacombs). In a sense, for the French company, Antiquity served as a backdrop rather than a narrative framework, and the focus of films such as La Vestale, Amour d’esclave, and also Idylle romaine, was primarily on romantic drama.

Among the silent antiquity prints in the BFI, we have recently been able to identify the 1912 British film Pygmalion and Galatea, previously considered lost. The original story for the film’s representation of the Cypriot sculptor Pygmalion is Publius Ovidius Naso’s Metamorphoses (1-8 AD). Two recent studies by Victor Stoichita and Paula James have productively explored the centrality to cinema of Ovid’s mythic tale in which the stone of Pygmalion’s creation is transformed into female flesh. Yet, closer in time to the film lies the influence of nineteenth-century ‘Pygmalionism’ in art and theatre, as well as the myth’s development in earlier European cinema