Amour d’esclave (Pathé frères 1907) is a drama that explores themes of sexual desire restrained by social conventions. The story revolves around Polymos, a married Athenian citizen, and his passionate affair with Chloë, a slave dancer. The narrative culminates in tragedy when Polymos' jealous wife intervenes, leading to Chloë's demise and Polymos' suicide. This film anticipated a shift in France towards literary adaptations aimed at the middle class and reflected Pathé's strong financial position in 1907, marking a high point for French cinema. It exemplifies the early twentieth-century melodrama trope, in which passionate love leads to tragedy. Spectacle, enhanced by colour, dance and theatrical effects, is clearly more important than cinematic innovation or any particularly faithful reconstruction of ancient Greece.

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.

Nerone, also known as Nerone o l’incendio di Roma (Nero or the Burning of Rome in Anglophone distribution), directed by Luigi Maggi and Arturo Ambrosio in 1909, should be regarded as one of the true ‘gems’ of early Italian cinema. In a period that predates the triumphs of Cabiria (1914), Quo vadis? (1913), and other grand colossal or epics, Nerone stands out as a particularly striking example of a cinema whose strength lay in its power of synthesis. How do you capture, in just a quarter of an hour, the defining moments in the life of history’s most bloodthirsty emperor? How do you evoke the grandeur of ancient Rome using nothing more than painted backdrops? Fortunately, we have at our disposal a beautifully restored print of the film, allowing us to reflect on these questions. Yet the restoration process, too, holds its own mysteries…

San Paolo (Giuseppe De Liguoro, Rodolfo Kanzler, Milano Film, 1910) narrates the highlights of the life of Saint Paul, a religious subject based on the Acts of the Apostles. In its settings it intersects with the representation of the classical world in the first century CE, tracing a geographical and historical arc from an imaginatively conceived Asia Minor (Tarsus) and Syria (Damascus) to Neronian Rome during the Great Fire of 64 CE. This analysis explores the various surviving versions of the film, as well as its notable use of on-location settings and colour as a means of reinforcing the authenticity of Paul’s presence in Rome and its religious resonance. The film is a pioneering work in which a hugely significant historical-religious narrative meets the merging grammar of silent cinema.

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.