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.

Cléopâtre, as the first in the Pathé studio’s Série d’Art, places the queen theatrically at the centre of a resplendent Orientalist tableau filled with pharaonic monuments, lotus leaf pillars, exotic canopies and couches, black slaves, leopard skins and feathered fans, all showcased in stencil colour. Digging into the archaeology of this Egyptian environment played out before a French camera in a cold January exposes its colonialist tropes: the dangerous queen seduces Mark Antony but is overcome by Octavian, the true embodiment of the masculine West. However, the colonial rhetoric of the film turns out to be more complicated when compared with the Pathé film Le caprice du vainqueur with which it had been paired. Here Julius Caesar, as the embodiment of the Western imperialist in Egypt, is cruel and licentious. His demand that an innocent girl dance before him results in an uprising by the Egyptian people who burn down the palace and oust him from it. Overturning the discourses of colonialism, the West is here temporarily defeated by the East. This analysis explores how these two films shape Roman Egypt according to a complex, distinctively French, brand of Orientalism played out within a late nineteenth-century French culture of Egyptomania.

While most French silent films on Greco-Roman Antiquity in the collection of the British Film Institute are Pathé and Gaumont productions, a rare example is a film by the company Éclipse: Bélisaire (1910). It not only refers to a historical figure. It also relies on a long tradition of French literature, theatre and painting concerning the Byzantine general, while deviating from it in intriguing ways. Little is known about the film and who made it, and the actors remain unidentified. Yet, some information is known about the company that produced it: Éclipse. So detective work has been required to analyse this unusual antiquity film.

In addition to other early Pathé film titles on antiquity,  the BFI National Archive holds a copy of the 1910 Pathé frères film Cléopâtre (Cleopatra), directed by Ferdinand Zecca and Henri Andréani. The film is mostly based on the French stage play Cléopâtre by Victorien Sardou and Émile Moreau (1890), which was in turn inspired by William Shakespeare’s play, but it also bears similarities with nineteenth-century painting. The film contains a typical tableau-like style and histrionic acting, reminiscent of the stage. The lead role was performed by the acclaimed stage actress Madeleine Roch, who previously had acted in several stage plays set in antiquity and acted in various historical films at Pathé around 1910. Cléopâtre also typically follows the Western Orientalist tradition in representing the East as feminine and cruel.

The print of the film Héliogabale (André Calmettes, Le Film d’Art 1910) that survives in the British Film Institute National Archive is, as far as we can tell, unique. While another early French film on the life of the Roman emperor Heliogabalus, L’Orgie romaine (Louis Feuillade, Gaumont 1911) has received considerable attention from scholars, much less consideration has been given to this Film d’Art version of his life. So what aspect of antiquity does this film reconstruct, what can we say about its cast, production team and set design, in its plot and mise-en-scene what ties does it have with contemporary theatre and painting, how different is it from L’Orgie romaine, and why does it seem that the only two films made about such an unusual Roman emperor were produced solely in France and solely at this time?

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