Les Martyrs Chrétiens, released in English as Christian Martyrs, plunges viewers into Nero’s arena in the aftermath of a Ben-Hur-like chariot race whose traces still litter the Circus: the film begins where a famed painting of an upturned chariot ends. A procession of ‘those who are about to die’ advances before the emperor, culminating in the arrival of the Christian martyrs, one of whom is both crucified and devoured by a lion through a cinematic trick that inspired one of the earliest ‘behind-the-scenes’ reports in film history. The tableau continues with a lion tamer confronting his beast in the guise of a gladiator painted by Gérôme. The scene is described, and perhaps narrated, using words from the novels Quo Vadis? and The Last Days of Pompeii. Even the panoramic camera movement that opens the film, seemingly proclaiming the novelty of cinema’s gaze upon antiquity, ultimately reveals itself to be rooted in a network of pictorial and lantern-slide traditions. By tracing such connections, this analysis shows how Christian Martyrs exemplifies the inter- and multi-mediality of early cinema, situated at the crossroads of literary, performative, pictorial, and spectacular traditions through which the medium appropriated and refashioned the ancient world.

The Vitagraph Company, established in New York City in 1897 as one of the first film production companies in the United States, had begun making film versions of historical narratives and literary classics in 1908. After several adaptations of Shakespeare and well-known ancient themes (Virginius, Saul and David) early in 1909, they produced The Way of the Cross in the summer of 1909. The basic premise parallels that of the Polish novel Quo Vadis, naming the Roman military officer protagonist Valerius instead of Vinicius, the Christian woman Leah instead of Lygia. But the conclusion parallels more closely the English melodrama The Sign of the Cross in that these protagonists submit to martyrdom in the arena to conclude the story. Director J. Stuart Blackton employed his characteristic scheme of creating multiple sets (17) and filling them with as many as 50 actors and extras in a single scene (e.g., the gladiatorial arena). The film resembles some of the others on this website by including black slaves and a tableau modeled after a widely familiar Gérôme painting. The lone copy of the film is held by the BFI, albeit with German intertitles as it comes from the Joye collection.

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 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.