Selling the Italian epic Cabiria (1914) to British audiences in and beyond 1914, given its colonial rescue fantasy and its spectacular celebration of a nationalist war of empire in Africa, was a significant challenge. Cabiria was purchased for British consumption in April 1914 but not shown in the UK until more than a year later. British programmes that survive in the BFI National Archive and contemporary press reports demonstrate that Cabiria was successfully screened across the country only from 1915 to 1916. Its advertising to British audiences and its consumption across this period of the Great War is situated in stark contrast to its circulation in Italy. It is now recognised that exclusive focus on national cinemas and the specific history of their film production and exhibition overlooks the dynamic, transnational character of the silent era. This essay aims to put the United Kingdom more firmly on the map of Cabiria’s cultural geography and demonstrate that, in the cultural context of cinema-going in Britian during the first world war, Cabiria becomes almost a different film from the one shown in Italy or in other Anglophone cultures and takes on quite distinct meanings.

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.