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.

This article focuses on four of Itala Film's first silent films, preceding the famous epic Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, Itala 1914), but already developing an iconographic vocabulary on antiquity, especially through the search for scenic elements. All prints used stem from the collection of the British Film Institute but are analysed in comparison with prints elsewhere. Giulio Cesare (Giovanni Pastrone, Itala 1909) is contextualised by its roots in theatre and painting, but also its recycling of sets, costumes and even actors from a previous Itala production, Principessa e schiava (dir. unknown, Itala 1909). Both films mark Itala's debut in films about Roman antiquity. Confirmation of this recycling by Itala can be found in two films both set in ancient Greece instead: the famous film La caduta di Troia (Giovanni Pastrone, Romano Luigi Borgnetto, Itala 1911) and the lesser-known Clio e Filete (Oreste Mentasti, Itala 1911), with the latter reusing parts of the scenography and costumes of the former. This analysis considers the sources of the ancient worlds designed by Itala, the style of its reconstruction, the use of recycled materials, and what all this says for Italian filmmakers’ visions of the ancient world in 1909-1911.