Based on ancient sources like Menander and Ovid, in the nineteenth century a heterosexual biography and iconography for the celebrated ancient Greek poetess Sappho emerged in which she fell desperately in love with a handsome fisherman and committed suicide by jumping off a cliff when rejected by him. The Sappho of antiquity who sings of erotic desire within an intimate world of women is replaced by a Sappho more suited to constrained nineteenth-century sensibilities in which she loses her poetic authority and her homoerotic desire. The early Italian film Saffo (Pineschi, 1909) treads in the footsteps of this nineteenth-century convention, but adds an extra dimension by alternating its painted backdrops for interiors with shots for its exteriors of real, albeit often neoclassical, locations, such as the park of Villa Borghese in Rome. This strategy of authenticating the classical by means of the neo-classical has consequences for how, in the film, ancient time and space merge with the modern.

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.