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.

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.

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.

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.

The Slave of Phidias (1917) creates a dialogue between antiquity and early cinema, reimagining the world of the Greek sculptor Phidias. Known for works like the Athena Parthenos and the Zeus at Olympia, Phidias represents ideals of harmony and divine beauty, which the film echoes through its fictionalised portrayal of his workshop and the muse figure Callyce. While informed by archaeological finds, the narrative blends history with creative interpretation. Director Léonce Perret reinforces this classical atmosphere through careful composition, lighting, and use of landscape, with Villa Maryland standing in for ancient Greece. By combining sculpture, architecture, and cinema, the film connects ancient artistic ideals with modern visual storytelling, highlighting the lasting appeal of beauty and creative inspiration.

Phidias, renowned as the greatest sculptor of Greek antiquity and the lead artistic director of the Parthenon, is the subject of the 1917 French film L’Esclave de Phidias, directed by Léonce Perret. The film draws on aspects of Phidias's tumultuous life, focusing on a melodramatic narrative that explores his relationships and eventual exile, while largely neglecting his sculpture. Upon release during World War I, critics highlighted the film's artistry and the importance of its music, underlined by the special score composed for this film. Thanks to the joys of music, the artist finally capitulates to his model who is herself hopelessly in love with him.