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.

In addition to other early Pathé film titles on antiquity,  the BFI National Archive holds a copy of the 1910 Pathé frères film Cléopâtre (Cleopatra), directed by Ferdinand Zecca and Henri Andréani. The film is mostly based on the French stage play Cléopâtre by Victorien Sardou and Émile Moreau (1890), which was in turn inspired by William Shakespeare’s play, but it also bears similarities with nineteenth-century painting. The film contains a typical tableau-like style and histrionic acting, reminiscent of the stage. The lead role was performed by the acclaimed stage actress Madeleine Roch, who previously had acted in several stage plays set in antiquity and acted in various historical films at Pathé around 1910. Cléopâtre also typically follows the Western Orientalist tradition in representing the East as feminine and cruel.