Patrizia e schiava, known as Patrician and Slave or Afra in its Anglophone distribution (director unknown, Cines 1909) is one of the earliest films on Roman antiquity made by the Rome studio Cines. It is also an interesting film in several respects. Many props referring to ancient Roman furniture and sculpture used in this film would be recycled for years by the company and its associated organisations like Palatino Film and Unione Cinematografica Italiana. The aesthetically attractive ancient world to be found in this film therefore became the foundation for subsequent Cines’ films about Rome regardless of the period in which they were set. Patrizia e schiava, however, also appears disturbingly comfortable with the ancient institution of slavery and a racist representation of Africans. As in the British film about Pygmalion (see our text on Pygmalion and Galatea on this site), divine intervention creates a happy ending for the protagonist but here it also serves to construct a colonialist allegory about Italy’s victory over supposed dangers from across the sea.

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.

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.

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.

Silent films depicting antiquity utilized a range of representational strategies to vividly reconstruct Graeco-Roman architecture, thereby facilitating a temporal transport for audiences to the ancient past. One of the most prominent techniques was monumentality, which was used to create impressive sets and reflected advancements in film technology. This approach became a recurring feature in many films of the 1920s. The main set for the silent epic Quo Vadis (1924) set in the reign of the emperor Nero was the monumental palace created for the exhibition Mostra dell'Agricoltura, dell'Industria e delle Arti Applicate (Exhibition of Agriculture, Industry, and Applied Arts) held in 1923 at the Galoppatoio inside the Villa Borghese gardens in Rome. The architect Armando Brasini-renowned for his eclectic style rooted in Fascist architecture-designed the exhibition spaces. Brasini’s work drew inspiration from ancient Roman and Italian Baroque architecture, incorporating elements that evoked the poetic quality of ruins, a hallmark of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s visionary drawings. This article explores Brasini’s architectural contribution to the film, with a focus on the representation of Nero’s palace and examines his influence on the rise of a monumental aesthetic in silent films portraying antiquity.