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.

Nero has occupied the cinema screen more than any other figure of Roman history, creating for spectators a multisensory experience of the emperor as image, movement and sound. The background of these Neros goes back to his wide circulation in the cultural imaginary of the nineteenth century, in restagings of operas and plays as well as the performance of new ones, in paintings and postcards, novels, circus shows and lantern slides. But, across the first decades of the twentieth-century, cinema shaped its own Neros better to suit the specificity and needs of the medium, its changing technologies and industrial practices, and the differing cultural contexts of his reproduction. This essay puts the four prints in the BFI archive that concern Nero - namely, Nero or the Burning of Rome (Nerone o L’incendio di Roma, 1909), Way of the Cross (1909), Quo vadis (1913) and Quo vadis (1924) - within the context of the eleven silent films about the Roman emperor that have survived from the early years of cinema. The essay reflects upon differences that emerge between these cinematic representations across time and nation and, in doing so, explores more broadly why silent cinema was so attracted to him.