In this introductory essay, we explain the layout and features of the Museum of Dreamworlds website, in order that you can see how to navigate it and make it useful for you. We explain the methods behind our inquiries and survey some of our research findings. We also indicate here some of our project’s other activities and future resources that we will be creating until and beyond the end point of the project in November 2027. We will be developing and extending this introduction as we continue to analyse the antiquity films in the BFI. At this stage, the website is also a work in progress so we would greatly welcome any questions you may have as well as suggestions for corrections, clarifications, additions or improvements, or notification of any malfunctions. We can be reached at: museumofdreamworlducl@gmail.com

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.

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.

Among the silent antiquity prints in the BFI, we have recently been able to identify the 1912 British film Pygmalion and Galatea, previously considered lost. The original story for the film’s representation of the Cypriot sculptor Pygmalion is Publius Ovidius Naso’s Metamorphoses (1-8 AD). Two recent studies by Victor Stoichita and Paula James have productively explored the centrality to cinema of Ovid’s mythic tale in which the stone of Pygmalion’s creation is transformed into female flesh. Yet, closer in time to the film lies the influence of nineteenth-century ‘Pygmalionism’ in art and theatre, as well as the myth’s development in earlier European cinema

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.

This article focuses on four of Itala Film's first silent films, preceding the famous epic Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, Itala 1914), but already developing an iconographic vocabulary on antiquity, especially through the search for scenic elements. All prints used stem from the collection of the British Film Institute but are analysed in comparison with prints elsewhere. Giulio Cesare (Giovanni Pastrone, Itala 1909) is contextualised by its roots in theatre and painting, but also its recycling of sets, costumes and even actors from a previous Itala production, Principessa e schiava (dir. unknown, Itala 1909). Both films mark Itala's debut in films about Roman antiquity. Confirmation of this recycling by Itala can be found in two films both set in ancient Greece instead: the famous film La caduta di Troia (Giovanni Pastrone, Romano Luigi Borgnetto, Itala 1911) and the lesser-known Clio e Filete (Oreste Mentasti, Itala 1911), with the latter reusing parts of the scenography and costumes of the former. This analysis considers the sources of the ancient worlds designed by Itala, the style of its reconstruction, the use of recycled materials, and what all this says for Italian filmmakers’ visions of the ancient world in 1909-1911.