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.

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.