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.

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