The Ancient World in Silent Cinema

Description

In the first four decades of cinema, hundreds of films were made that drew their inspiration from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Bible. Few of these films have been studied, and even fewer have received the critical attention they deserve. The films in question, ranging from historical and mythological epics to adaptations of ancient drama, burlesques, cartoons and documentaries, suggest a fascination with the ancient world that competes in intensity and breadth with that of Hollywood's classical era. What contribution did antiquity make to the development of early cinema? How did early cinema's representations affect modern understanding of antiquity? Existing prints as well as ephemera scattered in film archives and libraries around the world constitute an enormous field of research. This extensively illustrated edited collection is a first systematic attempt to focus on the instrumental role of silent cinema in twentieth-century conceptions of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East.

Pantelis Michelakis is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol. His research interests are in Greek theatre, literature and culture and in their ancient and modern reception. He is the author of Achilles in Greek Tragedy (2002), Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis (2006) and Greek Tragedy on Screen (2013). He has also co-edited Homer, Tragedy and Beyond: Essays in Honour of P. E. Easterling (2001) and Agamemnon in Performance, 458 BC to AD 2004 (2005). Maria Wyke is Professor and Chair of Latin at University College London. Her research interests include the reception of ancient Rome, especially in popular culture. In both Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema and History (1997) and The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations (2000), she explored cinematic reconstructions of ancient Rome in the film traditions of Italy and Hollywood. She won a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to investigate the reception of Julius Caesar in western culture, since published as Caesar: A Life in Western Culture (2007) and Caesar in the USA (2012).

'This stellar book is itself a dazzling, exceptional classic. Summing up: essential [for] all readers.' Choice