The Ancient World in Silent Cinema

Maria Wyke (Principal Investigator) and Pantelis Michelakis: The Ancient World in Silent Cinema (Cambridge 2013). 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. Hundreds of films were made in the first four decades of the twentieth century that drew their inspiration from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Bible. This collection asks what contribution did they make to the development of early cinema? How did early cinema’s representations affect modern understanding of antiquity?