Housman Lecture 2025

How does one cross the distance that separates antiquity from modernity? In the first three decades of cinema, ancient Greece is often presented as a remote but vibrant world that, rather than being the object of contemplation at a distance, can be visited and experienced through the senses. Silent films deploy a wide range of strategies to foreground or elide the conditions under which transportation to ancient Greece is possible. 

The passages to antiquity to be explored in this lecture call for the need to ground imagination to the materialities and promises of visual and communication technologies that push the boundaries of what can be recorded and transmitted. 

Against the backdrop of natural sciences, spiritualism, and aesthetics, such technologies allow us to situate the cinematic fascination with ancient Greece at the intersection between representation and its disruption, the intentional and the accidental, sensory perception and desire.

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