Screenings

Past Film Screenings

Silent Cinema Quo Vadis? + intro by Dr Aylin Atacan with live piano accompaniment

01 December 2024 14:15 NFT1

As part of the project, BFI arranged for a screening in Bryony Dixon's regular Silent Cinema strand at BFI Southbank of the 1924 Quo Vadis? More than 200 people turned up to watch this epic Italian silent accompanied with great energy by Neil Brand.

Magnificent and disturbing, the 1924 Quo Vadis? revels in the debauchery we expect from Ancient Rome. A spectacle on the grandest scale, it features a cast of thousands and a Nero played with satanic glee by Emil Jannings. The film opens with him lying resplendent in his monumental palace (the set was the Palace of Festivities, a fabulous faux Roman villa built for a trade exhibition), peering with sadistic amusement at a half-dressed girl being thrown into the fountain to fatten his lampreys for dinner!

This film has been restored by Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam) in 2002 in collaboration with Fondazione Cineteca Italiana (Milano) and Fondazione Scuola Nazionale di Cinema – Cineteca Nazionale (Roma). Special thanks to Museo Nazionale del Cinema-Fondazione Maria Adriana Prolo (Torino) and National Film and Television Archive (London).

Past Film Screenings

Entering the Ancient World through Silent Cinema

Saturday 30 November 2024 4:45 PM - 5:45 PM in the Morecambe Winter Gardens

For about 100 spectators, in the glorious surroundings of the Morecambe Winter Garden, Museum of Dreamworlds screened a quartet of early silent films that brought the ancient world alive on screen. A short 1901 British travelogue to Pompeii started the show, before the two dramatic centrepieces of the programme - Nero, or the Burning of Rome (1909) and a forty-minute high-octane dash through Homer’s epic in The Odyssey (1911). We rounded off the afternoon with a cartoon chariot race. Maria Wyke introduced the programme and silent cinema’s close interest in reconstructing on screen the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome. She also took questions after the screening. The films were live-scored by the artistic director of Northern Silents, Jonny Best.

Northern Silents is supported by Film Hub North with National Lottery funding on behalf of the BFI Film Audience Network. Additional funding from Morecambe Town Council.

Past Film Screenings

QUO VADIS? Cinema Ritrovato film festival in Bologna

Across the mornings of 25 and 26 June 2024, the epic silent film Quo vadis (1924) was screened for an audience of around 100 film fans and scholars at the Cinema Ritrovato film festival in Bologna. On the first day, piano and harp (Neil Brand and Eduardo Raon) accompanied scenes of the emperor Nero engaged in magnificent but disturbing entertainments in the grounds and the banquet hall of his monumental palace. The settings played a vital role in mapping ancient Rome as home to the vices of this imperial grotesque (as played by the German star Emil Jannings). On day two, the tone and tempo changed as piano and drums (Neil Brand and Frank Bockius) accompanied red-tinted scenes of beatings and murder, attempted rapes, the whole city on fire, a strongman wrestling a bull, heroic chariot racing and the lurid martyrdom of the Christian community, followed by Nero’s suicide and the triumph of the Cross.

The film was introduced by Ivo Blom and Maria Wyke who explained how the film’s title (from the Latin for ‘where are you going?’) refers to the Church legend that the Apostle Peter turned back to Rome after seeing a vision of Christ on the Appian Way and to the Polish novel that interwove with the story of Christian martyrdom a fictional romance between a Christian girl and a Roman soldier. But most importantly, the title refers to the phenomenal success of the 1913 Italian adaptation of the novel to screen which this later film aspired to replicate. Our great thanks are due to the festival programmer Oliver Hanley for inviting us to describe the film in the festival catalogue, and to introduce it and our MoD project to the Bologna audience. Inspired by the film’s emphasis on mise en scène and spectacle, we also ran at the festival two workshops about fictional and documentary manifestations of ancient Rome as a cinescape in silent cinema.

Photo by Valerio Greco

Past Film Screenings

Classical Association Conference March 2024, University of Warwick

Saturday 23 March 2024 14:30-16:30 in the Warwick Arts Centre Cinema 2

publicity for Museum of Dreamworlds film screening

The event featured a screening with live piano accompaniment by the professional accompanist Stephen Horne of an attractive variety of silent films ranging from 1901 to 1924 that concerned ancient Greece or Rome. Films screened included: a visit to the site of Pompeii; the tragedy of Electra; the myth of Midas; the fall of Troy; the assassination of Julius Caesar; Nero’s burning of Rome and persecution of the Christians; and – as the climactic finale - a cartoon chariot race. The screening emerges from the Museum of Dreamworlds research project based at UCL. The project asks how such encounters between cinema and classical antiquity have shaped our modern memory of the past and what role they might be able to play as teaching resources in the future. There was an opportunity for Q&A at the end, and, to assist the project, feedback from the audience was warmly invited. Detailed discussion of the project’s potential interest to teachers took place on Sunday during workshop 11 Public Engagement from 9:00 to 11:00.

Prior film screenings led by Maria Wyke

In April 2023, a live screening was held at UCLA (Los Angeles) of the rarely seen yet remarkable Italian silent feature film Cajus Julius Caesar (1914, dir. Enrico Guazzoni) brought over especially from the archives of the Netherlands Film Institute and accompanied by an original score composed for the occasion by the noted concert pianist and composer Michele Sganga. Caesar’s life was presented in three movements: first romantic melodrama (his secret love for the beautiful Servilia); then triumph (his victory in Gaul); finally tragedy (death at the hands of his friends).

In July 2019, at the UCL Bloomsbury Theatre, the professional pianist Stephen Horne accompanied a screening of four rarely seen but remarkable films about ancient Greece and Rome. Two of the films documented the ruins of the Acropolis and Pompeii as they appeared to travellers in the early twentieth century. Two were aesthetically rich and immersive feature films concerning the sculptor Phydias and the emperor Caligula. Through their enticing use of gesture and look, exotic sets and extravagant costumes, music and movement, these latter films offer their spectators the opportunity to enter into the classical past and experience it as if they were there. The screening of Caligula was the UK premiere of a beautifully restored print from Italy. The other prints were obtained especially from archives in Austria, the USA, and the UK. They were introduced by Maria Wyke (UCL) and Pantelis Michelakis (University of Bristol).