The ancient world in silent cinema /
edited by Pantelis Michelakis and Maria Wyke.
- 1 online resource (xxi, 379 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).
Introduction: silent cinema, antiquity and 'The Exhaustless Urn of Time' / Theories, Histories, Receptions: The ancient world on silent film: the view from the archive / On visual cogency: the emergence of an antiquity of moving images / Cinema in the time of the pharaoh / 'Hieroglyphics in motion': representing ancient Egypt and the Middle East in film theory and criticism of the silent period / Architecture and art dance meet in the ancient world / Ancient Rome in London: classical subjects in the forefront of cinema's expansion after 1910 / Gloria Swanson as Venus: silent stardom, antiquity and the classical vernacular / Homer in silent cinema / Movement, Image, Music, Text:: Silent saviours: representations of Jesus' Passion in early cinema / The Kalem Ben-Hur (1907) / Judith's vampish virtue and its double market appeal / Competing ancient worlds in early historical film: the example of Cabiria (1914) / Peplum, melodrama and musicality: Giuliano l'Apostata (1919) / 'An orgy Sunday school children can watch': the spectacle of sex and the seduction of spectacle in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1923) / Silent laughter and the counter-historical: Buster Keaton's Three Ages (1923) / From Roman history to German nationalism: Arminius and Varus in Die Hermannschlacht (1924) / The 1925 Ben-Hur and the 'Hollywood Question' / Consuming passions: Helen of Troy in the jazz age / Pantelis Michelakis and Maria Wyke -- Bryony Dixon; Marcus Becker; Antonia Lant; Laura Marcus; David Mayer; Ian Christie; Michael Williams; Pantelis Michelakis -- Caroline Vander Stichele; Jon Solomon; Judith Buchanan; Annette Dorgerloh; Giuseppe Pucci; David Shepherd; Maria Wyke; Martin M. Winkler; Ruth Scodel; Margaret Malamud. 1. Part I. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Part II. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.
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.
9781139060073 (ebook)
Historical films--History and criticism. Silent films--History and criticism. Civilization, Ancient, in motion pictures.