Screenings

Upcoming film screenings

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).