Saturday 30th November 2024, 16:45-18:15 at the Morecambe Winter Gardens
Entering the Ancient World through Silent Cinema
A variety programme in the Northern Silents series, including an early travelogue to Pompeii and Vesuvius, a Roman historical drama (the emperor Nero setting fire to Rome and persecuting the Christians), Greek epic (an adaptation to screen of Homer’s Odyssey) and, as the climactic finale, a high-speed cartoon chariot race.
The screening is run in association with the AHRC-funded research project Museum of Dream Worlds based at University College London and led by Maria Wyke. The project (drawing on the surviving films in the BFI National Archive) asks how did early cinema design its Greek and Roman dreamworlds? What did cinema gain from recreating the distant past? What did that past gain from being recreated in moving images? The project also considers how these films were once used as instruments of education and what educative potential they might have today.
You can follow the project here.