2 Dugard Way, London
Wed 9 Sept · 19:30 · £8
Kennington Bioscope hosts the screening of a celebrated Italian feature film about Nero and the burning of Rome as well as a varied programme of shorts set in ancient Rome. They will be presented by Professor Maria Wyke from the Department of Greek and Latin, UCL, London. If time permits, there will be an opportunity for Q&A at the end. Released in 1913, Quo Vadis? demonstrated radical advances in the powers of the motion picture. It offered a detailed adaption to screen of a popular Polish novel in which a romance between a Roman soldier and a Christian girl is played out in the dangerous conditions of Rome where Nero burns the city down and persecutes the Christians, while Saint Peter flees but returns to protect his suffering flock. The film’s title comes from the question the apostle is supposed to have asked when he sees a vision of Christ walking along the Via Appia: ‘Where are you going Lord? ‘ (in Latin: quo vadis, domine?). The film began a whole international cycle of spectacular epics set in the ancient world that continue to this day. It was greatly admired for the rich detail of its sets, the choreography of its vast crowds, its suggestive use of location shooting, the spectacular quality of its arena scenes, the emotional draw of its private love story and the uplift of its religious dimensions. A coloured version of Quo Vadis? (1913, director Enrico Guazzoni) is being loaned for the occasion from the Eye Filmmuseum in the Netherlands thanks to the support of the AHRC-funded research project Museum of Dreamworlds which Maria Wyke leads – https://museumofdreamworlds.org/ (opens in a new window). A variety of 35 mm shorts from the BFI concerning ancient Rome will also be shown. The project is systematically investigating all the silent films about ancient Greece and Rome that survive in the BFI National Archive. The project asks why was silent cinema so fascinated by the classical world, how did they design their visions of it, and how did they bring these distant times and places into the modern world of their audiences? Live piano accompaniment. Costas Fotopoulos will be playing for Quo Vadis?, and Colin Sell will play for the shorts.
Not the same tradition as the lineage above — a genuinely different thread to pull, if you want one.