Greece and Rome on Screen: On the Possibilities and Promises of a New Medium

The emergence of cinema creates new possibilities for the representation and conceptualization of Greece and Rome. This chapter concentrates on a small selection of color films produced by the French companies Pathe and Gaumont, and more specifically on the stencil effects used in these films. The chapter discusses small and diverse sample of films that allows us to trace a development in the use of film color from novelty to accepted norm within a relatively short period of intense artistic and technological experimentation with a specific coloring technique. The oscillation between and within different types of polychromy and monochromy informs cinematic representations of antiquity throughout cinema's history. A persistent narrative about early cinema spectatorship focuses on a very different kind of spectator, the naive spectator who runs away in panic from the fast‐approaching train on the screen or who runs towards the screen in an attempt to save the heroine in danger.