Museum of Dreams: Silent Antiquity Films in the BFI National Archive

古典古代(古希腊和罗马的文化)从一开始就为电影提供了一个强大的特权场所，可以探索被认为是西方世界的起源和文化遗产的过去。无声电影(涵盖19世纪90年代至20年代)在现代创作和传播关于过去的知识方面发挥了重要作用，无论是在国家、文化和语言边界之内还是跨国界。电影为全球观众提供了一种全新的、令人惊讶的创造性和迅速标志性的方式来体验古典古代，这种方式与其以高雅文化形式(如小说、戏剧、歌剧、绘画、舞蹈和雕塑)的重建有关，但又不同。古典的过去被带到了今天，在时间和空间上移动，由演员体现，并通过颜色和音乐伴奏在情感上进行编码。多亏了电影，古典古代被赋予了一个身临其境的民主梦幻世界，而由于古典古代，电影可以宣称是一种教育艺术的地位--正如该项目的标题所说的那样，它是一座“梦想的博物馆”。梦想博物馆将对古典古代和无声电影之间的遭遇进行一次连贯、跨学科和比较研究。该项目将询问，这种遭遇如何塑造了现代世界中古典古代的文化记忆，以及电影作为全球媒介的历史。它将调查无声电影，将古典作为美学作品、商业娱乐形式和大众教育工具--这种教育经常富有想象力地关注女性和奴隶，面向不同性别、种族和阶层的观众，似乎挑战了公立学校或博物馆等精英文化机构的权威。该项目将使用英国电影学院国家档案馆中最大的(但服务最差的)幸存电影集合作为一个具有代表性和可管理的语料库。至少有70幅编目的印刷品以古希腊或罗马为重点，在日期、流派和原产国方面范围广泛。该项目将是第一个系统地研究这些无与伦比的藏品与古典古董有关的项目。通过这些手段，梦想博物馆将建立对古典古代的现代接受和无声电影的跨国历史和文化地位的更好理解。通过关注BFI的资产，该项目还将使英国牢牢地处于制作、放映、消费和策划20世纪初经典古代电影的全球网络中，并为这些电影在21世纪建立一项重要的教育遗产。与其他国家相比，梦想博物馆将极大地丰富人们对古典古代在20世纪初英国文化中的作用以及进入它的民主化进程的理解。它将提供对无声电影的文化功能、其民族特色、跨国展览和本地化消费的更深入的了解。通过在链接数据研究网站上展示其调查结果，该网站还将提供至少30份数字化印刷品，并通过其他出版物、研讨会和放映，该项目将引起人们对BFI财产的重要性的关注，并刺激对它们的进一步研究，以及更广泛地说，如何通过现代媒体回忆遥远的过去。该项目的跨学科和比较方法将直接惠及国际电影档案工作者以及多个学者群体。专业利益相关者(建筑师、教师、博物馆馆长和媒体从业者)的参与将更好地创造教育资源--并为这些电影留下遗产，远远超过项目的生命周期。

Classical antiquity (the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome) provided cinema from its inception with a powerfully privileged site for the exploration of a past perceived to be the origins and cultural heritage of the Western world. Silent cinema (encompassing a period from the 1890s to the 1920s) played a fundamental role in the modern creation and dissemination of knowledge about that past within and across national, cultural and linguistic boundaries. Cinema offered its global audiences a radically new, astonishingly creative, and swiftly iconic way of experiencing classical antiquity that was related to, but distinct from, its reconstruction in high cultural forms (such as the novel, theatre, opera, painting, dance and sculpture). The classical past was brought into the present day moving in time and space, embodied by actors, and emotionally coded by colour and musical accompaniment. Thanks to cinema, classical antiquity was rendered a powerfully immersive democratic dreamworld while, thanks to classical antiquity, cinema could lay claim to the status of an educative art - a 'museum of dreams' as in the project's title.Museum of Dreams will produce a cohesive, interdisciplinary and comparative study of the encounter between classical antiquity and silent cinema. The project will ask how that encounter shaped both the cultural memory of classical antiquity in the modern world and the history of cinema as a global medium. It will investigate silent films concerning classical antiquity as aesthetic works, commercial forms of entertainment and instruments of mass education - an education that, in its frequent imaginative focus on women and slaves and address to audiences diverse in gender, ethnicity and class, appeared to challenge the authority of elite cultural institutions like the public school or museum. The project will use as a representative and manageable corpus the largest (yet least well-served) collection of surviving films, those in the British Film Institute's National Archive. At least 70 catalogued prints have ancient Greece or Rome as their focus and range widely in date, genre and country of origin. The project will be the first systematically to investigate these unparalleled holdings as engagements with classical antiquity. By these means, Museum of Dreams will establish a better understanding of both the modern reception of classical antiquity and the transnational history and cultural status of silent cinema. By focusing on the BFI holdings, the project will also situate the UK firmly within the global network that produced, exhibited, consumed, and curated the classical antiquity films of the early twentieth century, and establish for those films an important educational legacy in the twenty-first century. Museum of Dreams will considerably enrich understanding of the role of classical antiquity in British culture in the early twentieth century compared to other countries and the process whereby access to it was democratised. It will provide deeper knowledge of the cultural function ascribed to silent cinema, its national characteristics, transnational exhibition and localised consumption. By presenting its findings in a linked-data research website that will also provide easy access to at least 30 digitised prints, and through other publications, workshops and screenings, the project will bring attention to the importance of the BFI holdings and stimulate further research into them and, more broadly, into how the distant past can be recalled through modern media. The project's interdisciplinary and comparative approach will directly benefit the international community of film archivists as well as multiple constituencies of scholars. Engagement in the project of professional stakeholders (architects, teachers, museum curators, and media practitioners) will better enable the creation of educational resources - and a legacy for these films that will last well beyond the lifetime of the project.