Perret here produces another of his exquisite pictorialist melodramas. According to Gaumont publicity, the director delivers ‘an antique poem’ – a poem written in moving images and music. The film’s careful composition and deep-space tableaux recall the glamorous nineteenth-century antiquity paintings of Alma-Tadema and bring them to life. Most of the film is shot on location on the coast of southern France, among the cedars and cypresses of an ornate neo-classical villa. Characters appear dappled in sunlight, reflected in pools of shimmering water, or silhouetted against the sparkling sea, to great emotive effect. For this is not a grand historical narrative of the sculptor Phidias and the colossal works he created to celebrate the power of the Athenian state. What matters is not the creativity of the sculptor but that of his model – the poor slave girl who gives the film its title. While Phidias attempts to chisel a statue of the goddess of love that remains offscreen and unfinished throughout the film, his slave-girl creates in him a real, passionate love stirred by the beauty of her flesh and, most importantly, of her lyre-playing. By the end of the film the lovers face oblivion, forced to say goodbye to a tranquil ‘land of beauty and of love’ that is both ancient Greece and contemporary France. Suffering, loss and exile are key concerns suited to the film’s period of production during the First World War. At the film’s premier at the Gaumont Palace early in 1917, Eugène Poncin directed his especially composed score for soloists, a choir and a full orchestra to accompany Perret’s ‘aesthetic symphony’ to doomed love and tragic Hellas.

Maria Wyke