The 1924 European co-production Quo vadis? offers viewers fanciful scenes of Roman history that are both magnificent and disturbing. The emperor Nero is played as a satanic grotesque by the German star Emil Jannings. At the start, we see him lie resplendent on a couch in the grounds of his monumental, richly decorated palace. He peers with sadistic amusement at a series of half-dressed women being thrown into the fountain to fatten his eels for dinner. The erotic connotations are brought out by striking underwater shots. This Quo vadis? was designed as a remake of Enrico Guazzoni’s internationally successful epic of 1913 – a nostalgic return to pre-war filmmaking in the hope of reconquering a now lost global market. Through its long takes, distant framing, deep staging, and cast of thousands, the 1924 film also puts emphasis on spectacle but takes the familiar story to decadent extremes: extravagant banquets; beatings and murder; attempted rapes; the spectacular fire; gladiatorial fighting, a female charioteer, and lurid martyrdoms. Throughout, Quo vadis? emphasises the gaze of the emperor – Nero’s pleasure and horror at looking. The sunlight palace triumphs over the city until the Christians emerge from their catacombs. The set is the Palace of Festivities, a pavilion recently designed by the architect Armando Brasini in the Villa Borghese to house an exhibition on agriculture, industry and the applied arts. The pavilion’s reuse connects the fascist present to Rome’s classical past. Yet its symbolism on screen does not square with the emerging fascist rhetoric about modern Italy’s ties to ancient Rome. Civis Romanus sum, Mussolini had infamously declared on 21 April 1924. The imperial city this Quo vadis? invites viewers to enter is not shaped to suit fascism. According to the opening intertitles, it is simultaneously mistress of the world and crucible of corruption. One hundred years on, we revisit this cinescape with a mixture of revulsion and fascination.

Maria Wyke