Enrico Guazzoni’s early film La sposa del Nilo is, for once, not about Roman antiquity – the subject for which he became so famous – but about ancient Egypt. A couple in love are cruelly torn apart: she must be sacrificed to the Nile to end the drought. The final image recalls Federico Faruffini’s painting La vergine del Nilo (1865, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Rome). Noteworthy and innovative is the procession filmed from above, a perspective that Guazzoni would employ again, for example, in the final scene of Cajus Julius Caesar (1914), in which Servilia scatters flowers from her balcony onto the procession bearing Caesar’s corpse.

Ivo Blom