A Slave's Love

A Roman patrician watches a slave girl dance and wants her, and his wife arranges the poison, which he ends up drinking too. The plot is an opera without the music. What Albert Capellani adds, at Pathé in 1907, is depth: he stages the household around a staircase and lets the watchers be part of the composition, so the dance is also a scene about who is looking at it. Studio Rome, stencil colour in some prints, eleven minutes.