Date:
Wednesday, October 10, 2018, 6:00pm
Location:
Menschel Hall, Lower Level, Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
Harvard University Department of the Classics Presents:
The Archaeology of Hollywood
Documentary Screening and Panel,
“The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille”
October 10th, 2018
6pm
Harvard Art Museums: Menschel Hall
In 1923, the legendary Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille produced the silent film “The Ten Commandments,” the precursor to his 1956 masterful remake starring Charlton Heston. DeMille shot the first film in the sand dunes of Santa Barbara County, California, about 150 miles North of Hollywood, where he built an enormous “City of the Pharaoh” set. Designed by Paul Iribe, the “father of Art Deco,” it was the largest set in motion picture history—but when the production finished filming, the city mysteriously vanished.
In 1982, Peter Brosnan, a film student at New York University, was sitting in a bar one night when someone told him that there were ancient Egyptian Sphinxes buried somewhere in the California Dunes. It sparked his imagination, and he embarked on what would become a thirty-year battle to prove the existence of these Sphinxes and discover DeMille’s Lost City.
On October 10th, 2018, The Harvard Classics Department invites you to a screening of this “irresistible detective story” (Hollywood Reporter), followed by a panel with director Peter Brosnan, executive producer Francesca Silva, and project archaeologist M. Colleen Hamilton. The panel will be led by led by Peter Der Manuelian, professor of Egyptology, and Adrian Stähli, professor of Classical Archaeology.
Free and open to the public!
