Peaks of
Roman Empire
interest seem to be co-temporal with empire building:
e.g.,
Shakespeare's tremendously
successful Roman plays during the Elizabethan era and modern
fascination during
the US "(sole) Imperial superpower" age. (Cf.,
the sword and sandal flicks of the post WW2 period).
There are comparable German, Russian,
and Italian examples. The two great collections of Toga
movies are the Italian (ca. 1910 through late 1940s)
and the American (mostly post WW2). The Italian movies
generally glorified imperialism, and many of them were made
to justifiy Mussolini's goals. American Toga movies, as well as
the spate of "Sword and sandal movies in the late 1940s and early
1950s, were mostly anti-war, anti-imperialist, and "underdog
triumphant".
Strictly
speaking (and
why not?), in Hollywood, ancient Religious stuff (often biblical or ersatz biblical)
was made into "Sword and Sandal movies". Movies
with a non-religious Roman
setting were "Toga movies". It has been argued that all American
Toga movies were religious, i.e., either Judeo-Christian or Marxist.
Almost
always, lessons
are being taught -- authors and producers being the teachers. There is often a great difference
between the intended lesson and what is "received" by the audience,
and "reception", of course, is time sensitive (see below).
Definitions:
Film -- what people with pretensions of
"culture" go to see at small
"art" theaters in northwest Washington.
Movie
-- what the rest of us go to see at multiplex theaters in the burbs.
Flick -- what they usually show in
places where you can also get a beer -- like your
TV room.
Cinema -- what they do in France and at the "Cinema and Draft House" at the corner of Glebe and Fillmore in Arlington (the latter of which is a better place.)
Two other
words that you
often hear in "film as literature" courses are "reception"
and "gaze". There is
great controversy about what these words mean and how they should be
used. My simplistic definitions are as
follows:
Reception
refers to how material is taken in by a member or members of the
audience -- it
is passive, although there is (usually) an active element, which is how
the
audience member processes the material, i.e., how the material is
stirred into
what the person already believes of knows. (The
French "deconstruction" fad took this element
to the extreme, saying that what the author might have intended the
audience to
take away had lost its relevance as soon as the author's words (or
producer's
product) were offered: the only
thing that mattered was how the audience processed the information. This fad, remarkably, held sway
throughout the West for a while, but we are now said to be in the
"post-deconstructionism" phase.
This is all, of course, just specialist jargon.)
Gaze
(sometimes "look") is what the author or producer is trying to
attract, to the story as a whole and to particular aspects of the story. Gaze is much more active than
reception: the audience has to
look rather than just see.
Both
reception and gaze
are, of course, modified by time.
The time between when the story is written down and when it
becomes
available to a particular audience changes both reception and gaze. With our material, this happens several
times:
First,
when the event happens (or when the story is made up) and the original
recording of the event takes place.
This is not always as easy to define as it might seem. Some examples with our material are:
the comedic situations in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the
Forum, which appear
to be Roman but were actually
derived from earlier Greek stock situations; and the "horrors and sex"
in the Caligula story, which appear to be derived from historical
accounts of
Caligula's reign, but are really derived from pre-existing stock
descriptions
of ancient tyranny (i.e., nothing in
what comes down to us about Caligula from the ancient "historians"
has any necessary
relationship to what he actually did, but what we can be sure
about is that he was immensely unpopular with the successors in whose
employ
were the "historians".
Nonetheless, it makes for a titillating story so it's repeated
down
through the ages.
Later
intermediate retellings change the "lesson". In
our material, three of the films
(Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Titus) are based on explicit
retellings by Shakespeare, who had lessons of his own to add. All of the stories in all of the films
were reworked by European Renaissance "humanists" (i.e., people --
almost invariably men -- who rediscovered the "classic" Roman stories
and rewrote them into Ciceronian Latin or their own vernaculars, their avowed purpose being to find
"human" exemplars to replace the biblical exemplars of the earlier
"scholastics".) It's
worth noting here that Shakespeare got his Roman histories (Julius
Caesar and Antony
and
Cleopatra, but not
Titus
Andronicus) from
Sir Thomas
North's 1579 English translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, and that
North
would have been working from Latin text(s) as rendered by Italian or
French
humanists of his own time or slightly earlier, not with original texts..
Recent
productions (i.e., 20th/21st century) have their
own
added lessons to teach.
The
1937 Scipio
film was a
glorification of Italian fascist imperialism, which had been expanding
in Libya
("Tripolitania" and "Cyrenaica") since Mussolini's
accession and which, a few months after Scipio's premier would lead to the Italian
invasion of
Ethiopia. The intended Italian
audience reveled in the idea of imperial expansion.
Seventy years later we look on it with revulsion:
the "reception" has changed, clearly because our "political
correctness" isn't the same as that of the 1930s Italian audience.
The
post WW2 Hollywood epics (both Religious and Toga) were based on 18th
and 19th
century Protestant "novelizations" and novels. Quo
Vadis,
The Robe, and The
Ten
Commandments were
clearly
"religious message" films, and, not incidentally, had post-war
anti-war messages. They are
outside the scope of this course even though the first two were
definitely
"Roman". Ben Hur, which we will not see, was also
blatantly
religious, but that's not why we won't be seeing it.
The choice was between Spartacus and Ben Hur, and the former
has more lessons to teach both about Rome and about the societies that
made the
movies. (We will see, however, the
eight-minute chariot race scene from Ben Hur (twice):
it's too iconic and exciting to miss.) The
Spartacus film also has Christian
resonance, first because of the initial explicit tie-in to Christianity
provided by the off-screen narrator and then because of how the
Christian West
reacts to crucifixion, not to mention the subtext of supposed Christian
virtues
that run through the whole film. The
narrator's opening "Christian" remarks, by the way, are not nearly as
jarring to the educated ear as are the remarks, supposedly the words of
Augustus in a reference to his Res Gestae brag sheet, at the end of the 2003
Italian Augustus
TV film that refer to the birth of "Jesus of
Nazareth" in the 23rd year of his reign. Also, by the
way, there is nothing in the real history of Spartacus that would
justify the scene of his crucifixion: it was a cruci-fiction. Although
many of his men were crucified, Spartacus was not. It was assumed
that he had been killed in battle, but the body of Spartacus was
never found -- like Hitler, he still may be hiding out in Argentina.
The
Caligula movie
was the
result of several different visions (some of them clearly perverted)
working at
cross-purposes. The version we
will see is the least perverted (R - rated with Gore Vidal's name
back on the
label). We'll talk about but not
see the other versions.
Fellini's
Satyricon, based
on the
surviving fragmentary Satyricon
of Petronius Arbiter, Nero's supposed "master of the revels", was
produced to draw parallels between Dolce Vita 1960s Italy and Nero's Rome. It's pretty tame by today's
standards. What could Fellini have
wrought today? (Something to think
about: were the Satyricons of Petronius and Fellini about satire or
Satyrs?)
Gladiator is yet another big toga
blockbuster. The story is pure
fiction except for the names of some of the main characters. It gets an "F" for historical
accuracy, but the background material -- costumes, ambiance,
architecture, and
the feel of the colosseum are very accurate. When
Gladiator
first
lit the silver screen, several movie critics said that it was
too violent and bloody, but we "Romanists" know (don't we?) that the
movie wasn't nearly bloody and violent enough to accurately depict the
Colosseum and Roman society.
Our
final film will be Titus,
Julie Taymore's fairly accurate rendering of Shakespeare's Titus
Andronicus. This
was Shakespeare's most violent play, and
Ms. Taymore doesn't cringe from reflecting Shakespeare.
Shakespeare scholars say that he was
inspired by the "revenge dramas" of Seneca, nine "plays"
intended to be read rather than performed that were written in blank
verse by
the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca in the 1st century AD.
Rediscovered by Italian humanists in the mid-16th century, they became
the
models for the revival of tragedy on the Renaissance stage. The two
great, but very different, dramatic traditions of the age -- French
Neoclassical tragedy and Elizabethan tragedy --
both drew inspiration from Seneca.
There are certainly "modernisms" throughout the film, but they
are clearly both intentional and, more importantly, to the point.
Taymore is better known for her design, direction, staging
of "The Lion King" (which, in fact, has some elements that could
easily have been drawn from Shakespeare.) A more traditional version of
Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus will be playing at the Washington
Shakespear Theatre from April 3 through May 20, 2007.
Our class on Titus will be on May 8.