Peaks of
Roman Empire interest seem to be co-temporal with empire
building by audience home country:
e.g.,
Shakespeare's tremendously successful Roman plays during the
Elizabethan era and 20th/21st century fascination with the
Empire during the US "(sole) Imperial superpower" age. (Cf., the "sword and sandal" and
"toga" 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 justify 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 and other, mostly
European, movie capitals, 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 or thinks he/she 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 (even pre-Roman) stock descriptions of ancient
tyranny.
In fact, 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". Modern "revisionists", however, maintain that Caligula was very popular with the people who counted, the Roman demos or mob. Nonetheless, Caligula's "excesses" made for a titillating story, which has been 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 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, and, at any rate, the
locations of Ben Hur are Israel and Antioch, not Rome. (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 (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 surviving "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,
Seneca's plays 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's
Hamlet.) A more traditional version of
Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus played at the
Washington Shakespeare Theatre in 2007, and the Washington
Folger Theatre hosted a live video-link performance by the
Royal Shakespeare Company in September of 2017. The
Synetic Theater has a "Wordless Shakespeare" version of Titus
Andronicus in its 2018 season.