for the Rome-Movies Course
Things
to keep in mind:
Although our system is a conscious copy of the Roman Republic,
it is the Empire that fascinates us.
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.
Almost always, lessons are
being taught – book authors and movie/TV producers are
trying to reach/teach the audience. There
is often a great difference between the intended lesson and
what is "received" by the audience.
In almost all
cases, media producers are trying to recoup the monetary
investments. Only a few investors (producers) are
willing to lose money to teach
a political lesson.
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 "Arlington Cinema and Draft House" at the corner of Columbia Pike 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 an the audience member processes
the material, i.e., how the material is stirred into what
the person already believes or 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 is what the
author 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 first 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: 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
these "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 producers and
directors of Shakespeare, all of whom had lessons of their
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.
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, undoubtedly because of current
"political correctness".
The post WW2 Hollywood epics
(both Biblical and Roman) were based on 19th century
Protestant "novelizations". 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 the eight-minute chariot race scene from Ben Hur,
however, (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 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.
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 one of 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 ancient Roman Satyricon novel 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 sword and sandal 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 collosseum 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 movies wasn't nearly bloody and violent enough to
accurately depict the Colosseum and Roman society.
Our final film will be Titus, Julie Taymore's marginally
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 Brittish
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 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 (Hamlet)).
Note: the bloodiest (and horrible) scenes in Titus in
Shakespeare's days were either off stage, or were
simulated with bits of red cloth pulled from
costumes. Taymor uses a lot of fake blood in
close-ups and emphasizes the horror. Note 2:
Seneca's revenge odes were even more circumspect.
They were produced with no live actors -- just the author
seated in a darkened odeon singing/chanting his work
self-accompanied by a lyre. It was all left to the
imagination of the audience.
Modern
productions of Seneca's surviving revenge odes sometimes are
now done with costumed actors speaking Seneca's words.