Uploaded 16 April 1999
Films set in ancient Rome have often drawn the laughter, if not the outright contempt, of classicists. Why should classicists bother themselves with the inanities of such pompous, ephemeral farce when they have such rich, timeless materials to work with? And, if any book on such films by a classicist has first to confront the potential scorn of their own discipline, what possible utility would such a work have for serious scholars of history in film? Given this opportunity to reflect back on my own work, [1] I would like to argue that the need to write polemically about the rewards of studying classical history in film can draw particular attention to some productive interdisciplinary techniques for its analysis.
Analysis of ancient Rome’s reconstructions on screen has only recently begun to occupy a serious place in classical studies. And, in more conservative quarters, works such as my own and an earlier collection edited by Martin Winkler[2] might well be viewed at worst as acts of cultural vandalism, and at best as vulgar attempts to attract students to a discipline in crisis. Since the nineteenth century classics has conventionally been equated with high culture, and the classical tradition viewed as a sacred process of handing down formally complex, morally rich, critically insightful texts to a present viewed as their passive and grateful recipient. Classics (in this view) is the antithesis of popular culture. And, when faced with the apparent prospect of its replacement by popular culture as a subject of university education, it becomes the duty of every classical scholar to bring students into direct contact with Graeco-Roman culture and thus to save them from modern barbarism. In such an intellectual climate, books on film by classicists must work to denaturalize the distinction between high and popular culture, and to demonstrate that films with an ancient theme are to be understood as an integral part of a more broadly conceived classical tradition. What emphases, then, arise in this polemical approach that may be of use to the study of other histories in film?
Firstly, to evaluate historical film (and its anachronisms) on the basis of a direct comparison with “primary” sources – in this case the surviving texts and monuments of ancient Rome – is to misunderstand the nature and the complexity of cinematic historiography. The work of Hayden White and Stephen Bann is important here not only because they collapsed any seemingly clear boundaries between history and fiction, but also because they interpreted the historical discourses of the nineteenth century as an integrated (and evolving) regime for the representation of the past. Historical film, in this analysis, emerges from and is related to the “professional” histories of the nineteenth century, as well as that century’s museum displays, historical novels, paintings, plays, opera, and mass entertainments. [3] Hence cinema’s representations of the Roman occupation of Judaea have most frequently been shaped around the fictional figure of the Jew Ben-Hur and his famous chariot-race, while films about the emperor Nero most commonly feature the star-crossed love of a Roman soldier for a Christian beloved, are entitled Quo vadis?, and climax with the girl almost gored to death by a bull in the arena.
We should not forget that film is a medium for the narration of history that initially located itself as an extension of nineteenth-century representational forms. Still in the 1910s and 1920s, and even as late as the 1950s, feature-length film narratives of antiquity were borrowing from the whole spectrum of nineteenth-century modes of historical representation (literary, dramatic, pictorial) in pursuit of historical authenticity, authority for cinema as a mode of high culture, and the guarantee of mass audiences who would be drawn by the vivid reconstruction of familiar and pertinent events of the past.
Take the emperor Nero as an example. The narrative and many of the characters to be found in the Hollywood epic Quo vadis (USA 1951) are inherited from a religious novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz which was first serialized in a Polish magazine between 1894 and 1896, and went on to become an international bestseller in numerous translations. The novel itself claimed reliance on ancient sources but in fact drew on contemporary historical scholarship in order to animate the poorly documented and much debated story of the early Christian church in Rome. Following the conventions of Walter Scott’s Waverly novels, Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis? humanized and domesticated history by retelling the persecutions and martyrdoms of Nero’s reign in terms of the star-crossed love of the Roman soldier Vinicius (played in the film by Robert Taylor) for the Christian Lygia (Deborah Kerr). The Hollywood epic’s strategies for narrating history are more intelligible and better understood when compared to its source in nineteenth-century novelistic historiography.
The representational strategies of historical film have borrowed additionally from an even broader repertoire of nineteenth-century aesthetic forms. During the silent era the film scenography of ancient Rome frequently constituted a series of animated paintings. Audiences of early Nero films clapped every time they recognised the representation in the film medium of popular neoclassical paintings such as Jean-Léon Gérôme’s scenes of gladiatorial combat or Christians martyred in the arena. MGM’s 1951 Quo vadis inherited the same technique, if not an attention to the same paintings, when it presented the crucifixion of Saint Peter in the form of a static tableau. Even the Hollywood film’s figuring of Nero’s reign as a series of spectacular moments – the firing of Rome, the chariot races, the gladiatorial combats, the massacre of Christians – can be traced back through cinematic tradition to the equestrian shows and circus spectacles which toured Europe and the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. A programme of 1889 advertising the Barnum Circus show Nero, or the destruction of Rome reads like the press-releases and poster captions that accompanied the distribution of Hollywood’s Neronian blockbuster: “tremendous spectacle of blazing Rome”, “dazzling interior of Nero’s palace”, “gorgeous scenes of imperial orgies”, “terrific arenic combats”, “powerfully realistic climaxes”, and so on. [4]
The new technology of the moving image could be seen as a further development of a nineteenth-century technical progression through engraving, lithography, and photography towards ever more “realistic” representations, whether of the present or the past. Such technological developments further abetted the nineteenth-century historical sensibility that sought to make the past live again in the present. Thus, one of the most fascinating attractions which the new medium soon claimed to offer was the possibility of reconstructing the past with a precision and a vivacity superior to that of the preceding historical discourses on which it drew for inspiration. The technicolor of Quo vadis or the wide-screen of Ben-Hur (USA 1959) were similarly hailed by the studios in the rhetoric of historical realism, even if their purpose was more prosaically to combat the attractions of television.
Thus, cinema’s ancient Rome emerged into the twentieth century as a world formed from the historical discourses of the nineteenth, more vivid and fully realised than any which could be pieced together from the fragmentary remains of ancient texts and monuments. Roman history on film, therefore, should be scrutinized in relation to its nineteenth-century sources and understood as both a continuation of and a challenge to them.
Secondly, representations of a particular historical period in film should be understood as intertexts with other, extra-cinematic devices for using that past to speak of present concerns. Pierre Sorlin, in his analyses of history and film, has argued that history in film is a useful device to speak of the present time. [5] In the context of my own work, however, it seemed important to emphasize additionally that ancient Rome in film is not an arbitrary enabling device. The two nations most prolific in the manufacture of cinematic histories of Rome – Italy and the United States – were also those that assiduously created a whole array of “invented traditions” to connect themselves to a Roman past now appropriated as their own. [6]
To take the emperor Nero again as an example: in what senses, in 1951, could a film be aboutancient Rome but for modern America? What types of identification or distance might we expect a film about Neronian Rome to solicit? What cultural competence did American audiences then have to interpret a film narrative of Nero’s reign as addressing the concerns of the present? Played by Peter Ustinov, Nero speaks in British upper-class cadences, thus figuring the pious rebellion against the emperor in terms of the War of Independence. But, significantly, during that war America had played a republican Brutus to the British king’s dictatorial Caesar. While the Founding Fathers viewed the Roman republic as the greatest and most serviceable exemplar of liberty and the struggle against tyranny, and dressed their heroes (such as George Washington) in the civic virtues of a Cincinnatus, a Cicero, or a Cato, British politicians were regularly clothed in the vices of the Roman emperors. [7] For American audiences familiar with their own country’s political rhetoric, the Roman rulers of MGM’s Quo vadis could thus be read as imperial oppressors of the Old World, the rebelling yet pious Christian communities as heroes of the New.
Furthermore, in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, Hollywood narratives of ancient Roman tyranny overthrown (Nero commits suicide at film’s close) could readily operate analogously to celebrations of the recent defeat of European dictatorships. For both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had troped their political discourses of expansionism in Roman terms and their Roman paraphernalia and parades of popular consent had been displayed worldwide in newsreel footage. Thus one contemporary American film critic speculated on the pleasures spectators of Quo vadis might gain from identifying the crowds massed on screen beneath Nero’s balcony with those who had recently stood beneath Mussolini’s. [8]
The 1951 Quo vadis offered its American spectators self-satisfied parallels between imperial Rome and modern fascist states, between Christianity and the American way. In so doing it also assuaged current Cold War concerns about Communism. In line with its novelistic origins, the film depicts Nero as a godless Antichrist. Yet that depiction was sharply resonant in the 1950s, for American fundamentalists were regularly painting the Cold War in apocalyptic terms, assimilating Stalin to the Antichrist, and equating Church membership and attendance with the essence of Americanism. The triumph of Christian values at the film’s close argues for religious revival and gives historical authority to a victory for the American way.
But cinema’s Roman history lessons were not without their paradoxes and equivocations. From the late nineteenth century, American expansionism had appeared to endanger the Republican institutions and Christian ethics which the Founding Fathers had been so keen to establish. Critics of empire from then on frequently looked to the decline of Rome as a monitory vision for twentieth-century America. And in film history, therefore, imperial Rome could be cast as both the tyrannical and oppressive Old World and as an aspect of the American self. MGM’s Quo vadis replays and reinforces the rhetoric of the Cold War by figuring Stalin as the sadistic, godless Nero, but, through the portrayal on screen of the hounding and suicide of the Roman writer Petronius, it also appears in passing to mourn the repression which constant vigilance against Communism within the US had required.
The film’s traffic in historical analogies is even more complex than this. Throughout the twentieth century, in works of social theory and their popular elaboration in the press, the rise of American mass culture has been compared with imperial Rome’s bread and circuses. [9] Arguing that the more a society comes to depend on mass culture the more it falls into a pattern of decline once traced by Rome, critics described American film (and television) as the new colosseum feeding exhibitions of sex and violence to its new Romans. But such an adverse equation between Hollywood and ancient Rome could be turned to the studios’ advantage. It has long been noted that whatever the moralistic drive of Quo vadis on the level of its narrative, visually it places its spectators on the side of decadence and tyranny. [10] As a legendary provider of astonishing spectacle Nero could readily operate as a metaphor for cinema’s own provision of visual excess, and his commodified court embody the grandeur, luxury, and eroticism of Hollywood itself. The MGM studio thus invited from spectators a consumer gaze, and encouraged them both to identify with the luxury displayed on screen and to carry over that identification into their lives outside the cinema. Through the purchase of rayon boxer shorts (in eight fiery patterns) or pyjamas emblazoned with a pattern of spread eagles, you too could “Make like Nero”.
To conclude: without attending to the traditions which lie behind and alongside filmed history (whether they be earlier historiographic conventions or extra-cinematic discourses of history), we fail to do justice to the complexities and ingenuities with which cinema has placed history on screen. In the case of Roman history films, the signs are encouraging. New works of scholarship are in press – such as a collection edited by Margaret Malamud and Don McGuire entitled The Empire Strikes Back: Images of Rome in 20thc Film and Literature – and one of my undergraduates, I have discovered to my great pleasure, has been cast as a Roman extra in Ridley Scott’s new gladiator film.
Footnotes:
[1] Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History (New York: Routledge, 1997).
[2] Martin Winkler (ed.), Classics and Cinema (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1991).
[3] See, for example, Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973); Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984); Bann, The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1990). For the importance of White to the study of historical film, see Arthur Lindley (29 May 1998), “The ahistoricism of medieval film”, Screening the Past, screeningthepast/firstrelease/
fir598/ALfr3a.htm>. [March 1999].
[4] see the reproduction of the poster in Projecting the Past , p. 122; fig. 5.4.
[5] See, for example, The Film in History: Restaging the Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
[6] For the concept of the “invented tradition”, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983).
[7] For useful introductions to the role of ancient Rome in the formation and development of an American national identity, see Peter Bondanella, The Eternal City: Roman images in the Modern World (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987); William L. Vance, America’s Rome. Volume 1: Classical Rome (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989); Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1994).
[8] See Giulio Cesare Castello in Cinema 105 (1953), p. 151; cited in Projecting the Past, p. 141.
[9] See Patrick Brantlinger, Bread & Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983).
[10] See Michael Wood, America in the Movies: or “Santa Maria, it had slipped my mind” (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975), esp. 184-85.