Monica Silveira Cyrino,
Big Screen Rome.
Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
ISBN: 1405116846
288pp
Au$54.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Blackwell Publishing)

In Big Screen Rome, classical historian Monica Silveira Cyrino combines her passions for Rome, cinema and the ancient world in a user-friendly and enjoyable manual focusing on nine well known films that use the site of ancient Rome to explore contemporary issues. Her book follows a trend amongst historians to teach the past through the medium of film. It differs from previous volumes on the ancient world and cinema in its textbook-like layout, making it easily accessible to students, teachers and general readers with an interest in history.

Each chapter is divided into a schematic set of sub-headings which provide factual as well as analytical information on ‘production and cast credits’, ‘plot and outline’, ‘ancient background’, ‘background to the film’, ‘making the movie’, ‘themes and interpretations’. These different sub-headings allow the author to explore the films from a variety of angles and to contextualise them in different ways. For example, in the section on ‘making the movie’ she illustrates how Hollywood uses the epic film genre and the spectacle of Rome to flaunt to international audiences the power and prosperity of the film industry itself, while blurring the distinction between historical figures and the movie star. While the sections on ‘ancient background’ provide the specialist and non-specialist reader with sound historical overviews, Cyrino’s goal in this book is not so much to draw out the inaccuracies and distortions of cinematic adaptations of Roman antiquity. Rather, the strength of the book is in the ‘themes of interpretations’ section which discusses the importance of the genre as a commentary on contemporary cultural and political debates in America and the relevance these films have for modern audiences. The list of ‘core issues’ that concludes each chapter is set out in a form similar to an essay question, reinforcing the sense that each individual chapter has been ‘road-tested’ on the author’s students and owes much to her focus on pedagogical goals as well as her obvious passion for the subject matter.

Set out in chronological order, the volume traces the changing representations of Roman mythology and antiquity from the American biblical epics of the 1950s, such as Quo Vadis (US 1951),The Robe (US 1953) and Ben-Hur (US 1959), to the secular struggles “between personal freedom and traditional authority” in the climate of cold war America in the early 1960s in Spartacus (US 1960) and Cleopatra (UK/USA/Switzerland 1963), to the humorous explorations of the genre in films such as A Funny Thing that Happened on the Way to the Forum (UK/US 1966) and Monty Python’s Life of Brian (UK 1979) to what Cyrino refers to as a modern renaissance of the genre with Ridley Scott’s blockbuster Gladiator (UK/US 2000).

The book does a good job in demonstrating how the values, rhetoric and politics of ancient Rome have persisted as universally important models which offer useful analogies for the exploration of the nature of power and ideology in 20th century America. For example, the discussions of Quo Vadis, The Robe and Ben-Hur show how these films “employed the rhetoric and ideology of the Cold War to condemn oppressive foreign tyrannies” and in varying degrees of subtlety hint at the link between Roman authoritarianism and the “American government’s attempt to restrain civil liberties during the McCarthy years of the early 1950s” (84).

The chapters on Spartacus and Cleopatra emphasise the shift of the genre toward provocative explorations of sexuality and gender, which the author convincingly links to contemporary controversies and public debate in America. The chapter on Cleopatra is particularly strong in its discussion of the link between Cleopatra’s aggressive sexuality, Elizabeth Taylor’s reputation as a legendary adulteress and changing gender roles. “While epic films such as Ben-Hur and Spartacus emphasized the exhibition of well-oiled nude male bodies”, Cyrino points out “Cleopatra completely ignores the masculine physique in favor of the female, recalling the more explicit representation of the feminine form in Quo Vadis” (154).
The strongest chapter in the book, owing no doubt to Cyrino’s passion for the film, is the chapter on Gladiator, which attempts to answer the obvious question “why was the long-defunct genre revived in 2000?” (224). The chapter convincingly shows that the genre’s importance as a framework for reflections on the political and cultural role of the United States is once again at work, this time as a meditation on the role of the nation as the world’s only remaining superpower (239). The discussion here is wide ranging and includes the film’s promotion of conservative values of family, home and spirituality and the influence of sports television on the shooting of Gladiator and the film’s subsequent impact on the production and broadcasting of contemporary sports events such as American Super Bowl, which invite audiences to associate the grandeur or contemporary sports events with the extravagance of ancient Rome.

The inclusion of the shorter, but no less interesting chapters on the comedies set against a backdrop of ancient Rome (ie. The Life of Brian), makes for a well balanced selection of epic Roman films, albeit one that is exclusively addressed to English speaking, mostly US American audience. Rome is used as a mere backdrop, much like Hollywood used the Rome based Italian film studios, Cinecittà, as a ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’ during the 50s and 60s when they provided a cheap production alternative. And here lies the main problem I have with this volume. Surprisingly for a book written by a self-confessed lover of the city of Rome, the city itself does not come alive but is merely explored as an American fantasy. Indeed, one might come away from this book with a sense that the genre was invented solely for an American market. Given the book’s appeal as a University course manual, it would have been useful to illuminate for potential students also the other uses of the mythology of Rome, for example those of the Italian Fascist government under Mussolini, who had ordered the building of Cinecittà as part of his propaganda machine to resurrect the myth of Rome as a means of instilling the young nation with a strong sense of collective national identity. To be fair, the author probably sought to avoid overlap with Maria Wyke’s seminal Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema and History (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), to which Cyrino’s book offers a useful addition. Both readers and teachers would be well advised to consult both volumes in order to get the bigger picture of Rome and the big screen.

Kerstin Pilz
Macquarie University, Australia.

Created on: Friday, 24 November 2006