A Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen

Arthur J. Pomeroy, Arthur J. Pomeroy

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118741443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A comprehensive treatment of the Classical World in film and television, A Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen closely examines the films and TV shows centered on Greek and Roman cultures and explores the tension between pagan and Christian worlds.

Written by a team of experts in their fields, this work considers productions that discuss social settings as reflections of their times and as indicative of the technical advances in production and the economics of film and television. Productions included are a mix of Hollywood and European spanning from the silent film era though modern day television series, and topics discussed include Hollywood politics in film, soundtrack and sound design, high art and low art, European art cinemas, and the ancient world as comedy.

Written for students of film and television as well as those interested in studies of ancient Rome and Greece, A Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen provides comprehensive, current thinking on how the depiction of Ancient Greece and Rome on screen has developed over the past century. It reviews how films of the ancient world mirrored shifting attitudes towards Christianity, the impact of changing techniques in film production, and fascinating explorations of science fiction and technical fantasy in the ancient world on popular TV shows like Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, and Dr. Who.

PART I
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DEPICTION OF ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME ON SCREEN

CHAPTER ONE
Greece and Rome on Screen: On the Possibilities and Promises of a New Medium

Pantelis Michelakis

Contrary to the widely held view that early films are largely lost, dozens of films related to ancient Greece, Rome and the other civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean survive scattered in film archives across Europe and North America. Only a small number of these films have been restored digitally and made available through home‐video formats or online video streaming. The great majority of the films is accessible only through film prints available for onsite viewing in archival film collections with flatbed film‐viewing facilities or in specialized film festivals. With the help of the “Treasures from the Film Archives” database of the International Federation of Film Archives, the open access database of the “Media History Digital Library” and the online catalogues of film archives, libraries and other institutions, one can trace a significant number of films made during the first twenty years of cinema. One can also collect valuable information about their production, distribution and exhibition with the help of ephemera such as production stills, screenplays, posters, reviews and film catalogues. What is distinctive about this body of archival films and its contexts? Why is it that a viewing technology and an art form associated with modernity turned its attention to antiquity from the very beginning? Which antiquity did it engage with? These are the questions that will form the basis for the discussion undertaken in this chapter.

Film or Cinema?

The focus of this chapter is on the first two decades of cinema, and more specifically on the period between the 1890s and the mid‐1900s which is often identified as “early cinema” and the period from around 1907 to around 1913 which is often referred to as the “transitional period.” The cinema of this twenty‐year period is often defined in opposition to the more familiar and mainstream types of cinema that follow it. It is called a period of “short films” (as opposed to “feature films”), or “trick films” (a dominant genre of the period to be eclipsed by the arrival of some of the more canonical genres with which we are familiar today), as “cinema of attractions” (as opposed to a cinema preoccupied with narrative causality and character development; Gunning 1990), as “kine‐attractography” (as opposed to the more conventional “cinema”; Gaudreault 2011) or more broadly as a period of sensationalism or exhibitionism (as opposed to the realism or artistic maturity of later cinema). How to describe this period is inevitably implicated in debates about continuity and change in cinema history. It is also implicated in debates about what cinema is. Is it a technological medium, an art form or an industry? If cinema is understood as moving images, as filmstrips run in rapid succession to give the illusion of lifelike movement, it was born with Thomas Edison’s kinematoscope films or with Etienne‐Jules Marey’s chronophotography films at the turn of the 1890s. If understood as filmstrips run through a projector, it was invented by the Lumière brothers in the mid‐1890s. If understood as a social practice or as an art form, cinema was formed at a later stage, around 1910. The word “cinematograph” itself is a classicizing neologism (“writing of movement”) with a complex history: it is commonly associated with the camera invented by the Lumière brothers, but it was first coined by Léon Bouly for another motion picture device in 1892, whereas in its abbreviated form, “cinema” began to be used as a label for moving images only from the late 1910s.

It is common to see film history in biological terms, through a model of growth that raises questions about origins while also infantilizing cinema’s first two decades. It is also common to see film history in teleological terms, with the two most dominant modes being those of a drive towards artistic maturity (cinema as an art in an upward trajectory from primitive to sophisticated and from naïve to self‐aware) and of a drive towards realism (cinema as popular culture moving from silent to sound to color to widescreen to 3D). These two narratives are often in tension (cinema as an art form versus cinema as popular culture), but they both cast early cinema in the same position of infantile lack and inferiority. Applying their logic within the period itself before 1914, one can argue for a progression from the shorter and more naïve films of the 1890s to the longer, more complex, more sophisticated, artistically more mature and technically more competent and realistic films of the late 1900s and the early 1910s. This is certainly a way of thinking endorsed by many of the film practitioners of the time themselves and exploited to the full by the publicity campaigns around them in an attempt to gain an advantage over their competitors. In fact, a large number of films related to antiquity belong to the rather limited output of quality films, especially adaptations, produced from around 1907. The pressure to demonstrate that film had matured and that it needed to be taken seriously as an art form can be linked to the greater reliance on narrative complexity and psychological characters after 1906, with films such as A Slave’s Love (1907), to some of the first artistically ambitious films aimed to attract middle‐class audiences produced by the French company Film d’Art in 1908, such as The Return of Ulysses, to the cultural debate about moving pictures in the United States which starts with films such as Julius Caesar in 1908, and to the first international successes of Italian cinema between 1909 and 1911 with films such as Nero (1909), The Fall of Troy (1910) and Odyssey (1911).

There are, however, other interpretative possibilities that in recent years have gained more traction. One can argue that cinema as an institution did not really take shape until around 1910; that before this time, the practice of filmstrip projection should be seen not in relation to a cinema to come, but in relation to technological and artistic developments that began much earlier in the nineteenth century and of which the projection of filmstrips was not always the inevitable conclusion. For instance, the “cinematograph” could be linked to other inventions of the nineteenth century that were preoccupied with still images, moving images, or projection and that were driven by the double imperative of science and entertainment: from photography and magic lantern slides to devices such as the phenakistiscope, the stroboscope, the tachyscope and chronophotography (Crary 1990). With the exception of photography, such devices may have now been reduced to mere technological curiosities, but their impact on nineteenth‐century visions of antiquity must not be underestimated (however under‐researched). Early films themselves are full of visual devices, both real and imagined. For instance, in George Méliès’ Long Distance Wireless Photography (La photographie électrique à distance, 1908), a large fantastic machine is used to project on a screen an image of a small painting depicting the Three Graces. Upon projection, the Three Muses come to life, to the amazement of the photographer’s clients. The machine that dominates the film frame compresses the various phases between film recording and film exhibition into something resembling real‐time televisual liveness (Olsson 2005: 152). At the same time, the transformation of the motionless goddesses on the canvas to live models on the screen demonstrates how the technology of the period seeks to transcend representational realism and promises access to the embodied reality of beauty and grace that traditional arts can only imitate.

The practice of projecting filmstrips can also be seen as coexisting with, drawing on, and competing against dominant forms of stage entertainment and display practices of a fin‐de‐siècle culture. Early cinema has an often‐neglected affinity to visual spectacles of the period with a strong performative quality, such as magic sketches, magic lantern shows, fairy plays, pantomime and variety shows. When taken into consideration, this affinity plays an important role in early cinema’s unique status and “troubling alien quality” (Gaudreault 2011: 34). For instance, in Méliès’ Long Distance Wireless Photography, the animation of the pictorial depiction of the Three Graces situates the film not only in relation to real and imagined visual technologies of the period but also in relation to the entertainment world of vaudeville and more specifically to the popular performance practice of tableaux vivants or “living pictures.” In another film by Méliès, Jupiter’s Thunderbolts (Le Tonnerre de Jupiter, 1903), the king of the gods conjures the nine Muses in a hall of his celestial palace on Mount Olympus. The Muses first appear as statues before they then come to life, beginning to dance and sing for (and with) him, until their cacophony and unruliness make him dismiss them, at which point they are made to turn back to stone and then to disappear again. What we have here is the film’s director, stage designer, producer and protagonist as the new master of the arts, with the power to conjure up painting, sculpture, song, music and dance, to combine them into an intermedial and interactive spectacle but also to quell their insubordination.

Another possibility for early film history is to argue that films of this period are not marginal for later cinema but central to it precisely because of their ability to combine the production and dissemination of popular entertainment on an unprecedented scale with the radical potential of intense artistic experimentation. Seen in this way, early cinema poses a challenge for distinctions that may seem familiar today but that emerged and consolidated only in later periods—distinctions such as those between high and low cinema, between self‐reflection and realism, or between commercial and art‐house cinema. Early cinema also questions the neo‐Aristotelian focus on storytelling over spectacle that has informed much of the scholarly work on later ci...