Imagining Ancient Cities in Film

From Babylon to Cinecittà

Marta Garcia Morcillo, Pauline Hanesworth, Óscar Marchena, Marta Garcia Morcillo, Pauline Hanesworth, Óscar Lapeña Marchena

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781135013165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

In film imagery, urban spaces show up not only as spatial settings of a story, but also as projected ideas and forms that aim to recreate and capture the spirit of cultures, societies and epochs. Some cinematic cities have even managed to transcend fiction to become part of modern collective memory. Can we imagine a futuristic city not inspired at least remotely by Fritz Lang's Metropolis? In the same way, ancient Babylon, Troy and Rome can hardly be shaped in popular imagination without conscious or subconscious references to the striking visions of Griffiths' Intolerance, Petersen's Troy and Scott's Gladiator, to mention only a few influential examples. Imagining Ancient Cities in Film explores for the first time in scholarship film representations of cities of the Ancient World from early cinema to the 21st century.

The volume analyzes the different choices made by filmmakers, art designers and screen writers to recreate ancient urban spaces as more or less convincing settings of mythical and historical events. In looking behind and beyond intended archaeological accuracy, symbolic fantasy, primitivism, exoticism and Hollywood-esque monumentality, this volume pays particular attention to the depiction of cities as faces of ancient civilizations, but also as containers of moral ideas and cultural fashions deeply rooted in the contemporary zeitgeist and in continuously revisited traditions.

1
Introduction

Cinematic Cityscapes and the Ancient Past

Marta García Morcillo and Pauline Hanesworth

1. Proto-Cinematic Ancient and Modern Urban Imageries

At the beginning of cinema, there was the city. Both in some ways products of the modern urban worlds that emerged from the Industrial Revolution, cinema and city are symbiotic. If the city is the place where ‘things happen’, cinema is the medium that captures its ephemeral movements. So it is that we find the city to be central not just to the productions by those who patented the new invention—the brothers Lumière in 1895—but also to those earlier experimenters of the medium such as Louis Le Prince, the Skladanowsky brothers and Thomas Edison.¹ Through the medium of cinema, these figures immortalised worlds in mid-metamorphosis, worlds that were changing—and crystallising—on a daily basis, shaped by the dynamism of modernity. Take for example the Lumière Company which embarked on an ambitious project that aimed to create visual archives of cities, historical monuments, picturesque sceneries and the happenings of modernity.² In these, the city began to be explored as the centre of human conflicts and challenges. Following this trend, the industry devised narratives that imaged the oppositions and contradictions of modern urban life as a contrast to the idealised archaism of the countryside.³ From the multiple meanings of the city, movies soon emphasised their role as witnesses, symbols and protagonists of universal and national histories and of the passage of time. Thus it was that cinema, by the turn of the century, had already become a valuable instrument by which pioneers could visualise and normalise the complex spatial relations of modern societies, the social codes of communities and individuals, and their forms of public communication and ritualisation.⁴ Cinema, then, contributed to the legibility of—and even legitimised—cities and their landmarks,⁵ as well as to the re-evaluation of places overlooked or marginalised by earlier urban narratives.

It was not, however, only the modern world that was captured in these endeavours. Cinema, as we will see, was also concerned with capturing antiquity. Of course, such endeavours were not unique to the modern medium. The pioneers of cinema were treading ground already marked by others such as those who had immortalised the world in their textual and visual accounts of the Grand Tour and in their recastings through the tradition of vedutismo.⁶ Indeed, many of the ancient places that cinema visits had already been consolidated in collective memories thanks to public shows that made use of panoramas, dioramas, stereoscopes, magic lanterns and other visual devices.

Let us take as our first example magic lanterns. From the second half of the 19th century, companies producing magic lantern slides began to combine traditional coloured and black and white glass reproductions of famous paintings and engravings with photographic views of buildings and ruins. Typical thematic series for magic lanterns included views of Graeco-Roman sites, the Holy-Land Tour and Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities, and cities such as, inter alia, Rome, Pompeii, Athens, Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, Thebes, Karnak and Petra.⁷ Particularly interesting were those coloured slides that were designed to create dissolving effects using light exposition and other mechanisms that—in a forerunner to cinema—made movement possible. A quick look at a collection of slides created for the Hall’s catalogue of magic lanterns reveals this proto-cinematic portrayal of ancient worlds. In addition to vignettes such as shipwrecks and the Birth of Venus, we find sequential historical events based on well-known paintings, such as the meeting between Anthony and Cleopatra and their famous banquet.⁸ Ancient Rome is here visualised through a chariot race in the Circus Maximus, a martyrdom in the Coliseum (by both day and night), and a view of the Via Appia that magically transforms itself into the interior of a Roman house.⁹ We find Jerusalem in juxtaposition with an image of grandeur changed into one of its fall, while Pompeii is visualised through the changing of a characteristic view of the splendid domus for an image of its inexorable destruction¹⁰—both of which reproduce two works by the French painter Henri-Frédéric Schopin.¹¹ As in another visual spectacle— the diorama—these examples show the primitive and yet effective ways in which projected light managed to create effects which could set stories in motion and which made ancient cities and their iconic buildings both the dynamic settings for and the protagonists of moving tales.¹²

Urban landscapes also became the main protagonists of our second case study: the popular panoramas. These comprised vistas painted on the interior walls of a naturally lit bespoke rotunda building—also called a panorama.¹³ Panoramas celebrated, more than any other 19th-century pre-cinematic spectacle, space and place. The paintings found within favoured the representations of large sceneries, depictions of cities and portrayals of contemporary and past events (especially battles). These, owing to their concave form, created the effect of bringing the viewers in to other, foreign spaces producing, in another proto-cinematic way, the illusion of travel through time and space. It was, again, the itineraries and cities of the Grand Tour and of other exotic places that symbolised 19th-century triumphant colonialism that found their home in these buildings: tourism was substituted for experiences of escapism.¹⁴ This escapism did, however, as with magic lantern shows, have a didactical purpose: explanatory guides accompanying the shows were produced and distributed amongst the viewing public.¹⁵ Consider the guide by Robert Burford that accompanied a panorama of Pompeii shown in London in 1824.¹⁶ This guide provided very detailed explanations—even labelling buildings—of current excavations, illustrating that public interest in the tragedy and rediscovery of the Vesuvian town went beyond the picturesque.

The immersive nature of panoramas developed further with the creation of pleoramas and padoramas (more sophisticated moving panoramas). Such shows could simulate the journey of the viewer even more effectively—even on water. These reached their peak in the ultimate symbols of 19th-century modernity: the fin-de-siècle exhibitions. These expensive and artistically demanding spectacles anticipated even more the enormous possibilities of cinema in their capturing of the marvels of the world and in their recreations of the events and places of the past. Thus, by the time cinema came to the fore, the inhabitants of industrialised cities had already participated in collective visual recognitions of present and historical urban environments, and in the notion of spectacle with which they were inextricably attached.

It must come as no surprise that only one year after the official release of the cinematograph, antiquity was introduced to the cinematic screen: Néron essayant des poisons sur des esclaves (Hatot, 1896), a Lumière production directed by Georges Hatot, provided us with our first cinematic glimpse of the ancient world, in this case Neronian Rome.¹⁷ Influenced not by literature, as is the case in many later early ancient world films,¹⁸ this production can instead be seen as the continuation—perhaps even culmination—of a series of long-established cultural traditions epitomised in the visual media explored above. From such auspicious beginnings, ancient world film flourished. Cinema began to mine ancient civilisations and their urban imagery for the shaping and nourishing of their visual spectacles, utilising history— as well as literature and the arts—to legitimise a new medium that was still stigmatised by the upper classes and relegated to an inferior lower cultural and social status in comparison to theatre or opera.

2. Authenticity and the Cinematic City: The Visual and the Haptic

As heir to a long tradition of visual media, tourism and historical accounts, it is perhaps unavoidable that ancient world films—and indeed other visual media—are subject to explorations and analyses of historical authenticity, especially in relation to set design and the production of mise-en-scène and its accurate or, more often, inaccurate nature.¹⁹ No one, indeed, can be more critical in this regard than ancient world scholars.²⁰ However, such an approach can be subject to a misunderstanding of the concept of authenticity in historical film: equating not with truth, realism, or accuracy, authenticity is rather a more nebulous concept.

In relation to the cinematic city, there are two key ways in which we can explore this concept: that of visual authenticity and that of haptic authenticity. Let us take the visual first. Visual authenticity, ensuring the city ‘looks right’, is often a concern of historical filmmakers. Such authenticity can be achieved through realistic—or seemingly realistic—recreations of buildings, props, costumes etc. So it is that we hear of Cecil B. DeMille sending an agent, Florence Meehan, around the Middle East to collect authentic arte-facts in order to ensure the visual authenticity of The Ten Commandments (DeMille, 1923).²¹ Or we hear of the hiring of Vittorio Nino Novarese, professor of history, costume and drama, to act as historical and technical advisor on the set of Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960).²² These are but two of the countless examples that could be brought to the fore to illustrate the expense and concern expended on achieving the ‘right look’ of history, of creating a vista fit for Barthes’ balcony.²³

However, the right look in cinema does not necessarily equate with what historians might term the accurate or correct look. Putting aside the problems of achieving accuracy within budgetary and locational constraints and within an industry that caters more often than not to perceived audience expectations rather than historicity, there is a sense in which accuracy is a red herring. First, we must accept the fact that historical accuracy is a misnomer: knowledge about the ancient world and its cities is mutable, changing—and eternally debated—according to archaeological discovery and scholarly interpretation.²⁴ Second, we must consider the fluid nature of the city itself: cities are not static entities but in constant flux, changing their form at the macro and micro level each passing day.²⁵ Third, we must acknowledge the imprecision of the human gaze, or rather our brain’s interpretation of that gaze: bombarded with so much visual—and overall sensory—data, we often perceive not that which we see but that which we expect to see. This has been aptly demonstrated with regard to cinema by the various experiments in the 1910s and 1920s of the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov. The most famous of these experiments is that now termed the Kuleshov Effect in which Kuleshov utilised montage to illustrate its effect on the viewer: he found a long close-up take of the expressionless face of the Russian actor Ivan Mozzhukhin and intercut it with various other shots.²⁶ In so doing, he revealed how an audience would read vastly different emotions into the face of the expressionless Mozzhukhin depending on the shot with which it was connected.²⁷ This assumption of perception was shown to be especially prominent with regard to location and mise-en-scène in another experiment of 1929. At this time, Kuleshov directed a short film in which two people meet on a street, shake hands and climb the steps of a large building. His audience assumed this to be shot in one location; in actuality, it was an edited composition comprising many different locations: continuity of narrative produced an (incorrect) perception of continuity of setting.²⁸ Thus, to assume that historical authenticity in the depiction of cities requires a visual accuracy is to misunderstand the nature of history, of cities and of human kind, as well as the nature of cinema itself.

What, then, do we mean by visual authenticity in relation to cinematic cities? To this we must reiterate that which was revealed by those Kuleshov experiments: we see what we expect, and what we expect is predetermined by diegetic narrative as well as extradiegetic precedence; that is to say what we are told (we recognise that Kuleshov’s two actors are in Moscow and so assume the steps of the White House are Russian) and what we know from previous viewings (we expect Rome to contain a coliseum, as that is how we are presented with Rome in previous cinematic—and other—incarnations; without it, it is not Rome).²⁹ Hence, visual authenticity is one in which the look feels right even if it is visually inaccurate.

It is this term ‘feels right’, that brings us to our second aspect of authenticity, that of the haptic. The privileging of visual accuracy can be said to arise out of the privileging of the visual in cinema: indeed, we term—both generally and specifically in the course of this volume—cinema a visual medium. However, to concentrate on this excludes the embodied nature of the cinematic experience. It is to this embodiedness that film scholars such as Giuliana Bruno, from whom the term haptic is borrowed, and Vivian Sobchack turn.³⁰ These scholars concentrate on the sensorial—visual and otherwise—and emotive experience of film...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Cinematic Cityscapes and the Ancient Past
• 2 The Babylon of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance
• 3 City of God: Ancient Jerusalem and the Holy Land in Cinema
• 4 From Ithaca to Troy: The Homeric City in Cinema and Television
• 5 Utopia: Cinematic Sparta as an Idea (Not a City)
• 6 Monuments, Men and Metaphors: Recreating Ancient Athens in Film
• 7 City of Lights: Ancient Alexandria in Cinema and Modern Imagination
• 8 The East in the West: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Carthage in Modern Imagery and in Film
• 9 “Rome Is No Longer in Rome”: In Search of the Eternal City in Cinema
• 10 “It Is like Soho, only Bigger”: Doctor Who and Modern Interpretations of Pompeii
• 11 The Late Antique City in Movies
• 12 Barbaricum—Civilisation of Savages
• 13 Atlantis and Other Fictional Ancient Cities
• Contributors
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index