The Epic Film

Myth and History

Derek Elley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317928874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Film & Video

As Charlton Heston put it: 'There's a temptingly simple definition of the epic film: it's the easiest kind of picture to make badly.' This book goes beyond that definition to show how the film epic has taken up one of the most ancient art-forms and propelled it into the modern world, covered in twentieth-century ambitions, anxieties, hopes and fantasies. This survey of historical epic films dealing with periods up to the end of the Dark Ages looks at epic form and discusses the films by historical period, showing how the cinema reworks history for the changing needs of its audience, much as the ancient mythographers did.

The form's main aim has always been to entertain, and Derek Elley reminds us of the glee with which many epic films have worn their label, and of the sheer fun of the genre. He shows the many levels on which these films can work, from the most popular to the specialist, each providing a considerable source of enjoyment. For instance, spectacle, the genre's most characteristic trademark, is merely the cinema's own transformation of the literary epic's taste for the grandiose. Dramatically it can serve many purposes: as a resolution of personal tensions (the chariot race in Ben-Hur ), of monotheism vs idolatry ( Solomon and Sheba ), or of the triumph of a religious code ( The Ten Commandments ).

Although to many people Epic equals Hollywood, throughout the book Elley stresses debt to the Italian epics, which often explored areas of history with which Hollywood could never have found sympathy.

Originally published 1984.

1	An Epic by Any Other Name

Then Penelope, in tears, addressed the hallowed minstrel:

‘Phemius, you know many other tales which capture men’s imagination,

deeds of both mortals and gods which minstrels make famous.

Sit and sing them one of those, and let them drink

their wine in silence. Stop this mournful

song which every time distresses the loving heart

in my breast; an inconsolable grief lies upon me …’

Telemachus then prudently spoke up:

‘Mother, why do you begrudge the faithful minstrel

giving pleasure however his mind takes him? Minstrels

are not to blame; the guilty party, rather, is Zeus, who gives

to each man who toils for his living as he wants.’

Odyssey, 1, 336ff.

Dictionary definitions of the word ‘epic’ provide only a starting-point. The Oxford English Dictionary offers: ‘Pertaining to that species of poetical composition, represented typically by the Iliad and Odyssey, which celebrates in the form of a continuous narrative the achievements of one or more heroic personages of history or tradition’, noting the word’s earliest literary appearance as 1589. The Oxford Companion to English Literature is content to précis its big brother’s definition, and further confuses the issue by stating, under the heading ‘Heroic poetry’: ‘… the same as Epic (q.v.).’ Far more helpful is the nominally less prestigious Longman Companion to English Literature (ed. C. Gillie), which takes the question several steps further: ‘(1) A narrative of heroic actions, often with a principal hero, usually mythical in its content, offering inspiration and ennoblement within a particular cultural or national tradition. (2) The word denotes qualities of heroism and grandeur, appropriate to epic but present in other literary or non-literary forms.’

The Longman Companion also notes that there may be Primary Epics (‘written for a society still fairly close to the conditions of society described in the narrative’), citing the Iliad, the Odyssey and Beowulf, and Secondary Epics (‘based on the pattern of primary ones but written for a materially developed society more or less remote from the conditions described’), citing Vergil’s Aeneid. For further sub-classifications one must turn to the American Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary, which opts out of any worthwhile definition but provides a splendidly detailed list of classes: epics of growth, or collections of ballads; epics of art with a single poet concentrating on some great central figure; mixed epics of growth and art; heroic poems of medieval knights and heroes; sacred epics; historical epics; and mock epics.

The above definitions show that the word ‘epic’ is almost exclusively identified with literary works, and that its application is frighteningly broad. ‘Epic’ has already joined the long list of words which are rapidly losing their original meanings. It may well embody concepts such as ‘monumental’, ‘large-scale’, ‘far-reaching’, ‘inspiring’, ‘awesome’ – it is in these senses that it is most used colloquially – but there is more to the fibre of the word than that.

Even the terms ‘heroic’ and ‘epic’ are frequently confused. Epic poetry certainly draws its power from the deeds of heroes, but heroic poetry is certainly not synonymous with the epic. Heroes alone do not make an epic unless the other ingredients are also present: a literary garb which dresses the action in noble style; the all-important mythic element which raises the work above mere reportage by the introduction of the irrational, the inexplicable or magical; and the feeling of an overall unity and purpose to the work, of an embodiment of unchangeable ideals, which is frequently national. A similar confusion occurs between ‘monumental’ and ‘epic’ – in the same way that the former is present in the latter but does not necessarily receive anything in return.

If we are to redefine the word ‘epic’ as applied to the cinema, and show the strong correspondences between cinematic and literary epic form, we must first examine the word’s genesis. Part of the difficulty in reaching any firm definition of the word lies in its own philological history. The strong literary associations arise from the fact that the earliest surviving examples are naturally in written form. The Epic of Gilgamesh, composed in Sumerian from c. 3000 BC onwards and reaching us in its most complete form in an Akkadian Semitic translation of the seventh century BC, is the earliest example known so far. The Sumerians (probably conquerors from the north and east) were the first literate inhabitants of Mesopotamia, and seem to have had an epic tradition of their own; Gilgamesh, at any rate, outlived both them and their language.

If not the earliest, Homer’s Iliad (Iliados) and Odyssey (Odusseia) are nevertheless the prototypes by which all successors have been measured, doubtless because of the greater impact of Greek civilisation. There is no evidence to connect Gilgamesh and Homeric traditions, despite the fact that contact was historically feasible and both used central stores of cyclical material. One fact, though, must be borne in mind: all three works started life orally, the Iliad and the Odyssey as a number of separate tales composed by wandering minstrels during the ninth and eight centuries BC. Their audiences varied from rich noblemen to the larger congregations of religious festivals, and their content, while drawing on a common stock of tales with some foundation in historical fact, could be embellished to suit the particular tastes of the listener: every nobleman would naturally wish his ancestors to be included in a list of brave heroes, and every township would wish its name to be included in a catalogue of those contributing ships, soldiers or money. The Greeks called these professional entertainers aoidoi, and they flourished along the western seaboard of Asia Minor.

By the end of the ninth century and during the whole of the eighth, the various songs slowly coalesced into a monumental form of oral composition – perhaps due to the presence of one or more exceptionally gifted aoidoi whom for convenience we may call ‘Homer’ – and with the rise of greater literacy during the seventh century the poems were eventually set down in writing in the form we have them in today. The aoidos, accompanying himself on the lyre-like kitharis or phorminx, was replaced by the rhapsodos, a far more organised ‘stitcher of songs’ (as the word means) whose function was more to recite pre-existing material than to aid the evolution of oral compositions. The spread of writing resulted in poetry as we know it today – composed on paper and imprinted with the personality of its author, and more and more expressing personal emotions rather than recording history and tradition.

The modern view, therefore, of the word ‘epic’ has little to do with its origins. The term derives from the Greek epos (word), which was used by the Greeks themselves in its plural form (epea) to describe the oral body of heroic songs of Homer and the like. Pindar, a mainland lyric poet writing in the fifth century, talks of rhapton epeon aoidoi (singers of woven words) in an ode composed around 485 BC; Herodotus, a historian writing later in the century, mentions ta Kupria epea when referring to the now-lost epic poem Kypria. Terms like epopoios (literally ‘maker of epea’) and epikos are later inventions for a form that had flourished centuries earlier: even to Classical fifth-century Greeks, an ‘epic’ was an intellectual fabrication which would never have occurred to the original poets. It is from the Greek, however, via the straight Latin loan-word epicus, that we have derived our own term, and we are thus forever in their debt.

By the third century BC, Alexandrian Greeks like Apollonius of Rhodes were already faking Homeric epics (e.g. his Argonautika) as a purely academic exercise – compare, in the present century, Nikos Kazantzakis’ sequel to the Odyssey – but the circumstances of their composition, though ‘fake’ when compared with the Homeric originals, should not detract from their qualification in any epic list. The aoidoi of the eighth century were already singing of events and a society long since dead and gone; their purpose, apart from earning a living, was to entertain and inspire, and Apollonius’ work does likewise.

The Romans, as in so many fields of creativity, took up the Greek example and modified it to their own tastes, adding a consciously rugged and monumental quality while refining (Homeric) epic language. There is no surviving record of any oral tradition in the Roman culture, though doubtless ballads were sung on celebratory occasions. Livius Andronicus, a captive Greek of the third century BC, is credited with introducing epic form to the Romans, and his translation of the Odyssey into Latin was still being taught in schools until the time of the emperor Augustus.

Andronicus’ example was swiftly adapted to Roman ends: Gnaeus Naevius, at the end of the second century, wrote his epic Bellum Punicum in the native Saturnian metre, and Quintus Ennius, a generation or so later, introduced the crucial dactylic hexameter metre (in imitation of Homeric metres) with his great epic Annales, a history of Rome in eighteen books. It was, however, the Aeneid (Aeneis) of Publius Vergilius Maro (Vergil), written during the last eleven years of his life from 30 to 19 BC, that united the various contrary strands of Roman epic into one cohesive and persuasive whole. The Homeric element is evident in the flashback structure and the escape from Troy, the Roman relevancies in the later books of Aeneas’ struggles in Latium, and the all-important Imperial glorification – for Rome was then ruled by the first of its emperors – in the prophetic passages on Rome’s future greatness.

No subsequent work quite matched up to Vergil’s achievement: during the first and second centuries AD there followed a succession of rhetorical artefacts, of which the most noteworthy was Marcus Lucanus’ Pharsalia (or De bello civili), written under the eagle eye of the emperor Nero and celebrating in ten books of difficult verse the civil war of a century earlier. The work is unfinished – Lucan was forced to commit suicide in AD 65 – but amply demonstrates the Roman propensity for using factual, rather than mythical, material as epic matter. There was no shortage of monumental poems during the following centuries, but their style is generally crabbed and academic, lacking even the sheer imagination that Apollonius of Rhodes had brought to his earlier scholarship. A significant step was taken by Gaius Iuvencus, a priest in Spain under Constantine the Great (c. 325), who made a metrical version of the four Gospels, but no other poet seems to have taken up the idea of using Christ as a central figure for any epic work.

A last-ditch attempt to revive the spirit of Vergil is evident in the works of Claudius Claudianus, a Greek raised in Alexandria who composed in Latin hexameters at the end of the fourth century AD: using the wars against the Goths and the usurper Gildo in Africa as an excuse to eulogise the powerful general Stilicho, he shows great command of both factual and mythical material, woven in eloquent language of considerable strength. Claudianus was not a confessed Christian, and his poems are thoroughly Roman in viewpoint, but the influence of Christianity can be felt in his and others’ works of the period. It is, however, little more than an influence, since right until the end of the Roman Empire there appears no literary epic with any professed Christian message. Many prose treatises were written – by Aurelius Augustinus at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries AD, and by Anicius Boethius a century later – but it was national rather than religious affairs which remained the focus of the Roman epic.

Curiously it was only after the fall of Rome, at the beginning of the fifth century, that Christianity began to make headway as epic material. It was to be several centuries before new literature was to appear, but the troubled years of the Dark Ages (from the Fall of Rome to the eleventh century) provided plenty of orally transmitted tales which later generations wove into epic verse. Beowulf, written down in the eighth century in Late West Saxon English, is actually set in Southern Scandinavia of the fifth and sixth centuries and contains no references to either Britain or Christianity; it is, however, the product of a Christian Anglian court and shows the civilising influences of the re-establishment of Christianity in Britain two centuries after the departure of Rome. Similarly, the great Icelandic sagas of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries contain a mixture of the Pagan and Christian: the Laxdæla Saga starts in the Age of Settlement and spans the adoption of Christianity in AD 1000; Njal’s Saga is more directly concerned with the effects of Christianity on its protagonists.

So dim is the boundary between such ‘religions’ that one is often tempted to spell Christianity with a small c. Even in the fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight it is more the spirit, rather than the letter, of Christianity which informs the hero’s actions, although by now the stark realism of Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature is being tempered by the influence of Romance poetry. The stern heroism of the North, helped by the rise of the feudal system, had for some time been giving way to a new concept, that of ‘chivalry’, and the Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries against the Saracens in the Near East provided a new source of Christian-oriented epic inspiration. As with Beowulf, the present refashioned the past. Of the many French national epics, or chansons de geste (originally chanted by jongleurs, or minstrels), the Chanson de Roland took an incident from the eighth century and refurbished it in eleventh-century terms, and is the finest example of the Charlemagne Cycle. The Breton Cycle, or court epics, dealt (like the English Sir Gawain) with Arthurian legend from the early Dark Ages. There also arose an Antique Cycle, or matière de Rome, which carried on the Classical spirit by presenting Christian versions of the actions of heroes from the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and the like.

The wheel would seem to have come full circle, and in other countries heroic poetry merely adds national glosses. The Nibelungenlied, written for court performance in the thirteenth century, summarises the tradition from which Beowulf was derived in Germanic terms. The twelfth-century Slovo o poly Igoreve (The Lay of Igor’s Campaign), though composed in writing, draws strongly on the Russian oral heroic poems (byliny) and uses Christianity to draw lessons in national unity against fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• 1 An Epic by Any Other Name
• 2 Epic into Film
• 3 Biblical: The Old Testament
• 4 Biblical: The New Testament
• 5 Greece: Gods and Heroes
• 6 Greece: From Marathon to Alexander
• 7 Rome: From Myth to Republic
• 8 Imperial Rome: Crisis and Civil War
• 9 Imperial Rome: Slaves and Barbarians
• 10 Imperial Rome: Christian Conflicts
• 11 Early Medieval: Norsemen, Saxons, and the Cid
• 12 Epic Aftertastes: Misnomers and Modern Myth
• Filmography
• Critical Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Film Titles