Читать книгу Reception of Mesopotamia on Film - Maria de Fatima Rosa - Страница 8

Cinema should be seen as a universal language capable of annulling the differences and obstacles inherent to socio-cultural disparities. According to John Philip Hewak, “the cinema was conceptualized as an ensemble of codes, some specific to the cinema, others belonging to the culture at large, each comprised of minimal units not necessarily discrete or arbitrary, and not necessarily identifiable. These are the signs of the cinema.”³⁶ In fact, it was widely discussed whether semiology could be applied to cinema, as it is to linguistics, and whether or not cinema contains a sign. Although we do not intend to linger on this issue, we should mention that Umberto Eco claimed that any message has an implicit code and, therefore, the message of cinema could be understood as a sign or as a set of signs.³⁷ Since semiotics is the study par excellence of the signal, it is applicable to cinema. The spectator, upon entering the cinema room, while watching the film, would receive this set of messages, this panoply of signs, which he perceived, interpreted, appropriated, and reflected upon, and which revealed his sensibilities. By collecting these signals and interpreting them, the cinema viewer became a participant in a comprehensive and collective process of deciphering,³⁸ thus actively contributing to the cinema’s codes reception.

In this perspective, cinema does not differ from other arts and languages ​​that preceded it before it became dominant as a form of public art during the twentieth century. Martin Winkler recalls the words of J.B. Hainsworth when he stated that “at the beginning of literature, when heroic poetry reached society as a whole … society listened; in the twentieth century society views.”³⁹ The author recalls the importance of cinema as a new medium and criticizes, in the likelihood of Rood after him, the view spread by Charles Martindale that reception and Reception Studies could not be trivialized by choosing vehicles for their analysis considered to be less intellectual, such as films. Naturally, the semiotic analysis of a cinematographic creation anchored in antiquity can bring to light aspects related to the influence of that same antiquity and its products in contemporary societies. For Winkler, a film should indeed, as discussed previously, be considered as a visual text, “capable of the close analysis that classical philologists are trained to carry out. I call this classical film philology.”⁴⁰ The same can be said, naturally, in relation to a Near Eastern film philology, which intends, as Winkler claims, to establish a correlation between texts and images, in which the readers “view the ancients as important and even fundamental contributors to an ever-evolving and never-ending cultural continuity.”⁴¹ After all, cinema is the main heir to the textual narrative.⁴² And in addition to inheriting a literary tradition, cinema is also, as we shall see, the successor to a series of technologies, conventions, and artistic practices, which it received, retransmitted, and innovated.

We live in a world in which we are constantly overloaded with images, in which more and more people receive information, and especially information about the past and antiquity, through cinema and television, through films (of all sorts, comedy, epic, romance), television series or documentaries. Therefore, the greatest source of historical knowledge for most of the population is undoubtedly the visual media.⁴³ To prove this fact, it would be enough to do a search on Netflix’s search engine by the word “antiquity.” The media services provider Netflix has become the largest entertainment/media company, with 182.8 million subscribers worldwide.⁴⁴ Thus, the results are quite expressive and revealing: between series and films, we find recent titles like Roman Empire (2016), Noah (2014), Troy: Fall of a City (2018), Spartacus (2010), Rise of an Empire (2014), or older ones such as Gladiator (2000) or 300 (2007). Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) inclusively ushered in a new era in cinema on antiquity that seems to have come to stay, at least judging by the recent remake of Ben-Hur (2016) by Timur Bekmambetov or the new reconstitution of the duel between Moses and Ramses II portrayed in the film by Ridley Scott, Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014). Although Mesopotamia seems to have been long forgotten by the cinema (the last film that makes a reconstitution of the ancient land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates is the Italian Ercole contro i tiranni di Babilonia (1964); this if we exclude Alexander (2004) which portrays Babylon but during the Persian era), the truth is that antiquity has become once again a topic appreciated by filmmakers as it had been in the early days of cinema and in the post-Second World War era.

Taking this into account it is possible to reiterate that cinema, as a universal language, became, during the twentieth century, the biggest stage to transmit ancient history and one really appreciated by society. Its importance is also proved by the fact that in the beginning of this century and up to the 1970s, cinema was the most important spectacle activity; television subsequently dethroned films and the cinematographic experience in large theaters. And so, the question arises: is it possible to put history on film without losing its more professional nature?.⁴⁵ In fact, to answer this question we must understand what history actually is and if it is possible to transform written discourse (in other words, the written narratives – with beginning, middle, and end – that historians produce based on their analysis) into visual discourse? This is considering that, in reality, when we speak of narratives written by historians, given their linguistic and genre constraints, we are considering mere verbal fictions – a simple reconstruction of the past and never the past itself. Thus, what really needs to be highlighted is the possibility of transforming verbal fictions into visual fictions, the possibility of transforming a written truth into a visual truth, which does not necessarily have to be the same or in conflict with the first.⁴⁶ History, although based on techniques and methodologies that use facts and documents, is never but interpretation, is never but reconstruction. So, going back to the starting question: is it possible to transform written speech into visual speech? If we consider that each vehicle contains its own mechanisms, its own tools, its own semiotic codes, its forms of representation, its unique added value – Yes. After all, cinema is the triumph of realism.⁴⁷

What cinema will we then be analyzing in this volume? Our analysis will focus on films that intend to reconstruct Mesopotamia,⁴⁸ its culture or its history, whether based on archaeological and historical sources or grounded on legends and conceptions that were forged around it (such as Greek myths and the account of the Old Testament). Thus, with few exceptions that are justified, this study excludes films whose plot takes place after the fall of this civilization,⁴⁹ which is commonly considered to coincide with the conquest of Babylon by the Achaemenid emperor Cyrus the Great, in c. 539 BC. In parallel, and although not exhaustively, we will analyze films that evoke Mesopotamia (culturally,⁵⁰ artistically,⁵¹ historically⁵² or metaphorically,⁵³ positively or negatively,⁵⁴ retrospectively or prospectively⁵⁵), although they might not be set on it. On the other hand, and also with few exceptions, this study does not include films that were released directly for video or television (such as musicals inspired by famous operas) or non-European or American films.⁵⁶

With regards to the production centers of the movies portraying antiquity and especially the ancient Near East, there are three major countries to highlight: France, Italy, and the United States of America – the ones which held the leadership of cinematic production during the earlier years, and which we will analyze in detail in Chapter 4.⁵⁷ Concerning Mesopotamia in particular, it is possible to divide the cinematic productions in three large groups:

1) – The short movies produced from 1905 up until the middle of the 1910s, which consisted of silent films that had an estimated time of 6 to 15 minutes (predominantly Italian and French productions);

2) – The silent movies produced in the second half of the 1910s and during the 1920s, which were the first feature films ever produced on Mesopotamia and had a variable time duration (predominantly American productions);⁵⁸

3) – The movies produced from the 1950s until the present time, consisting of sound feature films. Within this category there is a higher prevalence of productions made during the 1950s and 1960s (predominantly Italian and American productions). Also, after the 1960s, the majority of the movies do not constitute recreations of Mesopotamia or of its legends, but are instead pictures that refer to an aspect of it and that might be set in a whole different time (normally contemporaneity). Thus, it would be possible to subdivide this third group into two categories: Mesopotamia on film and Mesopotamia in film.⁵⁹

If we examine in detail these three groups, there seems to be a hiatus from the mid-1920s until the 1950s. One of the reasons that may explain the disappearance of films about the ancient Near East, and in particular about Mesopotamia after the 1920s, is the rapid decline of the filmic genre that consisted of historical adaptations and reconstitutions. This genre almost ended with the advent of sound, having already entered in decline previously.⁶⁰

On the other hand, the prevalence of films during the 1950s and 1960s and its almost disappearance after may be intrinsically connected with the appearance of television, which would slowly replace cinema as the preferable media of the public. It may also be connected to the decay, for instance in Italy, of the peplum genre, substituted by the Spaghetti Western.⁶¹ Mesopotamia and antiquity were only truly recovered on screen in the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the peplum genre was resuscitated. Examples of this resurrection are, as we have seen, the movies Gladiator (2000) and Alexander (2004).⁶²