The return of epic films
If you did a Latin or Greek, or even if you have been entitled to a history lesson on ancient Greco-Roman at the college or high school there are chances that you have been entitled to any of the chestnut classroom activities: the projection Peplum.
Péplum The projection in general is an attempt by one or more teachers of good will, they are summoned to appear active and dynamic ® ™, make it interesting for a course on ancient inevitably suspect asleep students (under the wisdom of wisdom, one of the equations is "old = boring"). The maneuver is therefore to bring a class or two in a room, in front of a television to watch a movie (or at least excerpts of a movie), assumed to enliven their daily manuals and handouts. And what film project for students when it comes to antiquity? A peplum, of course.
The Last Days of Pompeii , Sergio Leone, 1959 (Source: English Wikipedia ).
Problem: in the eyes of past generations, the epic films of the last century were quick to sound corny - in fact they were already old-fashioned at the end of that century, at which time yours truly was using his rear pants pockets on chairs a college (which does younger person). Several reasons This severe sentence. The natural aging of any artistic work is the first: any details beasts, like the haircut of the actors or the role of women in the plot, may raise a smile for generations. The choice of film, then, can be tricky: the peplum was a very fruitful relationship between gender, with a ladle, the years 1950 and 1980, and, of course, it has not only produced masterpieces lumber. As long as the film in question is served by a clumsy execution and / or a small budget, the short session for disaster.
Which brings us to the last element, which is quick to give the final blow to any peplum having the misfortune to be a little old: special effects. Few things age faster than in film special effects (even haircuts seem modern side), and some elements have a devastating effect most dramatically on the benevolence of the beholder. Even the wonderful animated sequences frame by frame of the famous filmmaker Ray Harryhausen special effects are not immune to the ravages of years. And how not to chuckle before other strings otherwise less elegant: plastic armor, giant boulders cardboard elasticity suspicious athletes pangratiast fierce struggle to fluff pretending to be real beasts ... Measured by this yardstick, the most honest peplum exposed to be relegated to the land of nanars under severe criticism from viewers. Goodbye new media driving the rescue of a presupposed ancient mummified: cinema itself gathering dust too fast! What, alas, what to do?
While interest in antiquity never really stopped, there was a good time (since roughly the early 1980s) that the film did more risky to large scale productions of Ben Hur William Wyler (1959) or Clash of the Titans Desmond Davis (1981). But to the delight of Antique world, the millennium seems to have coincided with a revival of the genre, mostly on the side of U.S. blockbusters, the industry is yet unwilling to take risks.
What causes this revival? In a first attempt conclusive Gladiator Ridley Scott, in 2000, whose success has encouraged the studios, if not to read the classical works, at least to put the nose into their archives and wonder how to restore a sudden the kind of young that had their heyday a few decades earlier. Since Gladiator, films about ancient are again more numerous: Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004), Alexander (Oliver Stone, the same year), 300 (Zack Snyder, 2007), Agora (Alejandro Amenábar, 2009), Clash of the Titans (Louis Leterrier, 2010) or Centurion (Neil Marshall, the same year: Lina you were talking here), to mention only the most significant . Gone are the outdated special effects, instead of computer generated images and 3D.
These new epic films are present on posters in subway corridors, on the sides of buses, we talk in the media, and luck, sometimes we invite a historian to say a few words about the subject. For us young Antique world is a pleasure and an opportunity: not only it's interesting to see what the creators of these films, but also a (good) reason to speak of antiquity, Greek, Latin or otherwise, with a wider audience.
300 Zacky Snyder from Frank Miller (2007): Spartan hoplites facing hordes of Persian Immortals samurai-like backdrop of electric guitar. Reassure us: after a while, you end up necessarily suspecting that some things were not in Herodotus. (Image source: post on the official movie site .)
Criticism is Theseus ... and art is minotaur. How to watch Neo-peplum?
New problem: a film is not a history textbook or a course, or an illustration of an ancient text. It first ... a film that is to say a creation developed by a director in a very variable, depending on multiple constraints. Under the broad term of "peplum" I use here, camouflage themselves made all kinds of possible approaches to the ancient theater. On the dozen big films released since Gladiator not evoke antiquity in the same way as others. And for good reason: each was made according to a different aesthetic, belonging to a particular genre.
Facing these new visions of antiquity to the movies, an attitude all too common, sometimes in Antique world themselves (when they are not subject specialists, such as Claude Aziza, who no mistake not), is to watch a movie fresh out the eye, the other a history book, and play the game with seven errors of the eyebrow Zeus days of relentless storms. That date was incorrect, that detail does not match, that character has never acted this way, as decoration or armor is no time ... and now our developers changed into bad students, wearing their caps and all of dunce caps. Worse, they are accused of inducing error in the crowds, maintain a false vision of antiquity, instead of taking advantage of their privileged position of Artist in Wide Audience to investigate their world. "For once we are talking about the old stuff seems to say, it could at least be educational ! "
These criticisms are not entirely wrong: it is sometimes amazing to see how the ancient material, whether historical, mythological or otherwise, may be marred by some lazy blockbusters, despite the enormous potential it represents for any filmmaker. Yes ... but it should not be limited to criticism of this type, for three simple reasons:
- A movie not a documentary : it is not intended to tell the history, but foremost a history. A comparison term term in such detail as the film and historical truth can only be justified for a very special kind - the film history (and again). However, the majority of recent films about ancient are not like that. You can not judge a film's aesthetic program until it develops, or, in other words, gender or specific sub-genre which he claims. Ignoring this fact in a review would look at statistics on demography in the French novels of Balzac: it would be absurd. Zack Snyder's film 300 (released in 2007), for example, has beautiful inspiration from the battle of Marathon, he never claimed to reflect any historical truth: it is primarily a film adaptation of comic the same name published in 1998 by Frank Miller, a graphic novel which is influenced by the codes of superhero stories .
- On a broader scale, it must be remembered aesthetic language specific to cinema as an art (or cradle, if you prefer). You can not put it in the cinema the same way as in a literary or academic writing. And any film critic a little wise will tell you that in the case of adaptations literary works in film, for example, treachery well done, can yield a more friendly spirit of the work that most slavish adaptation. We can not fault the film Troy by Wolfgang Petersen (released in 2004) not to reproduce any such content twenty-four cantos of the Iliad , just as one can not reject as errors or betrayals of the new episodes invented by the film without first asking why the writers saw fit to introduce them into the story (it does not mean we can not do much more to blame this film but I talk about later).
- At a broader level still, we must keep in mind that a film is never created in the abstract, but it coincides with a time (in this case ours) that his imagination, his methods and his own concerns. The choice to devote a movie about this or that old is not innocent, but much depends representations associated with this subject and / or it may establish pretext indirectly to discuss such other matters of interest to the artist and his audience today. To take an example from the classical epics, where, in one of the first scenes of Ben Hur , Ben Hur, Jewish prince, finds his old friend Messala, now an officer in the Roman army, who explains that with aplomb ' must absolutely collaborate with the Romans occupying Judea its native state under penalty of all his people to "extinction," should not look far to realize that the film takes a clear vision of the Roman Empire, which approaches the Nazi totalitarianism in the time of the Second World War. Similarly, the film Agora Alejandro Amenábar (2009) is not a biography of Hypatia, a philosopher and mathematician of the third century, or rather he is not only that: it is also, even primarily, a reflection on religious extremism, fully engaged with the issues politico-religious world today.
These truths may seem self-evident, and even better if it does, but it is amazing how simplistic the problem "truth or lie? "Still influences some judgments about what type of movie.
Studying Ancient Images in
The Perseus of Benvenuto Cellini (1554, now the Piazza della Signoria in Florence - source: Wikipedia English ), poster film Clash of the Titans Desmond Davis (1981, source: Screenrush ) and displays his Greek remake in 2010 by Louis Leterrier. It's crazy, Perseus is always the head of the Gorgon in the same way ... "But then you say maybe, such a conception of criticism is like leaving card white filmmakers to tell all the nonsense they want about antiquity. What will be the projection Péplum we talked about earlier? Should we give up? "
No, of course, quite the contrary. For, as in all areas, namely inequalities lead to inequalities among the spectators. Everyone is not armed in the same way to watch a peplum. An antiquarian, who knows his subject will recognize where the film takes liberties with history and with a step back and goodwill, will evaluate the benefits these differences and when these inventions have one. A student of Image Arts, meanwhile, will be better informed about the pictorial language specific to different genres, and with any luck, know quite well the history of the peplum genre to recognize the times and Movie allusions. But a non-specialist comprehensive risk missing out on many things.
Hence the temptation misnomer, want to play the film-a role that is not theirs, that designers of educational tools : We fear that works of fiction, involved in too complex "truth" ultimately mislead the least sophisticated viewers. But this is not the filmmaker to play this role is the teacher - or, more accurately, many more people than this: the designers of curricula, first, because teachers are required comply with the programs, but also in other areas, teachers and researchers (historians, Latin, Hellenistic, archaeologists, etc..), both in their research and teaching university in their work with extension the general public. This is an ongoing dialogue between the arts and waited and knowledge within a company. And most importantly, it is a finding of a high commonplace to recall how the art of the image are important in today's societies (they held an equally great in ancient societies, elsewhere: let us to believe that the ancients had only text, there is nothing further from the truth!). It is therefore important to stay in school environment, that students are introduced to the reading of images, as they should be ahead of the texts.
Few complaints to make about this, it seems, on the side of national education: these issues are slowly entering the curriculum of secondary schools, and cinema studies in universities spread. It seems, however, very few researchers have engaged in a detailed study of this new vogue for old movies. The specialists of the subject are rare (the best known and most visible in the media is Claude Aziza, but no researcher can cover by itself an entire field of research!). The Anglo-Saxon researchers, however, seem to have taken this train, since during my walks in search of virtual reference, the only books and academic articles that I found about this new epic films, apart from those of Aziza, appeared in English publications.
must say that exercise is not easy, since we want to do things a little good: Besides a solid formation of antiquarian, this requires knowledge of at least the basics of education picture, to analyze appropriately the script, editing, framing, light, correspondence between music and image ... But large gap is worth it. And if one thinks in terms of education, it can also, in a broader perspective, provide an opening to a reflection on the representation of ancient images in general, throughout the long history going to Greece and ancient Rome to our cinemas, through the ancient art of the image (painting, ceramics, sculpture, architectural complexes), the medieval representations (think of these illuminations where combatants of war Trojan are represented in medieval armor, as if we represented Achilles lattice brandishing a machine gun) and the paintings and sculptures from the Renaissance and modern times (the current exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay on the representation of history by the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme firefighter is a good example of the opportunities to reflect on the image). The revival of
peplum is not only the evidence that ancient still interested (for those who think otherwise), it is not only a way for the antiquarian to bring up to date or appear "fashionable" to better attract and retain students ... It's also the perfect opportunity to put all these recent works in their context, broadly defined, taking the necessary step back - say 2000 or 3000 years - to discover or rediscover the importance and the incredible wealth classical subjects in the figurative arts. And show everyone the dramatic continuity and abundant running from these early times until our own, through a slow evolution with multiple ramifications.
I talked about video games, too?
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