Troy and the Cinematic Afterlife of Homeric Gods

chapter 5 Troy and the Cinematic Afterlife of Homeric Gods

Martin M. Winkler

In 1954, half a century before the release of Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, Homer’s Odyssey made a triumphant return to Italian high and popular culture in print and on the screen. Alberto Moravia published his novel Contempt (Il disprezzo), and Dino de Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti released Ulysses (Ulisse), directed by veteran filmmaker Mario Camerini and starring Kirk Douglas. This Italian- American co-production was the first adaptation of Homeric epic in the sound era, filmed on attractive locations in widescreen (1.66:1) and color and even in 3-D. (It went into general release in a shortened and flat version.) The film established, or rather re-established after a considerable hiatus, classical antiquity as a popular and lucrative subject for the cinema. Some years ago Hanna Roisman, an experienced Homer scholar, wrote a brief appreciation in a jour- nal intended for professionals and general readers alike. She called the film’s screenplay “tersely cogent and yet entertaining” and its scenery “absolutely captivating.” The film, she concluded, preserves “the spirit of fantasy and adventure of the ancient epic” in spite of significant alterations to and conden- sations of Homer. Her review ends with the verdict: “This is one of the best film versions of the Odyssey.”1 Contempt, the other influential reappearance of Homer that year in Italy, is, however, more important. Moravia had started writing about cinema in 1933; from 1944 on he regularly wrote film reviews and essays.2 By 1954 he had col- laborated on several screenplays, with and without credit. A number of his novels, sometimes with his script participation, were made into outstanding films. Best known are Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women (1960) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970). In between came Jean-Luc Godard’s adaptation of Contempt (1963), to which I will turn later.

1 Hanna M. Roisman, “Film Reviews: Ulysses (1954),” Amphora, 1 no. 1 (2002), 10–11. Details about the film are in Hervé Dumont, L’antiquité au cinéma: Vérités, légendes et manipulations (Paris: Nouveau Monde/Lausanne: Cinémathèque suisse, 2009), 203–204. A 2013 edition of this essential book is available electronically from its author at www.hervedumont.ch. 2 His writings on the cinema are now collected in Alberto Moravia, Cinema italiano: Recensioni e interventi, 1933–1990, ed. Alberto Pezzotta and Anna Gilardelli (Milan: Bompiani, 2010). The book is over 1,600 pages long.

Troy and the Cinematic Afterlife of Homeric Gods 109

1 Spectacle vs. Psychology: The Debate about Gods in Moravia’s Contempt and Its Importance for Film

Riccardo Molteni, the narrator of Moravia’s Contempt, is a novelist and occa- sional screenwriter. He is looking back on the disintegration of his marriage while he was involved with a film version of the Odyssey that emphasized the marriage of Odysseus and Penelope. Molteni is eloquent about the complexi- ties that arise when a classic work of literature is to be adapted in a modern medium for contemporary audiences. What, decades later, a Homer scholar observed in connection with Troy about epic audiences at any time in and since antiquity fits Molteni’s context equally well: “to a large degree audiences dictate the way that a story is told. Audiences take their own preconceptions and expectations to a narrative; responsibilities and opportunities as well result for the storyteller.”3 To this we might add: audiences also come with their prior knowledge or ignorance of that story. Moravia modeled Molteni largely on himself, for what Molteni reveals about filmmaking could easily have been said or written by his creator from both his cinematic and marital experiences.4 Molteni’s observations about the gods in Homer and what could or should be done with them are important for any screen adaptation of Homer. They appear to derive from Moravia’s observations about Camerini’s film. While preparing an initial treatment, Molteni stumbles over a question prompted by the very first scene in the Odyssey: “whether or not it was suitable

3 Quoted from Jonathan S. Burgess, “Achilles’ Heel: The Historicism of the Film Troy,” in Kostas Myrsiades (ed.), Reading Homer: Film and Text (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 163–185; quotation at 164. 4 The close analogies between Molteni and Moravia are well-documented. See, e.g., Renzo Paris, Moravia: Una vita controvoglia (Florence: Giunti, 1996), 143–144 and 234–236. Paris, 234, speaks of “Alberto-Riccardo.” What Moravia later said about his screenwriting experiences could have come from Molteni: “I always had the sensation that I was giving something pre- cious, for money, to someone who would exploit it for his own ends…. The scriptwriter…gives himself totally to the script, but the director’s name is on the movie.” Quoted from Alberto Moravia and Alain Elkann, Life of Moravia, tr. William Weaver (South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Italia, 2000), 151.—Moravia may have visited Camerini on location for Ulysses, at least accord- ing to Laura Mulvey, “Le Mépris (Jean-Luc Godard 1963) and Its Story of Cinema: A ‘Fabric of Quotations’,” in Colin MacCabe and Laura Mulvey (eds.), Godard’s Contempt [sic]: Essays from the London Consortium (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 225–237, at 227. Cf. Michel Marie, “Un monde qui s’accorde à nos désirs (Le Mépris, Jean-Luc Godard, 1963),” Revue belge du cinéma, 16 (1986), 24–36, at 27. The writings collected in Moravia, Cinema italiano, mention Camerini on a few occasions, mainly concerning earlier films of his, but never refer to Ulysses.