“INCLUDE ME OUT” – ODYSSEUS ON THE MARGINS OF EUROPEAN GENRE CINEMA: LE MÉPRIS, ULISSE, L’ODISSEA Christian Pischel The Diagram Homer’s Odyssey is considered one of the founding documents of Euro- pean literature. As we know, the text intertwines the motifs of the odys- sey or epic voyage, the intended homecoming, which is constantly being delayed and prevented by temptations and perils, and a structurally analogous narrative. Just as Odysseus traverses the world several times in search of Ithaca, the epic poem unites several temporal levels, narrative voices, and points of view until his return home, where the narrative does not end but culminates in the renewed and condensed mirroring of the entire process, the texture in all its to and fro and back and forth: Athena extends the night so that the reunited couple may tell each other the story of their twenty-year separation. Theresia Birkenhauer writes:1 The Odyssey is as artfully told as the narration is emphatically addressed in the epic. The hero’s labyrinthine parcours through uncanny spaces finds expression in the equally varied forms of discours, of narrative. In what follows, the epic quality of the material will serve as a backdrop against which I will explore three cinematic adaptations of the Odyssey. The films are the major Italo-American co-production Ulisse (Ulysses, 1954) directed by Mario Camerini, which is remembered today mainly because it starred Kirk Douglas, Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) by Jean-Luc Godard, and a lesser-known eight-part television miniseries from 1968 entitled L’Odissea directed by Franco Rossi. Based on the dates alone and read against the cycles of film history, these films are strikingly grouped around a distinct period in the history of European cinema. These three productions mark the era of the epic and sword-and-sandal (peplum) film, which, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, attracted international attention for the second time in Italian film history. While in the 1910s the 1 Theresia Birkenhauer, “Episches Erzählen – ein Erfahrungsraum,” program for Isabel Mundry, Ein Atemzug – die Odyssee, Deutsche Oper Berlin, 2005/2006 Season. © Christian Pischel, 2013 | doi:10.1163/9789004241923_012 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.Christian Pischel - 9789004241923 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 07:47:38AM via free access 196 christian pischel genre had already become a dominant product on the international mar- ket in the form of hugely elaborate and costly feature films, it returned as a low-budget mass product after Pietro Francisci’s 1958 Le Fatiche di Ercole (Hercules) unexpectedly became one of the highest grossing films of the year. Cheaply produced successors followed certain patterns, series, and variations, whose shared characteristics Richard Dyer tersely described as follows:2 Peplum films are adventure films centred on heroes drawn from classical (including Biblical) antiquity played by US bodybuilders. The concept of the male hero and the casting alone already reveal a signif- icant difference between the Homeric epic and the aforementioned film versions. If we examine the historical formation of the genre and insert the adaptations of the Odyssey, what emerges is the diagram of a repeated, reciprocal mismatch. Ulisse, despite its international cast and high budget, did not unleash the wave, but preceded it by several years. Le Mépris, made at the peak of the genre, expresses itself in strongly self-reflexive changes of level, which place the genre, antiquity, and also gender tensions in quotation marks to the point of alienation. And for television L’Odissea shifts to a serial format, at a time when, as the film historian Pierre Sorlin has shown, the Italo-Western had long since supplanted the epic film.3 “Include me out” appears to be Odysseus’s position on the genre. The present essay seeks to describe these films in the constellation between the Homeric epic on the one hand and genre film on the other, and to use these reciprocal relationships to reveal the significant margin- ality of the Odyssey adaptations within genre film. All of the examples are grouped around the genre, but each of them deviates from it in its own way, and this deviation unfolds, as we will see, as a reflection on the rela- tionship between narrative, gender tensions, and subjectivity. Thus each film will be queried as to its specific model of the epic and correlating concept of the subject. As we will see, the reason the films miss the mark lies in the mismatch between genre cinema’s hyperbolic masculine acting subject and the ambivalent subjectivity of the Homeric figure of Odys- seus. This cannot be explained solely on the level of narrative, however, in a purely representative reading of the hero, for example, but emerges only in the question of the concept of the epic that each film projects. 2 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London, 1997), p. 165. 3 Pierre Sorlin, “Die Genrefilm der 1960er Jahre. Kolossalfilm und Western,” in Das goldene Zeitalter des italienischen Films. 1960er Jahre, ed. Thomas Koebner and Irmbert Schenk (Munich, 2008) 371–90. Christian Pischel - 9789004241923 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 07:47:38AM via free access odysseus on the margins of european genre cinema 197 With reference to their respective film-aesthetic processes, the produc- tions cited here can only be interrogated as to how they themselves create a reflection on the announced context. For that reason, the focus is less on the plot, the “eloquent” scenes, or character delineation; the following analysis of the films is intended to develop and elucidate a picture of the cinematic form and show how the aesthetic possibilities of film and televi- sion were used to express a notion of the epic. Ulisse (1954) When Mario Camerini made Ulisse in 1954 the response was positive, but far removed from the prototypical status achieved three years later by Pietro Francisci’s Le Fatiche di Ercole, which offered a full realization of Dyer’s definition: Steve Reeves, who had had a successful career as a body- builder before turning to acting, embodied the stereotypical strong man and thus put his stamp on the figure of Hercules, which would represent the stable axis of the further development of the genre. Even past the apo- gee of the genre in the mid-1960s, it was heroes such as Hercules, Samson, and Maciste (a legendary figure invented by Gabriele D’Annunzio) who strutted their poses and feats of strength on the pseudo-antique stages of the Italian sword-and-sandal films, displaying their muscle mass and virile agency in exhibition battles. Odysseus, in contrast, is portrayed less as a muscle man than as a scru- pulous but passionate adventurer, whose contradictory yearnings – for the unknown, on the one hand, and for home and hearth on the other – must be pacified. From the perspective of the Homeric Odyssey, one is tempted to regard this as a forceful handling of literary complexity. In genre film, however, it is an impressive testament to the integrative power of Hollywood, the capacity to mold heterogeneous material into appar- ently originless narrative, which draws the impetus for events solely from the story itself. The narrative process retreats behind the opulence of the depicted world or is tied to the diegetic figures. In this sense, Hans Blu- menberg describes the realistic legacy of the epic as the restraining of its narrative quality.4 Since Homer, the epic has been the genre devoted to absorbing the world, to putting oneself in the place of the world according to the abundance und degree of reality, in order to gather wholly unto oneself the intensity of relationships to reality. 4 Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt am Main, 1981) 222. Christian Pischel - 9789004241923 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 07:47:38AM via free access 198 christian pischel It is doubtful whether Homer’s Odyssey in particular stands for this type of realistic illusionism with the epic polyphony described by Birken- hauer, but there is no question that within the epic’s books, the density of the narrated world repeatedly works against the narrative process. This dimension – the worldliness of the epic – meets the aesthetic potential of the classic Hollywood film to provide a positive image of the world even on a large scale and to relate it to the emotional life of its protagonists. In short, it is a realism that, like the wandering seafarer, is capable of tra- versing the entire world. Unlike epic poetry, which starts by invoking the Muses, so that the events may be told, Ulisse begins with the antagonism between world and desire within the diegesis – the absence of Odysseus from his appointed place, which supplies the basic dramaturgical tension for the whole film. In the first shot, we see the spinning maids, admonished by Eurycleia, being dismissed for the night. In the reverse shot, Penelope rushes into the room wearing a flowing black veil and reports that she has spied the vague outlines of a ship in the twilight. Odysseus’s nursemaid interprets her hopeful words: what she saw is a function of her longing, at which point Penelope’s touching gaze moves in all directions, until the laughter of the suitors can be heard from off-screen. A situation becomes concrete and is immediately applied to the unfulfilled wishes and tribulations of a sensitive female soul. What is expressed here evolves over the course of the film into the melodramatic image of a lonely woman whose tears over the unknown fate of her husband turn into the soft-focus veil of her own close-up.