magenta druckt HKS 18 The recent success of Hollywood blockbust- ers such as Troy, Alexander and 300 demon- strates how popular Greek antiquity still is and how well it can be marketed. Today as in the golden age of the peplum- genre, its myths, the Homeric heroes, the Attic tragedies, and – less frequently – historical personages such as Alexander the Great or the Spartan king Leo- nidas represent Hellas. The authors of this volume highlight the many and varied forms of the reception of ancient Hellas in the history of the cinema, from mythology to Roman Greece, from the era of silent films to the new millennium. In this, they are examining classic films, recent releases, and lesser known and often over- looked productions. Hellas on Screen Hellas on Screen HABES www.steiner-verlag.de 45 Alte Geschichte HABES – Band 45 Franz Steiner Verlag Franz Steiner Verlag Cinematic Receptions of Ancient 45 History, Literature and Myth Edited by Irene Berti / Marta García Morcillo García Morcillo ISBN 978-3-515-09223-4 Irene Berti / Marta Irene Berti / Marta Hellas on Screen Edited by Irene Berti / Marta García Morcillo HABES Heidelberger Althistorische Beiträge und Epigraphische Studien – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Herausgegeben von Géza Alföldy, Angelos Chaniotis und Christian Witschel BAND 45 Hellas on Screen Cinematic Receptions of Ancient History, Literature and Myth Edited by Irene Berti / Marta García Morcillo Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart 2008 Coverabbildung: Medea (P.P. Pasolini, 1969) credits: Cinetext Bildarchiv, reg. num. 00164401 Bibliografische Information der Deutschen National- bibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über <http://dnb.d-nb.de> abrufbar. ISBN 978-3-515-09223-4 Jede Verwertung des Werkes außerhalb der Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist unzulässig und strafbar. Dies gilt insbesondere für Übersetzung, Nachdruck, Mikroverfilmung oder vergleichbare Verfahren sowie für die Speicherung in Datenverarbeitungsanlagen. © 2008 Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart Gedruckt auf säurefreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier. Druck: AZ Druck und Datentechnik, Kempten Printed in Germany CONTENTS Preface 5 Robin Lane Fox (Oxford) Introduction: “Does Greece – and the Cinema – need another Alexander?” 9 Irene Berti (Heidelberg) and Marta García Morcillo (Dresden) Classic Sceneries: Setting Ancient Greece in Film Architecture 21 Nacho García (Barcelona) Colourful Heroes: Ancient Greece and the Children’s Animation Film 39 Martin Lindner (Oldenburg) By Heracles! From Satyr-Play to Peplum 57 Luigi Spina (Napoli) Odysseus’ Journey through Film 65 Herbert Verreth (Leuven) The Legend of Oedipus : Silent Cinema, Theatre, Photography 75 Pantelis Michelakis (Bristol) Pasolini, Aristotle and Freud: Filmed Drama between Psychoanalysis and “Neoclassicism” 89 Filippo Carlà (Udine) Sparta and Ancient Greece in The 300 Spartans 117 Fernando Lillo Redonet (Vigo) “A rare ensample of Friendship true”: the Story of Damon and Pythias 131 Irene Berti (Heidelberg) Celluloid Alexander(s): A Hero from the Past as Role Model for the Present? 147 Anja Wieber (Dortmund) Plutarch’s and Stone’s Alexander 163 Ivana Petrovic (Durham) 4 Contents Making Alexander Fit for the Twenty-first Century: Oliver Stone’s Alexander 185 Angelos Chaniotis (Oxford) Phryne: from Knidian Venus to Movie Star 203 Eleonora Cavallini (Bologna) Graecia capta ? Depictions of Greeks and Hellas in “Roman films” 219 Marta García Morcillo (Dresden) Bibliography 237 Index 251 List of contributors 267 PREFACE Films on classical subjects have a much wider range than most scholars and teach- ers realize. Spartacus , Cleopatra , Ben Hur and now Troy and Alexander are famous but how many ancient historians realize that there have been Italian films about historical subjects in fourth-century BC Sicily? It is exciting to read this collection of studies which bring so much more to our notice. I must admit to being a late convert. I was brought up to think that films were only to be watched on wet English afternoons. Otherwise, the cinema was a poor second best to hours spent in the fresh air. I also thought, in ignorance, that “film studies” were a feeble subject (they involved watching, not “self-improving” read- ing) and that their items of study were so down-market that scholars should waste no time on them. They were for under-powered minds who could not cope with ancient languages and had no idea of facts, contexts and social settings. I freely admit to a conversion on the road to London’s Warburg Institute Li- brary thanks to the blinding light of Hollywood. From 2002 to 2004 I was the his- torical consultant to the director Oliver Stone on his major movie, Alexander . My reward was to lead the Macedonian Companion Cavalry into battle at Gaugamela (in the Moroccan desert) and against Porus’s war-elephants (in the big Saraburi Botanical Arboretum in Thailand). I had the dream view from between my horses’ ears, and apart from the friendship and spirit of those days I learned so much so quickly. I also realized that the subject unrolling around me was one of excep- tional interest and importance. I will now sit through almost anything, including the latest version of the 300 . I have to confess that the cavalry in the recent epic Mongol about Genghis Khan would almost certainly defeat my own. Here are some central issues. If a film is about named historical persons, can we justly watch it and suspend historical criticism? Ronald Syme tried to draw a line between “historical fiction”, centred on fictional characters in a historical period, and “fictional history”, centred on historical persons and using parapher- nalia of original sources. “Historical fiction” would include War and Peace or Rouge et Noir. “Fictional history”, he thought, should include Marguerite Your- cenar’s dense Memoirs of Hadrian , especially in her editions which cited underly- ing sources. I am none too convinced by this sharp line. Syme wished to disparage Your- cenar’s widely-read book and “fictional history” allowed him to class it with his other scholarly interest, the wild and often humorous Historia Augusta , which was basically (in his view) the work of a late “impostor” and forger. At first sight, “fictional history” is a category which works rather well for Shakespeare. We talk, after all, about the “history plays.” But is it really the right category for the novel- ist Mary Renault when writing about Alexander or his Successors through known contemporaries’ “dialogue”? What about Robert Graves’s matchless I Claudius , frequently based on original sources and seen through Claudius’s eyes? Neither 6 Robin Lane Fox Graves nor Renault thought they were “fictional historians.” They thought they were novelists, entertaining, informing and diverting their readers. At most they might say they grasped at an “essence”, in some way, which lay behind the gaps, fragments and reticence of historical sources. I think that Stone’s Alexander or the 1960s Spartacus are fictions too, “his- torical dramas” perhaps, not historical novels. Ronald Syme detected “fictional history” in the accompanying notes with which Yourcenar’s Memoirs irritated him. What should we make, say, of Oliver Stone’s JFK or Nixon which were is- sued with a supporting battery of sources for critics? Perhaps “fictional history” is right for them, as they did overlap with heavily-attested events and known, living persons. However, annotation is not necessarily a claim to “history” pure and sim- ple. A subject from the ancient world actually marks a turning-point here in liter- ary presentation. Shakespeare’s “history” plays only survive in the collected Folio editions. The master himself did not issue them one by one, hot after their per- formances with supporting “sources.” It is Ben Johnson who marks the change. His Sejanus appeared in 1604 with a text surrounded by historical notes and cita- tions. For the first time a dramatist was claiming to be more than a fictional trans- poser. His Sejanus was claiming to be based on history, a real “historical drama” with back up. Is it therefore “fictional history”? I hesitate still, and prefer to class it as a “historical drama”. “Fictional history” seems wrong, somehow. Are historians, then, advised to keep quiet when filmmakers take leave of historical evidence and produce fictions as bizarre as the Persian King and his army in the recent 300 ? I do not think so. If a film or a play directly messes up what we know from historical evidence, historians are right to clamour. In my view they should have clamoured even more about Gladiator . What ancient histo- rians have to remember is that they do not know the full picture. We know the main things which Alexander did and we can draw up a chronology and an (ap- proximate) route for his army. We do not know how he talked or what he was really like. If Stone or Lean or Ridley Scott try to fill in such gaps with their own interpretation of an ancient person, we need to be sure we know they are wrong, rather than believing they “must” be. If only Wolfgang Petersen had not invoked Homer, how could historians really object to yet another re-telling of an inher- ently unhistorical myth about legendary Troy? Ah, you may say, but we do know the order of Alexander’s troubles in India, the troops’ refusals, his wounds, the elephant battle and so forth. Stone muddled them up. But Angelos Chaniotis sees the central point here: the film is narrated by a third party, Ptolemy, who is remembering events at least forty years ago. We are watching Ptolemy’s version and if there are mistakes in it, they are mistakes of his ageing memory. We cannot point to bits of Ptolemy’s existing history, or our scholarly deductions about it, and then deny that Ptolemy ever remembered things in this way. As the film exemplifies, his “remembering” is a work in progress, bits of which are to be cut out before it goes on record.