The 00's by Sarah

In addition to the greater acceptance of film as a serious artistic medium, classically based film served as a powerful political tool. In its most innocent form, classical cinema allowed Italy to “make claims to the earliest precedent and the greatest dignity,”⁸ thus strengthening national pride and identity. By watching people like themselves, the Italians “were able to visualize on screen their collectivity and gain a stake in historical action.”⁹

In a country within which one would have great difficulty escaping the constant reminders of its grand past, we can observe why “cinema has been crucial in the formation and wide dissemination of an historical consciousness of ancient Rome and that cinema has operated in tandem with, and sometimes in opposition to, more direct access to the surviving monuments and literary texts of antiquity to resurrect a vivid past intimately connected with present interests.”¹⁰

This concept of marriage between a supported vivid past and modern day ideals is most in Italy during the 1930’s. Under the fascist rule of Mussolini, “Roman iconography, architecture, and sculpture, political rhetoric, and military ritual were systematically exploited to justify historically the fascist aspiration to a colonial empire.”⁹

⁸ Wyke (1997): 15

⁹ Wyke (1991): 20

¹⁰ Wyke (1997): 3

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The Purpose of Studying Classical Film

May 2000 | Portland | Age 21

Thesis

The purpose of studying classical film

Wyke tells us in Classics and Cinema (1991), classically based film critics Mary-Kay Gamel and Peter Rose “argue that a fundamental purpose of their conventional definition of classics and classicism that have received so much support since the 1980s.” They continue to say that by “confronting the new conservative revival of a distinction between high and popular culture,” they “seek to dissolve that distinction from the supposedly high ground of the classical scholar”⁵.

I believe this is very important for several reasons. We have already accepted that the literature of the Greco-Roman world is valuable due to its rich morality and critically insightful themes. However, as it currently stands this ancient wisdom in its purest form is trapped in lofty translations which, sadly, are frequented by an almost exclusively academic crowd. The average citizen it must be admitted, would have little occasion to pick up a copy of the The Iliad no matter how colloquial the translation. It is for this reason among others that an attempt has been made to bring classics to the masses through the wide-reaching medium of cinema, and more recently through television. One of the earliest nations to embrace this challenge was Italy.

Early Classically Based Film

It is not surprising that Italy was one of the first countries to embrace a classical theme in its young cinema, with silent films such as Quo vadis? (1913), and Cabiria (1914). From a review in the Naples journal Film, 23 April, 1914, we are told that on viewing Cabiria for the first time,

An intense emotion grasped the entire audience, the emotion of the incomparable spectacle which, through a set-designer’s tenacious effort, revived the people of the third century [BC] and flung them into tremendous struggles before the steep walls of a city, into the burning waves of a flaming sea, at the feet of an idol crimson with fire… On their feet, on all sides of the theater the crowd shouted with enthusiasm and joy. A genuine, sincere, unrestrainable frenzy accompanied the majestic film from beginning to end… Cabiria is something that will last. It will last because at that instant the vulgar art of cinema ceases and history succeeds, true history.⁶

Indeed, the marriage of the high culture of classicism and the low culture of film was hailed all around, thus “bestowing on the modern medium a grandiose register and educative justification.⁷

⁵ Wyke (1997): 7.

⁶ Wyke (1997): 9.

⁷ Wyke (1997): 25.

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