11. Spartacus (1960), dir. Stanley Kubrick
Saturday, 30 October 2021 21:20![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strange_complexHey there, LJ / DW. I did All The Things for a few weeks there, and I am really not sure how I will ever get you caught up on it all. But let's have a go at writing about just one Thing - going to see Spartacus on a frankly ENORMOUS screen at the National Media Museum's Widescreen Weekend with ![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
HickeyWriter.
It looked SO GOOD. It was the 2015 restoration, which not only included all the deleted footage put back in 1991 (oysters, snails and all), but had clearly been carefully visually cleaned up as well. It was incredibly crisp, bursting with colour and detail, and sometimes almost looked like it was in 3D when there was something prominent in the foreground and the camera was moving round to track something in the middle distance. It really showed off the epic scale of the closing battle scenes as well. I had a go at counting the numbers of Roman soldiers by row and by column as they performed their opening manoeuvres before Spartacus' forces, and realised to my astonishment that I was looking at easily 20,000 people on that side alone. The spectacle of them all filing into lines and presenting shields in perfect synchronicity was genuinely awe-inspiring, and really helped me to understand the psychological impact such displays must have had on opposing forces in antiquity. On the other hand, the big-screen experience perhaps revealed more than a small one might that the editing and continuity left some room for improvement. People having conversations with each other were often visibly in completely different positions when the camera cut between shots seen from the front and behind, while the final few scenes revealed the remarkable colour-changing properties of Varinia's baby's hair.
I am not going to say much about the plot or its political resonances, all of which is well-documented, but it did really strike me how we are carefully shown enslaved women and children in the gladiatorial school, not to mention a very diverse range in Spartacus' roaming troupe, including elderly people and a dwarf. We're left in no doubt of the wide-ranging impact of slavery, or the inclusiveness of Spartacus' revolution, and this shows up in its logistics as well as its demographics. It's made very clear that weaving is as important to the revolutionary cause as fighting, with a role even for Antoninus the musicus. He seems to personify the (slightly apocryphal) quotation from Emma Goldman: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution."
The art (wall-painting, statues, etc) and architecture are often a little anachronistic, but that's par for the course in screen depictions of antiquity. In fact, I found the inclusion of statuary from right up to the late antique period in the opening credits actually worked in a positive sense, in that it could be taken as signalling that the moral issues at the heart of the story remained in place throughout the Roman period - though that reading was then undermined by an opening narration suggesting that the coming of Christianity had helped to overthrow the tyranny of slavery, which it very much did not! In any case, the sets all looked broadly Roman at least, and some aspects of them were carefully researched and thoughtfully conceived. I had to suppress a squee at the sight of an hourglass-shaped millstone in the kitchen at Batiatus' gladiatorial school. Oh, and talking of Batiatus, Peter Ustinov really is just truly amazing in a film chock-full of great actors playing great characters. I understand he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in it, and it could not have been more deserved.
Although I've seen the film before, I've learnt a lot more about both late Republican politics and modern politics since then, so that political exchanges which had rather passed me by on previous watches struck closer to home this time. In some ways, this was irritating, because it opened up new dimensions of anachronism for me. For example, in the period when the action supposedly takes place, there was no such thing as a First General of the Republic (which is what Crassus is introduced as), a garrison of Rome (six cohorts of which Glabrus takes against Spartacus) or a governor of Aquitania (to whom Gracchus sends Batiatus and Varinia at the end of the film), which had not been conquered yet. Nor was there any prominent politician called Sempronius Gracchus. Rather, Laughton's character seems to be a sort of splice between Crassus' main opponent Pompey (whom he can't literally be because Pompey was away in Spain for most of the crisis) and Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, the late-second-century BC populists. On the other hand, I was able to be forgiving about all this because I could also see how the politics of the Roman Republic was being used as an analogy for American politics, with Crassus as a Republican leader and Gracchus as his main opponent - perhaps an idealised Kennedy?
Although we didn't know this before we arrived, it happened that this film was the first screening of the Widescreem Weekend's 25th anniversary edition, so we got free drinks beforehand, free ice-creams in the intermission, and free cup-cakes to take home afterwards. Given how good the film itself was, I didn't need those perks to make for an excellent evening, but they certainly didn't hurt.
It looked SO GOOD. It was the 2015 restoration, which not only included all the deleted footage put back in 1991 (oysters, snails and all), but had clearly been carefully visually cleaned up as well. It was incredibly crisp, bursting with colour and detail, and sometimes almost looked like it was in 3D when there was something prominent in the foreground and the camera was moving round to track something in the middle distance. It really showed off the epic scale of the closing battle scenes as well. I had a go at counting the numbers of Roman soldiers by row and by column as they performed their opening manoeuvres before Spartacus' forces, and realised to my astonishment that I was looking at easily 20,000 people on that side alone. The spectacle of them all filing into lines and presenting shields in perfect synchronicity was genuinely awe-inspiring, and really helped me to understand the psychological impact such displays must have had on opposing forces in antiquity. On the other hand, the big-screen experience perhaps revealed more than a small one might that the editing and continuity left some room for improvement. People having conversations with each other were often visibly in completely different positions when the camera cut between shots seen from the front and behind, while the final few scenes revealed the remarkable colour-changing properties of Varinia's baby's hair.
I am not going to say much about the plot or its political resonances, all of which is well-documented, but it did really strike me how we are carefully shown enslaved women and children in the gladiatorial school, not to mention a very diverse range in Spartacus' roaming troupe, including elderly people and a dwarf. We're left in no doubt of the wide-ranging impact of slavery, or the inclusiveness of Spartacus' revolution, and this shows up in its logistics as well as its demographics. It's made very clear that weaving is as important to the revolutionary cause as fighting, with a role even for Antoninus the musicus. He seems to personify the (slightly apocryphal) quotation from Emma Goldman: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution."
The art (wall-painting, statues, etc) and architecture are often a little anachronistic, but that's par for the course in screen depictions of antiquity. In fact, I found the inclusion of statuary from right up to the late antique period in the opening credits actually worked in a positive sense, in that it could be taken as signalling that the moral issues at the heart of the story remained in place throughout the Roman period - though that reading was then undermined by an opening narration suggesting that the coming of Christianity had helped to overthrow the tyranny of slavery, which it very much did not! In any case, the sets all looked broadly Roman at least, and some aspects of them were carefully researched and thoughtfully conceived. I had to suppress a squee at the sight of an hourglass-shaped millstone in the kitchen at Batiatus' gladiatorial school. Oh, and talking of Batiatus, Peter Ustinov really is just truly amazing in a film chock-full of great actors playing great characters. I understand he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in it, and it could not have been more deserved.
Although I've seen the film before, I've learnt a lot more about both late Republican politics and modern politics since then, so that political exchanges which had rather passed me by on previous watches struck closer to home this time. In some ways, this was irritating, because it opened up new dimensions of anachronism for me. For example, in the period when the action supposedly takes place, there was no such thing as a First General of the Republic (which is what Crassus is introduced as), a garrison of Rome (six cohorts of which Glabrus takes against Spartacus) or a governor of Aquitania (to whom Gracchus sends Batiatus and Varinia at the end of the film), which had not been conquered yet. Nor was there any prominent politician called Sempronius Gracchus. Rather, Laughton's character seems to be a sort of splice between Crassus' main opponent Pompey (whom he can't literally be because Pompey was away in Spain for most of the crisis) and Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, the late-second-century BC populists. On the other hand, I was able to be forgiving about all this because I could also see how the politics of the Roman Republic was being used as an analogy for American politics, with Crassus as a Republican leader and Gracchus as his main opponent - perhaps an idealised Kennedy?
Although we didn't know this before we arrived, it happened that this film was the first screening of the Widescreem Weekend's 25th anniversary edition, so we got free drinks beforehand, free ice-creams in the intermission, and free cup-cakes to take home afterwards. Given how good the film itself was, I didn't need those perks to make for an excellent evening, but they certainly didn't hurt.
no subject
Date: Sunday, 31 October 2021 15:00 (UTC)no subject
Date: Sunday, 31 October 2021 21:57 (UTC)no subject
Date: Monday, 1 November 2021 10:59 (UTC)no subject
Date: Monday, 1 November 2021 11:12 (UTC)no subject
Date: Monday, 1 November 2021 11:47 (UTC)And I remember visiting the Forum and being really struck by how *close* everything was together and how, for example, a mob of a few thousand people could become a real factor if you were trying to conduct any sort of business in the city centre.