In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

It's time to capture a few more of my Cellar Club movie tweet-alongs. Do scroll on by if it's not your bag.

( 15. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1974), dir. Dan Curtis, broadcast 22 October )

( 16. The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), dir. Val Guest, broadcast 29 October )

( 17. Zoltan: Hound of Dracula (1977), dir. Albert Band, broadcast 19 November )

Hey 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 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.

I watched this last night, via a recording which had been waiting around on my Sky box for a good couple of years. It's certainly a very strange film, operating on a level a long way removed from realism. Magic is real; people die and come back to life; someone is seemingly pulled into existence in the field by the other characters hauling on a massive rope; characters experience all kinds of hallucinations, etc. It's hard to say in what sense any of what we see on screen 'happens' in any normal narrative sense, and we're clearly at liberty to interpret it in our own way.

One possible way of approaching it seems to be to read the whole thing as a hallucination experienced by Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), the first character we meet and the main one whose perspective we follow throughout, as he dies in a hedgerow after trying to escape the commander he is seen fleeing from at the beginning. Seen from this angle, the whole story is about his unresolved issues playing out: his awareness of his bookish unworldliness and how this compares with the civil war soldiers; his guilt about his failure to track down the books which O'Neill stole from the alchemist he serves; his anxieties about his own abilities with magic. When Whitehead passes back out of the field at the end and meets Jacob and Friend, the companions whom he had bonded with there but had also failed to save and buried in the ground, that is basically him passing through into the afterlife, his issues now resolved.

Another possibility is that we should take seriously O’Neill (Michael Smiley)'s claim that he has summoned the others into the field to do his bidding, making him the main driver of the story. He is the rival alchemist who stole Whitehead's master's books, and seems to need Whitehead's magical abilities to complement his own, Jacob and Friend for their physical labour (pulling him back from whatever strange realm he had gone to on the end of his rope, digging for the treasure he believes is hidden in the field) and Cutler to serve him. On this level, the field is a magical otherworld in which the characters' experiences, including death, don't have lasting real-world consequences, and from which Whitehead, Jacob and Friend are all eventually able to escape by helping each other and overcoming O'Neill.

Or maybe even both of those are too much the work of a modern rationalising mind-set, and we should accept the whole thing as a Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell-ish narrative in which magic is just fully part of the reality of everyday life. Meanwhile, once we've assimilated that aspect of the film, there are all sorts of other things going on. With only five real characters in the story (plus the commander Whitehead escapes at the beginning), a lot of the drama comes from drawing each of them as individuals and in contrast to one another. There are particularly strong class distinctions between the two alchemists (Whitehead and O'Neill) and the other three who are ordinary labourers / soldiers / servants, as well as the obvious moral distinction between the exploitative and violent Cutler and O'Neill and the basically good if in some cases crude Jacob, Friend and Whitehead.

Although the whole story takes place in the field, and thus away from the world beyond, it also captures in microcosm in all sorts of ways the wider context of the seventeenth century and the civil war which the characters have stepped out of. Though three of the characters are veterans and / or deserters from the war, it's never entirely clear from what side, and this is probably the point - that it hardly matters, but that England is riven with all sorts of tensions and fault-lines anyway which come out in these characters' own rivalries. It's a world where society is fractured and you can't be sure who you can trust; in which magic and religion co-exist, but that religion may come in the form of simple faith, complex theology or cynicism; where bodily needs and discomforts are pressing and science is advanced enough to deliver death at the end of a musket but there is nothing much beyond herbs and superstition to stave off disease.

It's also a very visually-striking film. It's shot in black and white, entirely in the titular field. This (plus the small cast) is partly about working on a low budget, but it's a shining example of making constraint into a virtue, with lots of great wide shots of the characters walking through the long ripe grass, their dark clothes silhouetted against its pale yellow(?). Periodically, the characters also hold still in exaggerated stances, pointing at key props or features in the landscape, as though posing for the paintings and engravings which are the only visual medium through which we can directly encounter seventeenth-century England. And of course there are lots of great special effects conveying magic and / or hallucinations, culminating in a particularly trippy sequence of violent winds, flashing cross-cut images and split screens when Whitehead deliberately eats the mushrooms which populate the field and engages in a magical battle with O'Neill.

There are literally no female characters in the film at all, but I think I am OK with that, a) because it deals with a small group of refugees from a civil war battle raging off-screen at the beginning of the story, so those people are inevitably going to be men, and b) because there were clearly plenty of women in prominent positions within the production team, including the script-writer and lead producer. That said, I would definitely love to see a film which offered the surreality, visual aesthetic, and feel for the social and historical context of the seventeenth century which this one did, but was also strongly or even wholly focused on female characters.

The pandemic has put a bit of a hole in my movie-watching, mainly because I was doing so much of it with lady_lugosi1313 before it started, but also because my Lib Dem chairing duties make it very difficult to ring-fence the time to sit down and watch a movie on my own without the prompt of a friend wanting me to do it with them. There's almost always an email to write, an agenda to put together, a printing task to do or some other chore accompanied by a weight of obligation that I tell myself I should get that done this evening, and then maybe watch something nice tomorrow. Guess what has always happened by tomorrow, though.

The same problem rather applies to writing about them too. It's always postponable until I have just sorted out X, Y and Z - but in fact the alphabet never ends. Anyway, I feel physically pretty under par this weekend and just need to ignore the to-do list for a bit. Let's see if I'm up to briefly recording some films I've watched instead.


4. Twins of Evil (1971), dir. John Hough

This is a Hammer vampire film whose reputation as being more concerned to titillate its audiences than tell a good story precedes it. As such, I went in with rock-bottom expectations, and therefore quite enjoyed it when it turned out to have a reasonably coherent storyline after all. I won't rush to see it again, but I have seen worse Hammer films. Speaking of which...


5. Moon Zero Two (1969), dir. Roy Ward Baker

Yeah, this was extraordinarily bad. It's a futuristic sci-fi story about mining on the moon, presumably released to capitalise on moon-mania sparked by the landing that year. I watched it on 9 May 2021, because that is the day when the story begins, plus I knew it would be the day after the local election count finished, so I would be knackered and very much in need of a brainless story to watch. But despite that attempt to create a feel of special timeliness around my viewing, I just could not get into the story. There were a few fun retrofuturistic costumes, including some ladies with excellent purple curly hair, but the whole story was just too reliant on boring dialogue about mining delivered in static indoor settings by characters I didn't care about.


6. Ghost Stories (2017), dir. Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman

This is a recent British ghost story anthology film which is overall good and delivers some nice scary thrills along the way. It's filmed in Yorkshire, which meant I recognised the locations, including scenes of a stage psychic shot in the City Varieties Music Hall in Leeds. Given that the one time in my life I have actually been there was not long before the pandemic to see a spoof psychic with lady_lugosi1313, that was pretty cool. The individual stories are tied together by a connecting narrative in which each is told by a witness to a sceptic investigating reported ghost sightings and trying to discover the truth behind them. It seemed to be going a bit silly towards the end, but the silliness then turned into a quite effective deconstruction of the connecting character, who ( spoiler ). It centres issues of discrimination by making the connecting character Jewish, showing how his childhood was marred by bullying and his father flying into a rage about his sister's Muslim boyfriend, and including a black priest in the first story. But it's also almost entirely male-centred, with women featuring only as monsters or distant, one-dimensional mothers / wives / daughters appearing only briefly to further the men's stories. A pity, because other than that it was pretty good.


7. Dracula Reborn (2015), dir. Attila Luca

I watched this one last night and it is extremely bad! The plot is supposed to be about a group of journalists from Vancouver and Paris who are trying to track down a vampire cult led by Dracula, and follow it to Transylvania. Unfortunately, the vampires themselves are styled in silly cheap cloaks and clown-white make-up which just makes them look like grotesque clichés. The editing is also often quite bad, and the logic of the plot set-up is ill thought-through. We hear news bulletins saying that the Dracula clan are like celebrities and the press are too scared to attack them. But we never see anything of this celebrity - how is it manifested? What hold does it give them over the press? Are they able to use it to draw in their victims? Instead, a string of bloodied corpses is left all over Paris, and we're shown individual killings being reported in the news. Shouldn't the press be collaborating in suppressing those reports if they're supposedly so in thrall to the vampires? Also, if the vampires are like celebrities, why is it particularly hard for the journalists to track them down? And what do the journalists think is going to happen when they do track them down? They keep saying they want to find and interview a missing girl who they believe has been turned into a vampire, and / or interview members of the vampire cult. But they also know that everyone who comes across the vampires in any way is brutally murdered, increasingly including their own contacts, and yet don't seem to try to do anything to find out how to protect themselves against the same fate. Literally none of it makes the slightest bit of sense, and it's only worth watching at all as an object lesson in the difference between a superficially cool-sounding concept and a genuinely well-developed story.

This film came to my attention because I noticed people were tweeting about it on the ClassicsTwitterMovie hashtag. It was too late for me to join in the communal watch by that point, but I saved the information and watched it myself a few weeks later. It's available on Youtube with English subtitles, though you have to actively turn them on by clicking on the cog, bottom right.

It is the second Romanian film I have watched, the first being Vlad Tepeș (1979) in February of 2015 (DW / LJ). I had made some attempts to learn some Romanian already at that point, ahead of a visit there that May, but only from a teach-yourself book - I hadn't yet discovered Duolingo. I see I judged in my review that I was able to understand about one word in a hundred, which wasn't much to celebrate! Watching The Dacii was a sober reminder of how far I still have to go, despite being 3/5 of the way through the Romanian Duolingo course now. Romanian speakers seem to go at a similar speed to their Spanish cousins when speaking to each other, which would explain why I've needed to make a lot more use of the 'speak at half-speed' button on Romanian Duolingo listening exercises than I ever have with German. On the other hand, I definitely understood a lot more than I did in 2015. The subtitles seemed to appear on a slight delay by comparison with the actual speech, which meant that once or twice I was able to parse a shorter sentence before the translation appeared. For longer sentences, I was probably understanding something more like about one word in three, but not really getting the time I needed to figure out what the sentence as a whole might mean before the next one started. Still, it is progress.

The story deals with the Dacian resistance to Domitian's campaign against them in AD 86-88, led by Decebalus. As such, it belongs to a wider genre of stories about antiquity which similarly focus on resistance to Rome's military might by peoples from the same geographical area as the contemporary nation making them. Comparable material from other nations includes the Asterix books, Los Cántabros (1980), a whole German mythology around Arminius and a similar British one around Boudicca. Rather like most of these other examples, the Dacii are cast as fighting not merely to defend their own territory, but as the last great hopes for resistance to Rome, all of which is made quite explicit via opening dialogue between a Roman at the gates of a Dacian fort and the inhabitants within. This seems to fit with Romanian foreign policy at the time, at least insofar as I've gleaned it from Wikipedia, which involved Ceaușescu in the early years of his regime winning popularity by taking a stance against the authority of the Soviet Union. Wikipedia also tells me that the film itself is extremely popular in Romania, standing as their second-most-watched historical film and fourth most watched of all time, so it seems that message of brave nationalism did indeed resonate.

The basic plot sees the Romans turning up for conquest and taking a Dacian encampment after an epic siege with a cast of thousands and lots of good details like a siege tower and a battering-ram with a roof covered in soft sacks to protect the men wielding it. The two sides then send ambassadors to one another, but both are clearly basically preparing for further war. The Dacians manage to ambush the Romans in a narrow pass, throwing rocks and felling trees on them a bit like the Ewoks. But this is not the end. Things culminate in a major battlefield confrontation, where although the Dacian leader Decebalus and a sympathetic Roman character named Severus try to defuse things, the Romans march forward anyway and we fade to an ancient battle scene relief. It's hard to map the events of the film very closely onto the actual history of Domitian's campaigns, as several licences have clearly been taken. E.g. history records that the Roman general Fuscus died in battle during the campaigns, but the film has him dying as the result of a sword-fight with Severus. Perhaps the decision to end with the battle and not show who wins was a way of capturing the somewhat ambiguous / unfinished outcome of the campaigns themselves? It seems a slightly odd choice given the evident desire of the producers to deliver a nationalist message, but perhaps it was better for them than either a) showing an outright Dacian victory, which wasn't really true, or b) Decebalus ending up suing for peace and becoming a Roman client king, which didn't really fit Ceaușescu's stance of resistance to the USSR. The mid-battle ending instead allows the producers to send the audience out of the cinema with the message that the battle of resistance against external authority is never-ending ringing in their ears.

Meanwhile, there's a lot going on around that bare-bones outline of battles and their outcomes. First the Dacians. Our sympathies are clearly supposed to lie with them. Charming pastoral hunting scenes early on in the film secure that, and contrast sharply with establishing scenes of the Roman characters which show Domitian's generals conspiring to undermine him and the emperor himself more concerned with gold than victory. The Dacians are coded in various ways which make the analogy with contemporary Romanians very clear - for example they wear embroidered clothes much like traditional Romanian garb, and send their women and children away from war to the mountains in carts much like the ones used there today - what Stoker calls a leiterwagen in Dracula.

But they are very much also the noble barbarians of the ancient Greco-Roman sources, which likewise suits the nationalist agenda very well. They wear the Phrygian caps and carry the dragon-headed standards shown on Trajan's column and various other Roman victory monuments. In the early siege of the Dacian encampment, the Romans manage to take only one prisoner alive, who promptly grabs a sword and kills himself. Later on, Decebalus explains to the sympathetic Severus, who has been sent to him as an ambassador, that the Dacians always fight to the death because they have no fear of it, and die laughing because they are going to their god, Zalmoxis. Indeed, there is lots of Zalmoxis business as the film goes on, which was one of my favourite things about it. Once Decebalus has resolved on war, he reluctantly agrees on the advice of his priest to send a message to Zalmoxis via his son Cotizo using the ritual of impalement on three spears (described by Herodotus), which they then proceed to do in front of this rock formation, which some people say is the face of Zalmoxis. I'd love to know whether that association predated the film or was created by it. Zalmoxis takes his time to respond, but does, sending torrential rain which floods the plains where the Romans are, causing them all sorts of trouble. It is all very cool stuff to see enacted on screen.

Decebalus himself is of course idealised as a wise and capable leader. We meet him for the first time when he is overseeing training contests (so, showing appropriate leadership in a state based on warfare), and then see him with his council of advisers being cautious yet firm and taking the necessary measures to protect the Dacian women and children. The councillors respond by casting doubts on Decebalus' strategy, which I found interesting because the motif of the wise leader surrounded by doubters and hot-heads was something I also recognised from Vlad Tepeș (1979). I am going to place a guess that this was part of Ceaușescu's self-fashioning, and I can see how that would be a useful narrative for an autocratic leader to create about the relationship between their own personal qualities and those of the people around them. He must have created it early, though, because (just guessing from its release date) this film probably went into production only about a year after he took power. Anyway, in the film Decebalus is of course proved right by the course of events, but is still having to rein in hot-headed generals right up to the final battle scene, where they force full-blown warfare despite his attempts to resolve things via intelligence rather than machismo.

Meanwhile, the Romans are fairly recognisable as the relentless military machine portrayed in many a Hollywood film, except here presumably standing for the Soviet Union rather than the Evil Brits. We see huge numbers of them marching to relentless music, but they are also humanised and characterised. Severus, the sympathetic one who spends time with the Dacians and comes to understand them, is of course portrayed as skilful and likeable from the beginning. On the other side, we have Fuscus, who is shown early on conspiring to undermine Domitian, and later decimates (literally) a legion whom he thinks have let him down. Domitian is of course a classic Bad Emperor, who sits arrogantly on Burebista's throne in the Dacian camp after the Romans have captured it to receive ambassadors from Decebalus, and has a tame historian following him round writing everything down - presumably in a suitably panegyrical manner.

Overall, definitely one I'm glad I watched. It certainly is nationalistic, but so are many Roman historical films, and it was fascinating to see that from a specifically Romanian angle. It's not naturalistic or subtle as a piece of cinematic art, but it makes the most of the assets Romania could command in the 1960s - beautiful landscapes and lots of people. And it's good to find that the time I've spent on Duolingo has had at least some impact at least. Here's to further progress!