Contact: Paula Randall, College of Humanities External Affiars, 520-621-5372; [email protected]
When Jon Solomon views the Oscar-nominated "Gladiator," he sees one more installment in Hollywood's century-long love of the dramatic stories of classical Rome and Greece and the ancient Middle East. J. Douglas Canfield sees westerns in the same historical perspective. Both professors in the University of Arizona College of Humanities have recently published books that explore award-winning movies.
Yale University Press has just published Solomon's "The Ancient World in the Cinema" in which he describes and evaluates 400 films set in ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, Babylon, Persia and Palestine. The book includes a look at the top money earners of their times: "The Ten Commandments," "Ben-Hur," "Cleopatra," "The Robe," "Spartacus," "Quo Vadis?" and "Samson and Delilah." The "Signet Book of Movie Lists" describes Solomon's book as one of the best books about film ever written.
The University Press of Kentucky released Canfield's "Mavericks on the Border: The Early Southwest in Historical Fiction and Film" in December 2000. According to Armando Jose Prats, associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky, "Mavericks" "locates itself brilliantly and originally at the intersection of a geography in the making and a quest for identity, offering the classic Southwest -- more an event than a place -- as the moral and spiritual region wherein the protagonists attempt a crossing, the shift of identity located in the shifting borderlands."
Solomon, a professor of classics, is the University of Arizona 2000 Five-Star Teaching Award winner. Canfield is a regents' professor of English and former Arizona professor of the year.
Solomon's "Ancient World" looks at the mix of historical accuracy, narrative, character, technology and directing that contribute to the truthfulness and believability of each film. "The historical characters do what sources tell us they did but not exactly," noted Solomon in a recent interview. "If a movie is too scientific and precise it may lose its audience, which doesn't sell 200 million worth of tickets. They 'Hollywoodize' all of them."
"Gladiator" is based on historical characters, except for the hero. Commodus the Emperor apparently was a "disturbed" individual. He did fight in the arena and did meet a violent death, but not in the arena. In real life he was strangled in bed. "The people who made "Gladiator" looked at some of the best ancient films," notes Solomon. The gladiator training scenes, for example, are modeled on those in Spartacus. As he notes in "Ancient World," "Gladiator" also enjoys "the economic and visual advantages not just of computer-generated special effects but of an entire generation's worth of developments in film technique.
A model of the lower tier of the Roman Coliseum was physically constructed for the film. The entire four tiers were re-created through computer generation, and the audience was able to see this famous ancient monument from a variety of angles: an aerial shot and a selection of interior midrange and distance views, including the views from the imperial box and from the luxury box of the gladiator owner Proximo (Oliver Reed), as well as sweeping eye-views, not to mention several views of the machinery below the sands of the arena. Several ground-level views create breathtaking impressions of the Roman arena in its heyday.
Solomon believes classical movies tell us about "the source of our own world" in western Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East. According to Canfield, westerns -- especially for those of us who live in the Southwest -- tell us who we are today and who we were in the recent past.
"Geronimo: American Legend," or the 1997 Turner Network Television production "Buffalo Soldiers," for example, examine the roles that Anglos, native Americans and African Americans play in the contemporary and recent Southwest. Canfield looks at Westerns set between 1833-1917 whose heroes or heroines are mavericks. The films he examines locate their stories in real historical situations and events. His mavericks cross or fail to cross the space between political states, cultures, and ideologies. All are existential heroes who make life and death decisions against the norm of their time.
He explores "Broken Arrow," about the U.S. military figure Tom Jeffords and the Apache leader Cochise, both of whom take death-defying chances to keep an unlikely peace between Anglos and Apaches in mid-19th century Southern Arizona. He devotes chapters to a series of movies about the outlaws and lawmen Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Billy the Kid.
Among movies situated south of the border, Canfield believes Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch," "changed the American western film forever, forcing us to confront the violence sanitized in earlier Westerns." "Como Aqua Para Chocolate" ("Like Water For Chocolate"), against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, follows Tita De la Garza's revolt against family dictates that she suppress her desire for sex, marriage and children to care for her mother.
According to Solomon, "since the popularization of theatrical film in the first decade of the 20th century, no genres, geographical localities, or historical eras have been more recurrent, significant, or innovative than the genre of films set in the ancient Greco-Roman and biblical worlds."
Several of the most critical events in cinema history involve classical films. The first significant film made from a book was the 1907 "Ben-Hur." The estate of the author, General Lew Wallace, challenged use of his book without recompense. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, producing the landmark decision that requires the film industry to get copyright permission and exchange money with the authors of its stories. In 1983, when Universal Studios sued Sony in the Beta-Max case, the Supreme Court cited this precedent-setting "Ben-Hur" case.
"When movies moved from being short tableaux to two-hour narratives, the first movies to do so, in 1912-13, were 'Quo Vadis?,' 'The Last Days of Pompeii' and 'Cabiria,'" Solomon notes, "These movies played to full movie houses in New York with live orchestras."
In 1953, when movies were losing 25 to 35 percent of their revenues to television, the film industry invented cinemascope to recoup business. The first movie in cinemascope, "The Robe," was set in ancient Rome. "Ben-Hur," in 1959, won more Oscars than any film other than "Titanic." Finally, Fox's 1963 "Cleopatra" was the biggest movie disaster at the time, almost bankrupting 20th Century Fox.
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