It is often said that “a picture is worth a thousand words”, but when it comes to Antiquity and its interpretation by an artist, sometimes these pictorial representations, sculptural, literary or cinematographic works do not help us historians at all, since they lead the viewer to believe them at face value, producing serious errors that become entrenched in society in such a way that our task of removing them becomes quite complicated and, even more so, when movies and novels are considered as valid as if they were essays and there is no critical view of them. So it is very important to always keep in mind the premise that any of the arts that use an image from the past does not have to be reliable, since it is an interpretation of the artist.
The case of Jean's painting is well known -Léon Gérôme entitled Pollice verse (1872), which has perpetuated the image of the end of the life of gladiators indicated with a thumbs up or thumbs down. This interpretation has been reproduced to such an extent that today it has become an icon and is part of our day to day in emoticons on social networks or on mobile phones. A wrong image.
Something similar to Gérôme's painting is what happened with the idea that the woman in Roman shows was that of a mere sexual object , an erotic icon and even a pornographic vision that served to revive the most basic sexual instincts of the ancient Romans. But although the negation of the pictorial work of art seems more plausible to us, the same does not happen with films, which, in general, the public understands as fictionalized documentaries. Big mistake.
It was not until 1932 that the image of a gladiatrix and it was in the masterful work entitled The sign of the cross , a Paramount film, directed and produced by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Fredric March, Elissa Landi, Claudette Colbert and Charles Laughton, based on the homonymous novel by Wilson Barrett wrote in 1895. It is not the first version of this novel, which had already been brought to the big screen on two previous occasions:one by the British Sigmund Lubin in 1904 and another in 1914, also by Paramount and directed by Frederick A. Thomson.
The sign of the cross. The woman in the Colosseum
The argument of The sign of the cross , which in Spain can be seen under the title El signo de la cruz , takes place in the Rome of Nero after the famous fire, when the emperor looks for the Christians guilty of burning the city to take them to the arena and execute them there. The protagonist, Marcus Superbus, prefect of Rome and pagan, falls madly in love with the Christian Mercia, who is the daughter of one of the ringleaders who instigated the fire. So far a simple story, but DeMille did not want to stop there and added a strong sexual charge to the plot. , so during the film scenes are developed (remember that the film is from 1932) of orgies, sadism, male and female homosexuality, sexual harassment... which managed to reach the market without any cut, because the "censor code" had not yet been established. . The film cost around $650,000 and was shot in just eight weeks. It was a box office success and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography for the work of Karl Struss. The scene that made her famous is that of Poppea bathing in a pool of donkey's milk where a lesbian fiction unfolds that the director only hints at, because DeMille was an artist playing with the viewer's imagination.
Furthermore, in what interests us here, it is It is the first film where women in the sand appear. of the amphitheater without it being a virginal Christian martyr, a character who had previously appeared in other titles. We can see in the film (1:29 pm) the development of a day of shows in ancient Rome. An interesting image that, without a doubt, can answer many questions about the idea that we currently have of female participation in Roman shows, which even some researchers today defend.
The script that takes place at the entrance to the amphitheater is priceless, some comments that give, together with the development of the later scenes, an image of the ancient Roman as truculent, masochistic, insensitive and sadistic, as well as cold and without feelings, an idea that is repeated in the stands of the amphitheater during the treatment of the games. The show begins with a traditional gladiator fight and, later, execution scenes are interspersed by elephants, tigers, crocodiles and a gorilla, with other athletes such as boxers, and even dares with some venatio . Undoubtedly, although (again I reiterate) it is a free interpretation, after the film there has been a study of historical documentation. Curiously, today we are struck by the fact that there is practically no blood in the film and that the gruesome scenes are insinuated and then the camera is directed at the faces of the spectators, who say it all. The director plays in this way with the panic scenes of those who are going to die and the spectators who look coldly, shout, cry, cover their eyes and make a thousand gestures, a magnificent technique, as I have already highlighted several times, for our imagination to fill in the gaps. The scenes that follow one another and those where an actress appears are charged with a strong sexuality, far beyond simple eroticism.
The women who appear in the arena are from three types:those condemned to death who are obviously atheists, the gladiatrices and the Christians who are also going to die. The scene of the second case is curious, of the gladiatrices fight . The director gives us a rather horrifying image of them. The fight takes place against pygmies, it is Estacio who tells us about it in his Silvas I 6, 50-55. The director destroys the heroic and brave image of the gladiatrices with that of a barbaric, dirty, disheveled woman, who looks more like a primitive woman than an erotic myth, which certainly has nothing to do with the gladiatrices of the sources:a fighter of similar features to the male version.
But the eroticization of women, which has led to the misinterpretation of the sources, and to the fact that even today we have a wrong image of the female character in these shows, goes hand in hand of the executions of condemned or damnatio ad bestias . The scenes of the film have nothing to do with the cruel reality that the sources tell us:naked, tied, sexualized women. One of them is executed by crocodiles and another raped by a gorilla supposedly to death, of course. Again the images do not come out, but the faces of the public do. On stage they appear with a kind of halo, probably the director used some kind of filter and a direct light that gives the skin of the areas a virginal image, white, naked, they are only covered with garlands of flowers that curl around of the body, but when the actress appears in profile, the feminine curves are perfectly distinguished, more than insinuated, they are shown without any modesty.
Clearly what the director intended to do was highlight the image of decorous and decent Christian purity, as opposed to that of naked pagan barbarism, but still had to face several criticisms from Christian organizations that saw that the film's strong erotic charge corrupted the history of Christianity and could lead to perdition the soul of the twentieth century believer.
The truth is that the image of the director is a totally unfounded portrait, which has nothing to do with what the sources tell us about these women:nor about the strong sexual connotation and erotica of these fights that the director of the film interprets in this way, neither about the nudity of the bodies of the executed women, nor about the role that women played in the show, nor about the almost animal woman of the gladiatrices. In short, a film, science fiction, as it has been very well described:an epic of sex and religion .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIRCARD, R. (2004), Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood , University Press of Kentucky.
BLACK, G.D. (1996), Hollywood Censored:Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies , Cambridge University Press.
BRUNET, S. (2013), “Women with swords” in Paul Christesen and Donald G. Kyle, Sport and spectacle in Greek and Roman antiquity , John Wiley &Sons.
LANDAZURI, M. The sign of the cross (seen here on 7/8/2017).
MUÑOZ-SANTOS, M.E. “Women and Roman shows”, Veredas da História Magazine , VOL. 9, No. 1, 2017 (in press).
SOLOMON, J. (2002), Peplum, the ancient world on film , Publishing Alliance.
ZOLL, A. (2002), Gladiatrix, the true story of history's unknown woman warrior , Berkley Boulevard Books.
Interesting links
The original novel
The sign of the cross (1914)
Trailer for The sign of the cross (1932)