as well as the goddess Ishtar and the rituals performed in her honor. All contributed to the idea that the Mesopotamian woman was in need of saving and correction, an aspect that reflected society itself.
Hence, we have opted for an analysis of film content and not of production. Nevertheless, Chapter 4 will be dedicated to the study of the cinematographic centers, especially Hollywood and Cinecittà, of how they dealt with the political and social transformations that occurred throughout the twentieth century, and how they constrained or not their creations.84 As we know, Mesopotamia, Babylon, and the characters associated with them have the extraordinary ability to easily metamorphose, assuming themselves as a linguistic resource, camouflaging themselves in different-style figures often used to express situations that are alien to them, but in which they are reviewed. Thus, either we find them as a metaphor, as a euphemism, or as an allegory. This will also be a focal point of our analysis, especially with regard to such films that we categorized earlier as Mesopotamia in film and which will be covered in Chapter 5. Indeed, out of Mesopotamia came the biblical metaphor “whore of Babylon” applied to many contexts and visible in various cinematographic productions. Everything that was evil was likely to have emerged from the land between the rivers. Evil, consummated in the figure of the Devil or the Antichrist, is one of the aspects that will be studied and that underline very well the twentieth-century conception on Mesopotamia.
To finalize, we include Chapter 9, named “Farewell Babylon, Farewell Nineveh,” which, in addition to summarizing some of the ideas presented throughout the work, addresses how the fall of Babylon and Assyria has always been associated with the excesses of their population and monarchs, and the consequent divine punishment that fell upon them. Through this final chapter, we also intend to highlight how Mesopotamia has always been presented in the cinema as the other, both from a cultural (expressing an implicit orientalism) and from a religious point of view (its polytheism opposing the European and American Judeo-Christian matrix). Cinema was, in fact, marked by these two perspectives: the Westernism that was in its blood and the idea of its salvific faith.
Notes
1 1 Vargas 2020, p. 94.
2 2 Jauss 1982, p. 21.
3 3 Martindale 2013, p. 174.
4 4 Martindale 2007, p. 298.
5 5 Idem, p. 301.
6 6 Hardwick 2003, p. 2.
7 7 Porter 2008, pp. 471–472.
8 8 By text we should understand any vehicle passible of conveying meaning, be it a book, a sculpture, or a musical piece. In the specific case of our book, the texts under analysis will be the films.
9 9 Apud, Jauss 1982, p. 21.
10 10 Burnett-Betsch 2016, p. 3.
11 11 Porter 2008, p. 469.
12 12 This book was preceded by Lorna Hardwick’s Reception Studies, published for the first time in 2003.
13 13 Hardwick and Stray 2008, p. 1.
14 14 Idem, Ibidem.
15 15 With the volume Receptions of the Ancient Near East in Popular Culture and Beyond (Garcia-Ventura and Verderame 2020).
16 16 Garcia-Ventura and Verderame 2020, p. 2.
17 17 Bohrer 2003.
18 18 Brusius 2012.
19 19 Malley 2012.
20 20 Regarding Reception on Mesopotamia, vide Garcia-Ventura, Verderame 2020, p. 2.
21 21 Porter 2008, p. 469.
22 22 Gadamer 2004, p. 197. About the idea of “chain of receptions,” vide Vargas 2020, pp. 94 and 96.
23 23 Hardwick 2003, p. 4.
24 24 Hardwick and Stray 2008, p. 1.
25 25 Martindale 2006, p. 2.
26 26 Idem, p. 11.
27 27 Idem, ibidem.
28 28 Rood 2013, p. 200.
29 29 Staiger 2000, p. 1.
30 30 Idem, p. 3.
31 31 Mayne 1993, p. 3.
32 32 Apud, Wyke 1997, p. 37.
33 33 Barta 1998, p. 13. About this question, vide also De España 2013, p. 45.
34 34 Biltereyst and Meers 2018, p. 22.
35 35 Aziza 2009, p. 81.
36 36
