experience,” and the film fits well within this logic.29 Reception through a medium like cinema should consider the results from both psychological and sociological factors that cannot be isolated.30 On the other hand, what matters is not only the immediate relationship of the viewer with the film projected on the screen, but also, and above all, the relationship that lasts after the first has left the cinema room (a relationship that could be extended not only through cognitive memory but also through different vehicles that adorned the film, the stories and its stars, such as magazines and cinema literature).31 For Pierre Sorlin, the analysis of an historical film would have two possible paths for a historian: first, to understand how the contemporary audience saw itself through the representation of the past; and second, to study the way history and its conscience were transmitted and perceived in the modern world.32 After all, “all films move forward to the present and ‘back to the future’ when they re-present the past.”33 The way the past is felt in the present, as well as the way the present sees the past, thus become two insurmountable topics of exceptional importance for the study that we present here. In sum, we cannot understand the past narrated in an historical film without understanding the sensibilities inherent to the society that produced it. Film mutates into much more than a piece of art or even an ideological tool; it transforms itself into a product of social and cultural meaning “triggering audience’s imagination.”34
There are, therefore, several aspects to consider when analyzing the reception of the ancient Near East through a vehicle such as film. Aziza listed some characteristics to be taken in consideration: 1) the period that is narrated; 2) the date of the film’s production and the country producing it; and 3) the moment when the film is viewed.35 This last point interests us mainly with regard to the film’s visualization at the time of its premiere, in the year when it was first released. Since that point onwards it may obviously be the target of a multiplicity of interpretations. Thus, the viewer of today will not react in the same way when watching Intolerance (1916) as would the viewer of the 1910s. Bearing this in mind, our analysis proposes to contemplate mainly the film as a product of its own time and heir to the psychological and sociological conditions of its first direct readers/viewers.
0.2 Why Cinema? What Cinema?
Cinema should be seen as a universal language capable of annulling the differences and obstacles inherent to socio-cultural disparities. According to John Philip Hewak, “the cinema was conceptualized as an ensemble of codes, some specific to the cinema, others belonging to the culture at large, each comprised of minimal units not necessarily discrete or arbitrary, and not necessarily identifiable. These are the signs of the cinema.”36 In fact, it was widely discussed whether semiology could be applied to cinema, as it is to linguistics, and whether or not cinema contains a sign. Although we do not intend to linger on this issue, we should mention that Umberto Eco claimed that any message has an implicit code and, therefore, the message of cinema could be understood as a sign or as a set of signs.37 Since semiotics is the study par excellence of the signal, it is applicable to cinema. The spectator, upon entering the cinema room, while watching the film, would receive this set of messages, this panoply of signs, which he perceived, interpreted, appropriated, and reflected upon, and which revealed his sensibilities. By collecting these signals and interpreting them, the cinema viewer became a participant in a comprehensive and collective process of deciphering,38 thus actively contributing to the cinema’s codes reception.
In this perspective, cinema does not differ from other arts and languages that preceded it before it became dominant as a form of public art during the twentieth century. Martin Winkler recalls the words of J.B. Hainsworth when he stated that “at the beginning of literature, when heroic poetry reached society as a whole … society listened; in the twentieth century society views.”39 The author recalls the importance of cinema as a new medium and criticizes, in the likelihood of Rood after him, the view spread by Charles Martindale that reception and Reception Studies could not be trivialized by choosing vehicles for their analysis considered to be less intellectual, such as films. Naturally, the semiotic analysis of a cinematographic creation anchored in antiquity can bring to light aspects related to the influence of that same antiquity and its products in contemporary societies. For Winkler, a film should indeed, as discussed previously, be considered as a visual text, “capable of the close analysis that classical philologists are trained to carry out. I call this classical film philology.”40 The same can be said, naturally, in relation to a Near Eastern film philology, which intends, as Winkler claims, to establish a correlation between texts and images, in which the readers “view the ancients as important and even fundamental contributors to an ever-evolving and never-ending cultural continuity.”41 After all, cinema is the main heir to the textual narrative.42 And in addition to inheriting a literary tradition, cinema is also, as we shall see, the successor to a series of technologies, conventions, and artistic practices, which it received, retransmitted, and innovated.
We live in a world in which we are constantly overloaded with images, in which more and more people receive information, and especially information about the past and antiquity, through cinema and television, through films (of all sorts, comedy, epic, romance), television series or documentaries. Therefore, the greatest source of historical knowledge for most of the population is undoubtedly the visual media.43 To prove this fact, it would be enough to do a search on Netflix’s search engine by the word “antiquity.” The media services provider Netflix has become the largest entertainment/media company, with 182.8 million subscribers worldwide.44 Thus, the results are quite expressive and revealing: between series and films, we find recent titles like Roman Empire (2016), Noah (2014), Troy: Fall of a City (2018), Spartacus (2010), Rise of an Empire (2014), or older ones such as Gladiator (2000) or 300 (2007). Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) inclusively ushered in a new era in cinema on antiquity that seems to have come to stay, at least judging by the recent remake of Ben-Hur (2016) by Timur Bekmambetov or the new reconstitution of the duel between Moses and Ramses II portrayed in the film by Ridley Scott, Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014). Although Mesopotamia seems to have been long forgotten by the cinema (the last film that makes a reconstitution of the ancient land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates is the Italian Ercole contro i tiranni di Babilonia (1964); this if we exclude Alexander (2004) which portrays Babylon but during the Persian era), the truth is that antiquity has become once again a topic appreciated by filmmakers as it had been in the early days of cinema and in the post-Second World War era.
Taking this into account it is possible to reiterate that cinema, as a universal language, became, during the twentieth century, the biggest stage to transmit ancient history and one really appreciated by society. Its importance is also proved by the fact that in the beginning of this century and up to the 1970s, cinema was the most important spectacle activity; television subsequently dethroned films and the cinematographic experience in large theaters. And so, the question arises: is it possible to put history on film without losing its more professional nature?.45 In fact, to answer this question we must understand what history actually is and if it is possible to transform written discourse (in other words, the written narratives – with beginning, middle, and end – that historians produce based on their analysis) into visual discourse? This is considering that, in reality, when we speak of narratives written by historians, given their linguistic and genre constraints, we are considering mere verbal fictions – a simple reconstruction of the past and never the past itself. Thus, what really needs to be highlighted is the possibility of transforming verbal fictions into visual fictions, the possibility of transforming a written truth into a visual truth, which does not necessarily have to be the same or in conflict with the first.46 History, although based on techniques and methodologies that use facts and documents, is never but interpretation, is never but reconstruction. So, going back to the starting question: is it possible to transform written speech into visual speech? If we consider that each vehicle contains its own mechanisms, its own tools, its own semiotic codes, its forms of representation, its unique added value
