The Late Antique City in Movies

In the general context of the filmic reception of classical antiquity, relatively few movies have been dedicated to the late antique period. In comparison to adaptations which took themes from ancient mythology, Greek history, the Roman Republic or the Principate, movies which are entirely set in the late Imperium Romanum or at its borders are extremely scarce. ¹ Excluding very few exceptions, which will be presented later, the attention is drawn only to specific characters—such as Attila, who dominated for decades this quite desolate field. ² The reasons for this scarcity are very different, and can here only be shortly listed. ³ The neglect of these materials does not lie in a lack of filmic potential. It must be found in a generalised image of late antiquity, which is connected in popular history with concepts such as decadence, decline, loss of civilisation and culture, effeminate and powerless emperors, very powerful women and barbarian invasions. All these aspects are negatively characterised and need therefore a specific context to be ‘translated’ into film in an efficient and relevant way. Not less relevant is the fact that late antiquity represents one of the most critical phases in the history of Christianity (with its evolution to a State religion and the genesis of the ‘Imperial Church’). This process is attached to the loss of the ideals of early Christianity, the connection of Christian clergy with a worldly power, the institutionalisation of a Church ‘of power’ dominated by men and the growing intolerance towards all other religious forms. These aspects are often considered as a sort of ‘fall’ of the Christian church, and therefore represent an extremely delicate topic to handle. The dominant Christian character of late antiquity in popular history is also problematic, or not so interesting, for an increasingly secularised 20th-century society, unless this material can be used in actualisation to refer to modern problems of the Christian church and religion, or generally of religious fanaticism. Agora (Amenábar, 2009) is the most famous example, but this is an important issue also in King Arthur (Fuqua, 2004). ⁴ In any case, the pagan world of classical Greece, or of Rome in the Republican period and in the Principate, offers the film industry an undoubtedly ‘more comfortable’ background. These contexts are seen as more exotic, further away from modern Western society and, accordingly, much less ‘loaded’ with modern problems and mentalities in connection with religious issues—Christianity, in these contexts, is ‘pure’, ‘archetypical’ and, most of all, persecuted, as well as not involved in political, social or economic power. ⁵ Furthermore, late antiquity had already been much less present than other ancient periods in 18th- and 19th-century historical painting, which represents a central source for early film. ⁶ Additionally, literary elaborations of this period—which also feature as a central source of inspiration for early cinema—are quite scarce (one of the few exceptions is represented, as we will see below, by Felix Dahn’s Ein Kampf um Rom, 1876).