Review of The Epic Film : Myth, Meaning and Mass Entertainment

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Cinema, Literary & Linguistics, Media & Communications, Popular Culture, Social History

The Epic Film: Myth and History, Derek Elley [re-published 2014, originally published 1984]

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The onset of the 21st century seemed to herald a revival in the epic genre in film. Large-budget “Sword-and-Sandal” movies of the early 2000s such as Gladiator and Troy, labelled “Neo-epic films” by cinema critics, have reinvigorated the genre. At the same time, a new blockbuster phenomenon in the shape of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series of films, padded with wall-to-wall distinguished British (and Commonwealth) actors, have extended the epic genre, and in the case of the ‘Rings’ cycle, given the flagging “Sword-and-Sorcery” sub-genre a new lease of life.

The author’s approach to his subject is a somewhat scholarly one, although the book also remains accessible purely on an entertainment level. Elley begins by making clear the distinction between the heroic and the epic … “heroes alone do not make an epic,” other ingredients especially the “all-important mythic quality” is needed to elevate the narrative to a higher plane, the ‘supra-human’ dimension. The author then proceeds to trace the transition from the epic in its original, literary form to its cinematic form.

The book concerns itself to a large extent with the type of epic film much in vogue in the fifties and sixties, drawn from the history and mythology of antiquity (Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia). Right up front I’d have to say that I think that the author is inclined to take the genre a bit too seriously. The epic movie, in whatever phase or incarnation it takes, has been something difficult to be especially serious about! By definition the standard form of the epic has tended to be characterised by an indulgence in excess – grandiosity, vulgarity, basically everything 8XL in size! Mention the epic film and people often think of monumental Hollywood flicks like Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Cleopatra, and the like. Conspicuous consumption the order of the day, so much so so that it could be suggested that epic films should be primarily seen as a kind of parody of themselves.

The Epic Film spends a good deal of time examining another type of epic movie, the Continental Sword-and-Sandal variant of the species which further takes away from the serious side of the genre’s purpose. The “Sword-and-Sandal” as the book points out is also known in the trade as a Peplum movie …from peplos the type of ancient Greek robe or tunic worn by women (as modelled below). Strictly speaking ancient men wore chitons, a lighter, simpler and usually shorter garment than the feminine peplos, but the name ‘Peplum’ stuck for the epic movie!

This sub-genre had its heyday between the late 1950s and the mid 1960, usually set in Ancient Greece or Rome and often filmed at Cinecittà in Rome (for a time the world’s film studio of choice) and/or in the campagna in Italy or Spain. The elements of the genre are well-known and entirely formulaic: heroic but one-dimensional gladiatorial strongmen, a bevy of immaculately beautiful but defenceless heroines in sexy, ultra-mini peplums, a paper-thin storyline appallingly scripted and only coincidentally unrecognisable as history, incoherently edited, low budgets, sloppily shot with atrociously wooden acting and haphazardly dubbed into English.

Footnote: the popularity of the Italian Peplum provided career change opportunities for body builders as many would-be actors like Steve Reeves, Mark Forest and Kirk Morris, made the transition from the bodybuilding game to become leads in Sword-and-Sandal sagas. Interestingly, many of the Italian musclemen-stars took Anglo-sounding names in an attempt to make them more appealing to the American market, thus the well-known Sergio Ciani became on screen the aptly named “Alan Steel”.

Steve Reeves’ phenomenally successful Labors of Hercules (1957) was the springboard for a spate of strongman-centred Pepla. From the mid sixties a number of the Peplum strongmen made the switch to Spaghetti Westerns which spectacularly filled the void when the popularity of the Sword and Sandal costumers began to wane. Spaghetti Westerns utilised the same device of giving its Italian stars American-sounding names, the most famous of which were the ‘Trinity’ duo, Terence Hill and Bud Spencer.

Whilst acknowledging the limitations of many of these B-grade epics Elley soberly proceeds to unearth all manner of meaningful cinematic aesthetics from the likes of Samson against the Moon Men, Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon, etc, etc. The author describes his text somewhat grandly as an extended essay on defining “the epic form in its filmic context”. The definition in the book that took my eye is attributed to Charlton Heston, “There’s a temptingly simple definition of the epic film: It’s the easiest kind of picture to make badly” (Chuck should have known – he appeared in his fair share of dud epics in his career).

Strongman ‘Maciste’

Elley points out that spectacle is the most characteristic trademark of the epic genre, and that trait is (or was) synonymous with Hollywood. Although we connect the Pepla of that era with Italy and the Continent, we tend to associate the wider phenomenon of epics with America. The author quotes Peter Ustinov to good effect: “I’ve always thought that only the Americans can do Ancient Rome pictures. Both cultures have the same kind of relaxed, rangy pomp. Both have exactly the same kind of bad taste”.

⇧ Transparent marketing attempt to capitalise on the famous ‘Ben-Hur’ chariot race but failing to meet those expectations

The book is adorned with some 88 pictures in glorious black-and-white and these may hold for some readers the greatest interest. Amongst these is a still from the 1964 movie The Fall of the Roman Empire, a long range shot of a Late Roman frontier fortress under attack – complete with a modern Italian villa and two parked fiats close by in the background. Another revealing picture contains a close-up of the cleft-chinned Kirk Douglas as the fabled Ulysses, his heroic countenance somewhat spoiled by the clearly visible but unsightly appearance of Kirk’s varicose veins! Or equally entertaining, is the photo of Victor Mature as Samson, teeth gritted, valiantly wrestling a ‘savage’ lion which has the look of having been recently rejected by a local LA taxidermist.

Many of the era’s epic films that came out of Hollywood tend to be prone to snatches of excruciatingly bad dialogue. The book provides a wealth of atrocious quotes from the genre. Savour if you will these little vignettes which run the gamut from overblown dramatic(sic) intensity to inane absurdity:

“When you speak of destiny, this is something I must at last believe” (delivered with exaggerated emphasis), Genghis Khan, in Genghis Khan (1965).

“Love and hate are horns on the same goat”, Rune woman, in The Vikings (1958).

“At one time, when you were a little fella, you were always asking questions!”, Joseph, to Jesus, in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

This last line of dialogue, tinged with more than a touch of folksy mid-western Americanism, could easily have rolled from the mouth of failed actor-turned-US president, Ronnie Reagan, whilst whittling wood on the back-step of his Californian ranch.

By focussing on 50s and 60s Hollywood and Italian epics Elley largely neglects the first resurgence of the Sword-and-Sorcery film which took place in the late 70s and early 80s … the Star Wars cycle, Excalibur, Conan the Barbarian, etc (all made before The Epic Film‘s original publication in 1984). Other (admittedly minor) sub-genres of the epic such as the Sinbad saga films (The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, and so on) and the Swashbuckler/Pirate films don’t get a guernsey at all … although the Sinbad movies could just as well be categorised as adventure-fantasy films, rather than strictly Sword-and-Sorcery ones.

Elley’s study of the epic film genre is informative and instructive in so far as it goes. Ancient Greeks and Romans, Biblical figures, barbarians and Norsemen, all get a good run, but Elley’s historical survey cuts off at the end of the Dark Ages. I’m left with a tinge of regret that he didn’t take a more expansive approach in the book to include the grand and occasionally grandiloquent epic movies made about legendary Britons of a later era like Arthur and Robin Hood, as well as the more modern epics like Lawrence of Arabia or Dr Zhivago and even extend it to examples of the genre as diverse as 2001 a Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes.

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In Praise of Terse Verse: Limericks, Clerihews and Modern Haikus

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Literary & Linguistics

The expression of poetry in shorthand form has always managed to garner a measure of popularity with the general reading public – especially in comic vein and done well. The shortness of the poetic form makes its more accessible when you line it up against the more self-consciously serious stuff…formal, academic poetry with its proclivity towards the denser, often seemingly impenetrable forms of expression. Variety is the watch-word with informal poetic forms, be it the contemporary verse of ‘Shrink Lit’ and modern haiku poems, or the older verse genres such as the epigram, the limerick, nonsense verse and the clerihew.

The essence of the poetic epigram was aptly captured by (Samuel Taylor) Coleridge, “a dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul”.

Example:

“Little strokes / Fell great oaks”

(Benjamin Franklin)

The limerick’s Irish genesis can be traced back to the 18th century and the Maigue Poets of County Limerick. Structurally, the limerick uses a stanza of five lines with a strict rhyme scheme of AA-BB-A. It embodies the spirit of nonsense verse and the modern variant sometimes tends to use obscene themes for humorous intent. Limericks have also been a vehicle for popular children’s nursery rhymes – eg, Old Mother Hubbard, Little Miss Muffet, Hickory Dickory Dock, Jack-and-Jill, etc. etc.

The best-known serial exponent of the limerick was Edward Lear who popularised it in A Book of Nonsense in the mid 19th century (although he himself did not use the term ‘limerick’). Lear’s limericks contain an inherently circular logic to them….a typical, absurdly inane example of his limericks is:

There was a Young Person of Smyrna
Whose grandmother threatened to burn her.
But she seized on the cat,
And said “Granny, burn that!
You incongruous old woman of Smyrna.”

The clerihew has also been a popular verse-style with its emphasis on simplicity of form and use of whimsical themes. It’s inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, began penning verses using the eponymous device as a schoolboy. One of Bentley’s most celebrated clerihews goes:

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I’m going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls,
Say I’m designing St. Paul’s.”

As demonstrated, a clerihew is a form of light verse usually consisting of two couplets (four lines), with lines of uneven length and irregular metre, the first line usually containing the name of a famous or well-known person [www.dictionary.com]. It employs a specific rhyme scheme, AA-BB, and it’s intent is humorous or possibly gently chiding. Less charitably the clerihew has elsewhere been described as “rhyming doggerel”.

Alice in Wonderland

Another of Bentley’s playful clerihews has fun with the author of the brace of universally popular Victorian classic books Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass:

Lewis Carroll
Bought sumptuous apparel
And built an enormous palace
Out of the profits of Alice.

Of Ivanhoe author Sir Walter Scott, Bentley wrote:

I believe it was admitted by Scott
That some of his novels were rot.
How different was he from Lytton
Who admired everything he had written!

And of colonial novelist H Rider Haggard:

Sir Henry Rider Haggard
Was completely staggered
When his bride-to-be
Announced, “I AM SHE!”

Later, Bentley’s own son, Nicholas, had a go at the clerihew:

Cecil B. de Mille,
Rather against his will,
Was persuaded to leave Moses
Out of “The War of the Roses.”

Over the decades a number of famous writers have turned their hand to composing clerihews including GK Chesterton and WH Auden. Auden’s interest was engaged sufficiently to publish a collection of clerihews in a book called Academic Graffiti – a couple of his best efforts are:

Henry Adams
Was mortally afraid of Madams:
In a disorderly house
He sat quiet as a mouse.

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Louis Pasteur,
So his colleagues aver,
Lived on excellent terms
With most of his germs.

Footnote: the clerihew, despite (or very possibly because of) its juvenile shallowness and nonsensical nature, has had an ongoing relevance as a teaching tool in engaging primary schoolchildren in the art of poetry-writing.

The Haiku Society of America defines the haiku as “a short poem that uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition”. In English it’s structure consists of three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables respectively (17 syllables in all).

The modern haiku has struck a cord in America more than anywhere else, though a great many of the experimenters in this form have tended to not adhere to the established 17 syllable/three line criteria. Outstanding US poets and writers who have dabbled in the haiku include illuminati like Robert Frost, ee cumings, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Richard Wright and Wallace Stevens, and a swag of the leading 50s and 60s beat poets including those Beat Generation icons Kerouac and Ginsburg.

In its modern, western incarnation, the haiku has had no greater recent proponent of the genre than David M Bader. The NYC attorney turned haiku humorist, had the Western Canon of literature firmly in his sights in a book first published in the mid-2000s as Haiku U: From Aristotle to Zola, 100 Great Books in 17 Syllables.

Bader’s slim, little volume churns out one condensed gem after another as he scythes through the literacy classics of the ages with irreverent fun. Moby Dick, American fiction’s time-honoured allegorical classic of the ultimate fight to the death between man and cetacean, is given a topical environmental twist by Bader:

Vengeance! Black blood! Aye!
Doubloons to him that harpoons
the Greenpeace dinghy.



Homer’s ancient classic poem equivalent of the modern “road movie”, the Odyssey (all 24 books of it) is hilariously condensed into the form of an unfavourable weather bureau forecast:

Aegean forecast –
storms, chance of one-eyed giants,
delays expected.

In similar style, Bader takes the reductive handle to Jane Austen’s seminal novel of early 19th century English manners Pride and Prejudice, stripping the stellar text back to reinvent it in the form of a newspaper classified ad:

Single white lass seeks
landed gent for marriage, whist.
No parsons, thank you.

Bader’s take on Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is a triumph of ubër-alliteration. With a clever play-on-words he economically ‘nails’ the odious persona of Humbert Humbert in 17 syllables:

Lecherous linguist –
he lays low and is laid low
after laying Lo.

Bader also produced an earlier book [Haikus for Jews: For You, a Little Wisdom] in which he set down examples of distinctively Jewish Haiku – characterised in the main by recourse to a self-deprecating and at times a downbeat, cynical brand of humour.

Five thousand years a
wandering people – then we
found the cabanas.

“Through the Red Sea
costs extra.” Israeli movers
overcharge Moses.

Jewish triathlon —
gin rummy, then contract bridge,
followed by a nap.

 

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Shrink Lit: the Great Tomes of Literature Writ Very Small!

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Literary & Linguistics

Some time around the early 1980s certain scribes started to bring the merits of “shrink lit” to the attention of literary publishers and by extension to the public … four centuries, I might add, after the Japanese developed the Haiku style of written expression. I raise the nexus because I can’t help think that the traditional and venerable style of Haiku was one of the influences motivating the rise of shrink lit. Other more contemporary catalysts have included the whole technological communications revolution and the increasingly busy lifestyles of people, etc, etc.

Shrink lit, as the term implies, reduces often famous and highly vaunted literary works to concise snatches of light verse – usually comprising around 8 to 12 lines of rhyme. Long and complex novels, plays and poems, are subjected to a radical scaling back process. The writer’s brief is to pare the book back to the bone whilst preserving the essence of the story and hopefully the spirit of it as well (this is the theory at least!). Great for readers with short attention spans I say!

In the early 1970s one of the pioneering manifestations of this light-hearted form of imitation was an American book called Shrink Lits: Seventy of the world’s towering classics cut down to size, by Maurice Sagoff. This work took on the task of economising many of the best known classics of fiction such as Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, Dante’s Inferno, Shakespeare and The Hobbit. The gruesome and brutal Old English epic poem Beowulf is rendered thus:

Monster Grendel’s tastes are plainish.
Breakfast? Just a couple Danish.
King of Danes is frantic, very.
Wait! Here comes the Malmo ferry
Bring Beowulf, his neighbor,
Mighty swinger with a saber!

The inclusion of The Great Gatsby, Lolita, Moby Dick, Catcher in the Rye, Babbit, Rip Van Winkle and Portnoy’s Complaint, et al, in Sagoff’s collection gives the book a distinctly American flavour, and presumably an American readership.

I seem to recall that Anthony Burgess in the Eighties published a list of the best (ie, “AB’s best”) Anglophone novels written since 1939. ‘Clockwork’ Burg provides an appraisal of each selection infused with his characteristic English snobbery and acerbity….the works are by authors of a certain homogeneous nature – a collection not surprisingly top-heavily British and overwhelmingly masculine.

Australians, being the reactive/adaptive creatures they are, weren’t long in assembling their own home-grown version of shrunken literature – Oz Shrink Lit: Australia’s classic literature cut down to size, edited by Michele Field. Oz Shrink Lit has proved to be popular over the years with uni students who are English majors, especially those assailed by a sense of oppression at having to tolerate an undemocratically chosen syllabus which necessitates tediously long and sometimes just tedious novels.

‘The Harp’ shrunk into ‘Down & Out in Surry Hills’

Field presents us with sixty-seven Aussie books, each one cut down to a handful of summarising verses. The sheer range of texts is impressive, among the shrunken classics are The Man From Snowy River (outrageously punning on ‘regret’), The Harp in the South (could be retitled “An Ode to the NSW Housing Commission” once given the Oz Lit downsizing treatment), A Woman of the Future, Summer of the 17th Doll and Puberty Blues. Juxtaposed against these Australian classics are harder to categorise entries in the collection: Clive James’ Unreliable Memoirs and, somewhat bizarrely, the Sydney White Pages.

The book comes in a handy, appropriately reduced size, 148mm x 90mm – just right for slipping through recession-shaped holes in coat pockets, losing on the bus, etc. Each verse is decorated with charming illustrations by that effervescent trans-cis Pacific cartoonist, Victoria Roberts. Victoria is really good at giving the countenances of her creations that look of crumbled anxiety, perturbed faces conveying a sense of harassed humanity in the onslaught of a perplexing post-technological age. Not only that, she is extra good at drawing kangaroos and dogs!

Oz Shrink Lit is the sort of book that would make any self-respecting dilettante salivate, offering as it does (the mirage of) instant erudition in an economy of words. Anything that can make Classics Illustrated look complex deserves our sincere admiration. For a particular tasty sample of Oz Shrink Lit’s humorous, condensed versification we need go no further than it’s take on Peter Carey’s Bliss, a quirky, modernist novel in the fabulist tradition (later translated to the screen in a vivid, memorably offbeat 1985 movie adaptation):

Always selling, always nice,
Ad Man Harry snuffs it twice,
Wakes to find he lives in Hell,
Now his wife does adverts well.

A False Ring: Mythmaking in the name of Tourism in Hogsback, Eastern Cape

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Biographical, Bushwalking, Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture, Travel

Hogsback, 18 kilometres from Alice in South Africa’s Eastern Province, is just about the coldest place I’ve been to in sub-Saharan Africa, barring the mountainous Malealea region of Lesotho. In fact it is one of the few places in South Africa where it actually snows!

Auckland village, above M&C Falls (ECP) Auckland village, above M&C Falls (ECP)

⋄The topography of Hogsback is characterised by dense forests, an extended mountain range (the Amathole Mountains), lush, verdant hiking trails (a veritable hiker’s nirvana) and teeming rivers, magnificent waterfalls such as the Madonna and Child Falls and the 39 Steps Falls, the Arboretum (a garden comprising a wide selection of international trees including a grove of Californian Redwoods over 100-years-old).

The 39 Steps

⋄In the period since JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books became famous, many acquainted with this part of Eastern Cape have drawn attention to the physical similarity of Tolkien’s fictional Middle Earth with the town of Hogsback. Director Peter Jackson could as well have chosen Hogsback for the setting of “The Rings” series of movie epics had he not been a native of a country (New Zealand) with a landscape equally evocative of Middle Earth.

Hogsback 39 Steps 009Even before “The Lord of the Rings” movie series some Hogsback locals did their best to capitalise on a handful of tenuous links with the celebrated Lord of the Rings author. The story goes, the ‘Rings’ books were inspired by the magical, enchanting physical form of Hogsback. The proponents of this theory point to the fact that Tolkien was born in South Africa (in Bloemfontein, Free State). The thesis loses traction when probed more closely. The famous author and avid philologist left South Africa at the tender age of three, never to return and having not ever visited Hogsback.

Tolkien as a young boy

⋄Myth-making about the Master Mythologist:
Despite this inconvenient fact, it hasn’t stopped the local tourist industry from milking the supposed nexus at every turn! ‘Lords of the Rings’ themes pervade the town and its surrounds, driven obviously by an effort to exploit the enhanced fame of Lord of the Rings. Tolkienesque references are scattered throughout Hogsback in the names of lodgings, shops and outdoor activities – Rivendell, Gandalf’s Rest, Merrell Hobbit Trail Runs, The Shire, Lothlórien, The Rings Hardware and Bottle Shop, Hog and Hobbit, Away with the Fairies Backpackers, River Running, Camelot Cottages, etc, etc. The association can probably be traced back in 1947 with the establishment of Hobbiton-on-Hogsback, an outdoor recreation and education centre for disadvantaged kids just off the R345 as you come into the Hogsback township. The “fantasy and fairies” theme is underscored in the numerous pieces of town sculptures depicting these motifs.

The Tolkien Middle Earth connection is often emphasised in print, such as in the following: “The romance of Hogsback, is recognised by reading The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) which seems to capture the special atmosphere of the unspoilt Hogsback forests and of a time when peace will rule the world” [Trevor Webster, The Story of Hogsback, www.hogsback.com].

Hogsback 39 Steps roadTalking to the staffer in the Hogsback Visitors Information Centre, she was unequivocally dismissive of the Tolkien LOTR nexus. So the lingering myth clearly wasn’t emanating from the likes of her! She also warned me against buying the primitive wooden toy horses and zebras in the street from members of the local Xhosa community. The street sellers, looking cold and dismal in the freezing conditions, were only asking R2 an animal, but the Visitors Centre lady explained that they are not properly gazed and sealed, making them a prohibited item to export out of RSA. Apparently a local artisan/sculptor had offered to glaze the artworks for the community at minimal cost so that they could charge more for the figurines, but his offer had not been taken up.

So, how plausible is the link between “Middle Earth” of Lord of the Rings and the sleepy, little village of Hogsback? Clearly, as stated above, JRR Holkien had no direct association with Hogsback, having left South Africa at age three. Information on Tolkien’s life however, suggest the existence of an indirect link. One of Tolkien’s sons, whilst in the Royal Air Force during WWII, was stationed at Hogsback and did correspond regular with the author with his reflections on the locale. These correspondences from Tolkien Junior included sketches and descriptions of the Hogsback ambience [Ibid.].

The Hog’s back!

⋄Accordingly it is quite feasible that, at the very least, these glowing accounts of the mystical, magic-like countryside provided background material for the physical world of The Lord of the Rings trilogy published in 1954/55. The parallels existing present a strong case to say that the description of the Mirkwood forest in the Rings cycle may conceivably have been inspired from Tolkien having read the war-time accounts of the place provided by his son.