'Reel History is a hoot! Alex von Tunzelmann writes with a blend of playful wit and delicious snark' Greg Jenner
From ancient Egypt to the Tudors to the Nazis, the film industry has often defined how we think of the past. But how much of what you see on the screen is true? And does it really matter if filmmakers just make it all up?
Picking her way through Hollywood's version of events, acclaimed historian Alex von Tunzelmann sorts the fact from the fiction. Along the way, we meet all our favourite historical characters, on screen and in real life: from Cleopatra to Elizabeth I, from Spartacus to Abraham Lincoln, and from Attila the Hun to Nelson Mandela.
Based on the long-running column in the Guardian, Reel History takes a comic look at the history of the world as told through the movies - the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly.
'Reel History is a hoot! Alex von Tunzelmann writes with a blend of playful wit and delicious snark' Greg Jenner
From ancient Egypt to the Tudors to the Nazis, the film industry has often defined how we think of the past. But how much of what you see on the screen is true? And does it really matter if filmmakers just make it all up?
Picking her way through Hollywood's version of events, acclaimed historian Alex von Tunzelmann sorts the fact from the fiction. Along the way, we meet all our favourite historical characters, on screen and in real life: from Cleopatra to Elizabeth I, from Spartacus to Abraham Lincoln, and from Attila the Hun to Nelson Mandela.
Based on the long-running column in the Guardian, Reel History takes a comic look at the history of the world as told through the movies - the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly.
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Overview
'Reel History is a hoot! Alex von Tunzelmann writes with a blend of playful wit and delicious snark' Greg Jenner
From ancient Egypt to the Tudors to the Nazis, the film industry has often defined how we think of the past. But how much of what you see on the screen is true? And does it really matter if filmmakers just make it all up?
Picking her way through Hollywood's version of events, acclaimed historian Alex von Tunzelmann sorts the fact from the fiction. Along the way, we meet all our favourite historical characters, on screen and in real life: from Cleopatra to Elizabeth I, from Spartacus to Abraham Lincoln, and from Attila the Hun to Nelson Mandela.
Based on the long-running column in the Guardian, Reel History takes a comic look at the history of the world as told through the movies - the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781782396475 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Atlantic Books |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 997 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Ancient World
The history of the world presented in cinema stretches back hundreds of millions of years. Animated dinosaur adventure The Land Before Time (1988) follows an orphaned Apatosaurus through the Cretaceous, 145–66 million years ago; the Ice Age films (from 2002) recount the adventures of Sid the sloth and friends, between 110,000 and 12,000 years ago. Sid the sloth was not, as far as we know, a real historical character.
Some filmmakers have had a go at caveman stories, though these are limited by their lack of language – and by the assumption that cavemen of all sorts were painfully literal and a bit dull. Jean-Jacques Annaud's Quest for Fire (1981) employed A Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess to write a grunty language for its Neanderthals, and zoologist Desmond Morris to advise them on how to shuffle around and pick each other's fleas off. Prehistoric flop The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986) subtitled a war-painted, Cro-Magnon Daryl Hannah.
The Birth of a Nation (1915) director D. W. Griffith was fascinated by prehistory, telling caveman tales in shorts Man's Genesis (1912) and Brute Force (1914). In the latter, cavemen were pitted against dinosaurs. The earliest fossil remains of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, date from around 200,000 years ago, during the Palaeolithic era – millions of years after the last dinosaur. Yet pitting plucky little humans against an angry T. Rex has often proved too tempting for filmmakers to resist.
1,000,000 BCE
One Million Years B.C. (1966)
Director: Don Chaffey • Entertainment grade: D • History grade: Fail
Dates: 'This is a story of long, long ago, when the world was just beginning,' intones a voiceover over images of swirling clouds and burping lava. Well, no. The film is ostensibly set in 1 million years BC, which would put it over 4.5 billion years after the world was just beginning. If by 'the world' it means hominid society, it's not quite so far out: only 1.5 million years or so. It opens with the Rock Tribe, a band of loincloth-wearing, warthog-eating cavemen. They are clearly Homo sapiens with slightly mussed-up hair. Finding genuine Homo erectus would be a casting challenge – though one does occasionally wonder about the exact species of Mickey Rourke – but Homo sapiens actors without suitable prosthetics date the film to 200,000 BCat the earliest.
Fauna: A caveman, Tumak (John Richardson), is exiled from the Rock Tribe, and wanders the land encountering local wildlife. In 1 million yearsBC, you might expect a mammoth, a sabre-toothed tiger or a glyptodon. Instead, Tumak hears a roar, and there looms before him a really big iguana. Finding genuine dinosaurs would be another casting challenge, but a really big iguana does not look like a dinosaur. It looks like a really big iguana. Or a normalsized iguana chasing a tiny caveman. Things get even sillier a few minutes later, when a really big tarantula shows up. It is four times Tumak's height. The biggest true spider ever to walk the earth is the goliath birdeater. It's still knocking around in South America and, while finding one in the bathtub would be alarming, even it is no bigger than your hand. Fortunately, Ray Harryhausen's beautifully animated stop-motion dinosaurs are on their way to rescue the film's visual credibility. Real dinosaurs, of course, died out 65 million years ago. Which makes them something of an anachronism in 1 million BC.
Culture: Exhausted, Tumak collapses on a beach, conveniently situated in the territory of the Tribe of Hot Blonde Women Who Wear Furry Bikinis. These folk are more advanced than the Rock Tribe. In addition to two-piece swimwear, they have invented embroidery, conch shell trumpets, cave-painting workshops, bouffants, false eyelashes, spear aerodynamics, laughing at foreigners, and the small-scale manufacture of boho costume jewellery. At one point, a turnip is lifted triumphantly aloft. Presumably they must have foraged for it rather than actually working out how to farm, which would catapult them forward into the Neolithic. Meanwhile, the Rock Tribe sit around banging sticks together, thumping each other and grunting, while a nubile young woman is forced to do a sexy dance. So all they seem to have managed to invent is patriarchy.
Survival: For all the Hot Blonde Tribe's innovations, they are still prey to an Allosaur, a Rhamphorhynchus and an angry turtle the size of a bus. If you're thinking this last may be from the same pet shop as the iguana and the tarantula, you're underestimating Harryhausen. It's Archelon ischyros, a gigantic testudinate of the late Cretaceous. In life less gigantic than it looks here, admittedly, and again 64 million years out of date – but it was, in some sense, real. Loana (Raquel Welch) points at it, shouting, 'Archelon! Archelon!', which is clever of her, seeing as it was named by palaeontologist G. R. Wieland in 1896.
Verdict: Harryhausen's dinosaurs are well worth a look, but the rest of One Million Years B.C. will bore the furry pants off anyone more advanced than a Neanderthal.
*
After the Ice Age, early civilizations began to form. By around 2500 BCE, there would be more for later filmmakers to work with: cities and trade networks, complete with forms of writing, numeracy, transport and exchange, across Mesopotamia and the valleys of the Nile and Indus rivers.
According to American and European cinema, ancient Egypt was populated and ruled by white people, though the occasional black actor is allowed a non-speaking role: usually as a spear carrier or leopardskin-clad trumpeter. The English rose complexion of Jeanne Crain passed for fourteenth- century BCE Queen Nefertiti in Italian adventure flick Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile (1961), opposite Vincent Price as a high priest. Nefertiti's husband, the pharaoh Akhenaton, was played by Michael Wilding in The Egyptian (1954), with other Egyptian roles filled by Jean Simmons, Gene Tierney, Peter Ustinov and Victor Mature. Even in the more recent Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), almost all the speaking parts were occupied by conspicuously white people.
2560 BCE
Land of the Pharaohs (1955)
Director: Howard Hawks • Entertainment grade: C– • History grade: D–
Khufu, or Cheops, was an Egyptian pharaoh of the fourth dynasty. He is remembered for building the Great Pyramid of Giza in the twenty-sixth century BC, the only surviving wonder of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Casting: Khufu returns from a war, rich with treasure and slaves. In 1955, Hollywood knew how to stage this sort of thing: scores of marching trumpeters, drummers, pipers and maraca players, hundreds of cavalry camels, and almost 10,000 extras supplied by the Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser. This spectacle made an impact on the then thirteen-year-old Martin Scorsese: 'When I first saw it as a kid,' he said, 'Land of the Pharaohs became my favourite film.' Unfortunately, when Khufu descends from his litter, he is Jack Hawkins. Clipped, uptight and as English as a rained-off cricket match, Hawkins is hopelessly miscast as the passionate, obsessive, despotic Khufu. The only Hollywood actor who could have pulled this off at the time was Marlon Brando.
Tyranny: Khufu's people labour for years on a pyramid for him. Eventually, they start getting ticked off. There's a nod to Herodotus here, who wrote of Khufu that his fixation on pyramid construction brought his people 'every kind of evil ... [he] bade all the Egyptians work for him ... they worked by a hundred thousand men at a time, for each three months continually'. The film leaves out the part where Herodotus says Khufu came 'to such a pitch of wickedness, that being in want of money he caused his own daughter to sit in the stews' – or brothels.
Romance: Khufu's lands end up so poor that some can't pay their annual tribute. One – Cyprus – instead sends Princess Nellifer (Joan Collins). It takes Khufu ages to work out that Nellifer doesn't like him, even after she has him stabbed. 'So it was you!' he gasps. 'Yes!' she hisses, with the same delicious venom she will later bring to Alexis Carrington Colby. 'You can know now! I planned it all, and it's all turned out as I hoped it would!'
Dialogue: 'I don't know how a pharaoh talks,' director Howard Hawks admitted later. 'And [screenwriter and Nobel laureate William] Faulkner didn't know. None of us knew. We thought it'd be an interesting story, the building of a pyramid, but then we had to have a plot, and we didn't really feel close to any of it.' If they'd all followed Collins's lead and stopped taking it so seriously, Land of the Pharaohs still wouldn't have been any good – but it might have been fun.
Verdict: Next time, less fourth dynasty; more just Dynasty.
*
Many of Hollywood's ancient Egyptian movies take inspiration from the biblical story of Moses, painting the pharaohs as proud and despotic. Historians are divided on whether Moses actually existed in the form that has been passed down in religious texts. Some suggest his stories may have been inherited and rewritten from even older traditions, or made up entirely. If he was real, he is usually dated to some time between the fourteenth and thirteenth century BCE.
Moses is popular with filmmakers nonetheless, though Ridley Scott's 2014 epic Exodus: Gods and Kings, starring Christian Bale, drew critical snark for its pompous tone. Hollywood films like Exodus: Gods and Kings are also largely responsible for sustaining the belief that Jewish slaves built the pyramids. It makes for a great cinematic visual, but the famous pyramids at Giza, Sakkara, Abu Sir and other major Egyptian locations were mostly built between the twenty-seventh and twenty-fourth century BC – hundreds of years before any Jews arrived in Egypt and at least a millennium before Moses. The Bible claims that Jewish slaves built the cities of Pithom and Rameses, not the pyramids, and many modern historians and archaeologists dispute the idea that the pyramids were built by slave labour at all.
1250 BCE
The Prince of Egypt (1998)
Director: Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, Simon Wells • Entertainment grade: A • History grade: C
Family: To save her son from an Egyptian cull of Hebrew baby boys, Moses's mother seals him in a basket and floats him off down the Nile. The pharaoh's queen plucks him out of the waters. The story bears a glancing similarity to the legend of Sargon of Akkad, a Sumerian king of the twenty-fourth century BC (around a millennium before Moses). Sargon was sealed in a basket by his mother and floated off down the Euphrates, arrived at the palace of the goddess Ishtar, was adopted, and grew up to become king.
Class: Moses is brought up thinking he's Egyptian. This isn't obvious from Exodus, but it does create a satisfying character arc for him – he'll go from spoilt brat to a leader of humanity. The film invents a daredevil race through the city, with Moses and his brother Rameses sending slaves scuttling into doorways as they gallop around in their shiny gold chariots, guffawing with princely entitlement. At one point, they knock the nose off the Great Sphinx of Giza, which appears to be under construction. In real life, the Sphinx was built at around the time of Sargon of Akkad. Its nose probably wasn't knocked off until around three millennia after Moses: possibly by British or French troops in Napoleon's time.
Disease: Pharaoh won't free the slaves, so God sends plagues. There are lice, locusts, frogs, hail (upgraded to massive bolts of fire plummeting out of the sky), dead cows, boils, and a new and horrifying eleventh plague of people bursting into song. Or maybe that's just because this is a musical. As is the Book of Exodus: there's a song in chapter fifteen. The plagues were not recorded in Egyptian texts, but this doesn't mean they didn't happen. Egyptian royal inscriptions tended to stick to the happy stories.
Escape: Moses leads the Hebrews to the Red Sea, which whooshes back to allow them through. It's superbly done – the shadow of a whale shark looming through the parted sea is a nice touch – but not particularly accurate. Scholars have pointed out that the Hebrew text of Exodus refers not to the Red Sea but to yam sûf, the 'Reed Sea', possibly a marsh or lake. A bit small to accommodate a whale shark.
Mythology: There's a triumphal final shot of Moses's face as he comes down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments. In Exodus, after meeting God, Moses's face radiated light, forcing him to wear a veil. Owing to another mistranslation, 'radiated light' appeared in the Latin Bible for centuries as 'grew horns'. There's even a statue of Moses by Michelangelo complete with a lovely set of horns. Prince of Egypt's Moses has a face that is neither glowing nor horned. Overall, though, this is a stunning film – certainly the most watchable cinematic version of the Moses story yet.
1250 BCE
The Ten Commandments (1956)
Director: Cecil B. DeMille • Entertainment grade: C+ • History grade: C-
Sources: DeMille himself strolls on screen at the beginning of the film, to explain how he has filled the gaps in the biblical story of Moses's life with the work of historians such as Josephus and Philo. He claims they had access to ancient documents, which have since been destroyed. In reality, there's no evidence that there were ever any such documents, and both Josephus and Philo were writing over a millennium after Moses's death. Other historians of that era, including Tacitus, treated Moses as a legendary figure.
People: One of the reasons that putting a date to Moses's life is so difficult is that the Book of Exodus isn't specific about which pharaohs it describes. The film plumps for Seti I as Moses's adoptive father and Rameses II as his brother, though there's a slip-up when Moses congratulates Seti on his victory at Kadesh, a battle actually fought by Rameses. As for the love triangle between Moses, Nefretiri and Rameses, that doesn't appear in scriptures or history. Bad luck, Josephus and Philo: DeMille also filled the gaps in Moses's life from a stack of pulp novels.
Technology: The film won an Oscar for rising to the special effects challenges of religious, rather than historical, imagery, most famously the pillar of fire and the parting of the Red Sea. But there's disappointment in store when Rameses refuses to listen to Moses's plea to let his people go, and Egypt is visited by ... four plagues. The other six are only mentioned in passing, because DeMille couldn't work out how to do frogs, flies, lice, boils, locusts or the death of livestock. These days, of course, it would be easy: just set up a camera outside the toilet block at the Glastonbury Festival.
Politics: 'Are men the property of the state?' thunders DeMille. 'Or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today.' In his analogy, the repressive pharaohs are the Soviets, while the brave Hebrews are the Americans. A historian may wonder with horror whether Moses is supposed to be Senator Joseph McCarthy. At the time of filming, one of the stars, Edward G. Robinson, and its composer, Elmer Bernstein, had been persecuted by McCarthy's investigations, and were in the process of being rehabilitated – a process mirrored by the redemption of Robinson's entirely fictional character, Dathan. DeMille was one of Hollywood's most prominent conservatives.
Verdict:The Ten Commandments is a fascinating historical film – not for what it says about Moses, but for what it says about Cold War America. 'Go!' commands Moses. 'Proclaim liberty throughout all the lands, unto all the inhabitants thereof!' The original line, attributed to God in Leviticus 25:10, has 'land' in the singular. It seems that didn't make the case for spreading American-style freedom and democracy clearly enough.
*
After the ancient Egyptians came the ancient Greeks. Special and visual effects technologies have limited cinema's efforts at translating Homer's possibly historical Iliad and mostly fantastical Odyssey to the screen, though there have been attempts. Kirk Douglas starred in Ulysses (1954), and Greek singer Irene Papas in Iphigenia (1977). Historians have mixed feelings about the extent to which the Trojan War actually happened, though it does match up date-wise with evidence of a city known to archaeologists as Troy VII, at Hisarlik in Turkey. Troy VII was burned to the ground in around the twelfth or eleventh century BCE, roughly the right date for Homer's war.
1250 BCE
Troy (2004)
Director: Wolfgang Petersen • Entertainment grade: D • History grade: D-
Scandal: In Sparta, King Menelaus holds a banquet for the Trojan princes, Hector and Paris. Paris sneaks off to make whoopee with Menelaus's wife, Helen. The next day, she runs away with him. This puts Menelaus in a bate, and gives his brother Agamemnon an excuse to start a war. 'Sparta was never my home,' Helen explains. 'My parents sent me there when I was sixteen, to marry Menelaus.' Actually, in Homeric tradition, her parents were king and queen of Sparta and it was her home. Helen herself chose Menelaus, a prince of Mycenae, to be her husband, and he gained the throne of Sparta by marrying her. This film is already a right old mess.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction,
1 The Ancient World,
2 Middle Ages Spread,
3 Renaissance Men (and Women),
4 Darkness and Enlightenment,
5 The Empires Strike Back,
6 Oh, What Lovely Wars,
7 Modern Times,
8 Living in the Now,
Index,
Acknowledgements,