Filming Ancient History
by Anna Henningsgaard
According to an ancient etymology, the word image should be linked to the root imitari. Thus we find ourselves immediately at the heart of the most important problem facing the semiology of images: can analogical representation (the ‘copy’) produce true systems of signs and not merely simple agglutinations of symbols? Roland Barthes, ‘Rhetoric of the Image’
In this passage, Barthes questions the legitimacy of an image-based language. The field of linguistics approaches and legitimates the signified relationships between text and truth, but the semiotics of images is a younger, less academically recognized field. Images communicate values more ambiguously than traditional texts, and are often problematically interpreted as carbon copies of reality as opposed to a unique system of representation. Barthes concludes that literal images are denoted while symbolic images connote, and in combining literal and symbolic imagery, visual medias such as film can engage as texts. This is a useful point because it emphasizes, firstly, that images represent a framed and manipulated perspective of reality and secondly that this manipulation can be encoded as a language.
However, encoding imagery with clear meaning is complicated, especially when the meaning is a reinterpretation of existing texts. Images and film communicate differently from a written text. For example, a written account can create a specific scene without mentioning background aspects that are irrelevant to the plot, while the frame of a filmed image often includes extraneous background symbolism. A book must describe simultaneous events in a sequence while a movie can capture many details and actions within a single shot. Books are often divided into chapters of varying lengths, while films are expected to follow certain timed structure. Because the information is structured so differently, there is a fundamental distortion in translating a written work into film. This distortion, or remediation, also carries significance, and its encoding becomes part of the new narrative.
As a figure whose story has been translated into every medium of communication, it is interesting to follow how the narrative of Alexander the Great has been reconfigured at each of these distorting moments of remediation. I am specifically interested in looking at how the story has been warped from the academically legitimate texts of Arrian and Curtius into film. What are the goals of these films, and how do these goals affect the portrayal of Alexander? Does this re-encoding communicate the narrative in a new or unique way that is academically valuable, or are they merely reflections of modern pop culture?
Media Theory & Classics
Media theory interrogates the space between two mediums. This mediation does not necessarily involve technology or human communication: Marshall McLuhan uses the example of a window screen mediating the space between a room and the outdoors. Any intermediary, or mediation, between multiple spaces, influences the perception of all the spaces involved. The discipline of Classics looks at defining a pure history based on establishing and interrogating historically legitimate sources. One problem with this is defining legitimacy, which calls back to the study of mediated relationships. Any original document is infused with its biases of perspective and limitations of medium. Thus from a media studies perspective, “historical truth” is a social construct, a privileging of mediated information based on a set of academically supported qualifications.
By taking into account the absence of a definitive historical truth, it is possible to interrogate the goals and objects of perception. In admittedly defining rather than discovering historical reality, media-savvy historians can consciously and self-reflexively manipulate the way that we perceive events. As history is constantly being interpolated through a changing modern perspective, a study of this process can allow for a more honest evaluation. However, as historians seek to define the legitimacy of “pure history”, they often limit their set of established academic tools. A historical novel published by a reputable university press is indisputably history. A film, on the other hand, is more problematic.
While this may not have been important in an age where written text dominated academia, the infiltration of new media and new perspectives into the historical discipline challenges the traditional historical narrative. As the form in which a narrative was documented came to define the literary genre of history, the distinction between medial form and historical reality grew fuzzy. Now that films, hypertexts, games, and novels all claim some adherence to historical truth, it is problematic to insist strictly upon a single format of literature as history.
Filmic versions of classic texts are undoubtedly problematic. As a literary text is translated into new mediums, the narrative must be conformed and adapted. In the case of film, storylines must be adjusted, colors and movement inferred. These choices can reflect the biases of the context in which the film is produced, but they can also communicate a large conglomeration of assorted research. Because of this, I assert that if the film is careful and aware of these distorting moments, certain filmic devices can serve to enhance the understanding and representation of academically useful historical narrative.
Arrian and Curtius
Two of the major surviving accounts of Alexander the Great were written hundreds of years after his death by Arrian and Curtius. Both of these accounts are different in nature and purpose, but they act to support one another.
Arrian’s account portrays Alexander as a positive, heroic figure and focuses on his military and moral excellence. It portrays his corruption and fall as a cruel implement of fate and a consequence of Persian influence. It goes into great detail of military battles and does not mention the more fantastic Alexander stories such as the Gordian Knot, and because of this it is understood to be the preferred historical text.
Curtius, on the other hand, wrote a tale of Alexander following in the sensationalist tradition of Cleitarchus. He vamps up popular stories like the Gordian Knot and the Page Conspiracy. W. Tarn said of Curtius that, “he seems to have no interest in his subject, save that it enables him to show what a clever man Q. Curtius Rufus was” (pg. 14, intro). He accentuates both the narrative and anecdotes with sweeping generalizations like, “an excess of possessions invites great losses” (76), “ nothing exercises greater control over the masses than superstition” (73), “no power which one gains by a crime is of long duration” (238), and “it is true indeed: luxurious living and base cruelty are not mutually exclusive” (237). He portrays Alexander as cruel and lustful, often returning to themes of drunkenness and the exotic.
As Arrian wrote after Curtius, he clearly chose to disregard his account in favor of the memoirs of Ptolmey, which were later lost. These two accounts are both flawed as historical sources. They were written hundreds of years after Alexander’s death, when already there were many conflicting histories of Alexander. Their primary sources are unclear and fragmentary. They conflate numerical figures, pitting tiny Macedonian forces against logistically impossible multitudes of Persians.
However, these two written accounts represent the major sources that historians look to for legitimate accounts of Alexander. These books, as flawed as they may be, have come to represent historical truth. Perhaps due to the virtue only that they survived while more direct accounts, such as Ptolmey’s, did not, these texts have established the Alexander narrative in two solid and supported veins and serve to reinforce modern reinterpretations.
Any legitimate modern revisiting or remediation of the Alexander narrative goes back to these two texts and either privileges one or attempts to reconcile them both.
In the Footsteps
In his documentary “In the Footsteps of Alexander”, Michael Wood follows Alexander’s journey from Macedon through what are now Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. This mission takes place in 1997, with Taliban forces actively invading Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s forces battling UN troops in Iraq and Iran. Wood embarks on what he describes as a pioneering journey, with a goal of charting, for the first time, Alexander’s entire path. However, not far into the film he redirects his attention and goals. Wood discovers a new narrative within the spaces Alexander inhabited, both in local stories and in his own sense of personal connection. The film claims to “journey across 2000 years and 16 countries”. The concept of Wood traversing through Alexander’s spaces, explicitly connotes a transcendence of time and space. In a bizarre way, this claims to be a film not just about but of history.
Wood appropriates Alexander’s character and life to tell the story of his own journey. By using his own body to document the movements of Alexander he claims to capture a true, firsthand legacy of Alexander on film. Even the title “In the Footsteps” connotes a direct, almost paternal connection between Wood and Alexander. His body actually stands in for Alexander’s body—one example of this is takes place in the first segment when he leaps from a boat into the sea, describing Alexander’s gestures and his own impression of the cold water as we watch him plunging through it. It becomes pretty clear that Wood wants to be Alexander, and his filming a modern Alexander story seeks out the locations where Alexander is still a real specter. On his website he describes sleeping "under the stars in places where mothers still tell their children 'Go to bed or Alexander will get you'".
He legitimates his historical claims by constantly referring to the texts of Arrian and Curtius. He takes up every opportunity to read aloud from the texts or quote obscure statistics. There are a few scenes in which he is simply sitting in his tent, reading aloud from one of the texts. There is a sense that there is some significance to this that cannot be communicated by reading the books ourselves. He is there, and by seeing him in this place, aware of its historical significance, we are supposedly gaining a unique insight into Alexander. In doing this he claims to add to the legacy of Arrian and Curtius, creating new source material to the Alexander narrative. What’s more, this source material is unique to the medium of film and would lose its power as a book.
Oliver Stone’s Alexander
The new Oliver Stone movie Alexander uses these same texts to legitimate its claim. One of its selling slogans is “The greatest hero of them all was real”. While it incorporated elements from other successful modern movies, such as Gladiator, Lord of the Rings and Troy, it also stirred up controversy by departing from the norm. For example, the movie defined Alexander as bisexual and assigned the actors’ accents according to what the director Oliver Stone considered parallel ethnic groups in modern society. All the Macedonians were assigned an Irish/Highland brogue so that audiences might subconsciously place them in proper relation to the more formal, well-educated Greeks.
The film also attempted to gain legitimacy by obsessing over details in the Arrian and Curtius texts. The battle of Gaugamela, which takes 30 minutes of screen time, was organized by classics and military scholars to follow the real battle as closely as possible, recreating the number of curls in Darius’ beard and a specific texture of red dust cloud ('Alexander, the Movie', Mendelsohn). Many passing plot and character references seemed to take place just so that audiences familiar with Alexander’s story would recognize that the writers knew the texts extensively. When characters were necessarily relegated to extras in the film, Alexander's character still calls to them by name, without introducing or revisiting them. This is just confusing for people who do not know the story and does not enhance an understanding of Alexander or his companions for historians.
Despite its painstaking attention to detail, the movie fell short in many places, not the least of which was the box office. It glossed over whole segments of plot with an aged Ptolmey’s narration. It omitted such beloved (albeit grandiose) fables such as the Gordian knot, Alexander’s dual sacrifice at Ilium, and his travels through Egypt. It failed Arrian in its lack of coherence and Curtius in its lack of spectacle.
Oliver Stone’s film is a good example of an agglutination of symbols and references, unattached to any cohesive plot or goal regarding Alexander. This film tried to glean legitimacy from historic detail, astound audiences with glamour and sex, and make a modern social commentary at the same time. This compromise crippled its success in any category. If its goal in translating Alexander into film had been to communicate his allure, for example, it could have taken the most seductive selections from Curtius. If it meant to make a modern social commentary, it should not have addressed the issue of homosexuality so skittishly, having Alexander express his love to Hephaestion and then staging the fully nude wrestling match between Alexander and Roxanne.
Conclusion
Here we see two filmic accounts of Alexander, both trying to legitimately append the texts of Arrian and Curtius. Wood does so in acquiring the story as his own and establishing himself as both an expert and admirer of Alexander. Though his quest is at times ridiculous and the symbolic undertones of self-proclaimed Alexanderhood less than academically respectable, his film acknowledges these shortcomings within itself, defines its objective audience as popular, and is thus a successful and coherent production. This clip is a good example of one of the film's less academic moments:
Stone, on the other hand, attempts to cinematically reproduce the Alexander narrative. As flawed as the film turned out, a few scenes did faithfully and richly reenact both the facts and aesthetic of Alexander’s life. Where the Hollywood-influenced appendage chopping can be separated from the carefully researched alignment of troops, the viewer is allowed to visualize the historical Gaugamela in new and potentially profound way.
In both cases, the clumsiest aspect from both a historical and entertainment perspective was the appropriation of modern political issues into the Alexander discourse. Wood was easier to swallow because within the movie he explained the process of cultures appropriating Alexander as a symbol. This justified his own appropriation of Alexander’s qualitative statements about conflict zones, politics, and geography. Stone’s film is more disappointing. The film trivialized its commitment to detail and entertainment in order to awkwardly broach the subjects of homosexuality and world domination in modern terms.
These films are flawed representations of history, but they also communicate the Alexander narrative in a way that has not been previously possible. As an interrogation of the spaces that Alexander directly influenced, Wood’s film captures a history and aesthetic with a visual power that is impossible to represent in a written text. Oliver Stone’s film corrupts the story, but it creates a colorful and inspiring atmosphere. The glowing signifiers of the filmic language hold unique potential for the representation of history.