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Gary Devore

~ archaeologist and author

Gary Devore

Category Archives: Film

Meat-Scenery

27 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by Gary Devore in A Murder of Crows on the Wall, Film, Hadrian's Wall, Pedius, Roman, Rome, Writing

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mystery, publishing, Rome, writing

 

butterfly

The penultimate scene of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), a far better piece of cinema than anything associated with Mel Gibson.  If you don’t know it, learn it.

In the 19th century, photography brought the carnage of the American Civil War home to the civilian population.  Photographers captured the torn and twisted bodies of anonymous soldiers strewn across battlefields, and those images were published in newspapers and journals to show the cost of a war that would go on to kill 2% of the entire population of the country.  The barbaric violence was put on full display and changed our national perception of death.

civilwarbattlefield

During the brutal trench warfare of WWI, photography, and also increasingly the moving image, documented horrible new forms of mass death men inflicted upon men.  Poison gas and the machine gun rendered killing impersonal.  The brutal slaughter, the bloody sundering of bodies without discrimination, horrified a generation of European men.

Now such graphic violence is masturbatory fodder for men (almost always men) playing a gory video game or watching a violent movie.  Especially a fucking Mel Gibson movie.

hacksaw-ridge-banner

Anonymous men in uniform get torn apart let and right in Gibson’s new film– and most of the time in “cool” graphic ways bordering on both the sadistic and acrobatic.  Unnamed soldiers are “disposable people” and their cinematic suffering is presented without any real thought or comment other than a voyeuristic pleasure inversely proportional to any audience’s sense of compassion.  These torn-apart bodies are dehumanized on the screen (especially the non-Christian Japanese).  They are background meat-scenery.  They are not protagonists.  They are not actual humans with thoughts and emotions, or anything the camera is willing to linger on except their blood, viscera, and gore.  These men are mute but for their screams.  In the larger narrative, they don’t matter because the camera only objectifies their anguish.  The film perversely revels in their messy deaths.  Their only role is to convey whatever pious, cruel, muddled message Gibson’s harping on now (jonesing for some sort of professional comeback without, you know, actually doing any real contrition to deserve it).

This lack of compassion, or at least the failure to apply it uniformly, is a tiresome hallmark of Gibson’s directorial work.  It is also a theme in the novel I just finished.  I’ve written a murder mystery set in the ancient Roman world– a brutal world Gibson would have felt at home in.  But I didn’t want to just present corpses for my detective, already cold MacGuffins simply representing puzzles to be deciphered.  I wanted to explore what it meant to be a compassionate man in that time who understood on a deep level that there really are no “disposable people,” and only our immature selfishness deems them so.  My main character, Gaius Pedius, learns every life has value.  He realizes that every man who dies on a battlefield (or is cut down by a murderer) is the subject of his own tragedy, his own subjectified reality.  Pedius’ investigations are not just a search for justice, but a forceful rejection of men like Gibson (who exist in every age) and their bloodthirsty nihilism.

death-meleager

I’m assembling the final draft now and getting ready to begin the protracted process of querying agents to shepherd it toward publication.  Along with hopefully being an enjoyable, amusing mystery novel, I hope A Murder of Crows on the Wall can also be, in its small way, a compassionate, Humanistic counter to our modern American trend toward dehumanization and cruelty.  And anything else Gibson puts up on the screen.

 

Torture and the Ancient Romans

14 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by Gary Devore in Film, Rome, torture

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Film, Rome, torture

romepre
A new article of mine about torture and its (changing) depiction in films about the ancient Romans has been published on The Awl: Now We Are Rome: Ancient Roman torture on film, and modern American torture in the news

I look specifically at “The Sign of the Cross” (1932), “The Fall of the Roman Empire” (1964) and HBO’s “Rome” (2005 & 2007). I also discuss the history of torture both in Rome and the US, and specifically about our troubling representation of torture in movies.

New Pompeii Show in London: an elusive, ever-changing quest

05 Sunday May 2013

Posted by Gary Devore in Art, Pompeii, Satyricon

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art, pan, Pompeii

Pan and the Goat

But then a sculpture such as that of Pan making love to a goat plunges us back into darkness and uncertainty, and makes the chasm of two millennia feel as abyss-like as ever. We will never be able fully to comprehend what the sculpture meant to the Romans who first saw it. Where we see smut or rape, perhaps they saw comedy or even tenderness. All we can say with certainty is that their attitudes towards sex and violence differed radically from ours. Understanding the past is an elusive, ever-changing quest.

from the review by Alastair Sooke on the BBC site.

Satyricon 19 – Scene XIII: Encolpius The Husband

14 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by Gary Devore in Film, Satyricon

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Film, satyricon

(Previously – Satyricon 18 – Scene XII: Encolpius Married)

19aThere is another fade out to denote time passing on the ship, and when the camera returns, snow coats the deck (really fake polystyrene).[1] Also visible is a jagged anchor (unrealistic but suggestive of what we recognize as an anchor) and a large square apparatus made of wood and copper. The production designer meant this to represent the huge mirror the inventor Archimedes famously built during the siege of Syracuse in 212 BCE to focus and burn Roman ships with the rays of the sun.[2]

19bAs the journey drags on, the non-slaves listen to a singer accompany a lyre. It is not entirely clear, but according to the script this is Lichas, completing his transformation into “the next Giton”. Encolpius has been saved from a life of servitude, but is still separated from his original beloved, Giton. The younger man uses his secret language hand signals on a sailor who is massaging his knee, which plunges Encolpius into gloom.

19cIn a shot that closes this short scene, the audience at the recital looks at the camera. The wealthy passengers are near, and in the distance the sailor/soldiers are arranged in a box resembling a frame. Artificiality continues to be imposed upon the scenes.

(Up Next: Satyricon 20 – Scene XIV: Lichas Murdered)

——-

[1] Hughes, Eileen (1971), On the Set of Fellini-Satyricon (Morrow), p. 189.
[2] Ibid., p. 187.

Satyricon 18 – Scene XII: Encolpius Married

13 Saturday Oct 2012

Posted by Gary Devore in Film, Satyricon

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Film, satyricon

(Previously – Satyricon 17 – Scene XI: Encolpius Confined and Pinned)

18aIn the novel, Encolpius’ sea voyage was meant to evoke Odysseus’ travels.  In Homer’s tale, Odysseus angered the sea god Poseidon and was repeatedly shipwrecked in his attempt to reach home.  Encolpius had angered the fertility god Priapus and embarked on a voyage of his own to placate the divine power.

In Fellini’s film, once Lichas has claimed him by defeated him in a wrestling bout, he marries Encolpius.  However, Lichas interestingly inverts his conqueror’s role and becomes the wife in the arrangement.  This mirrors the relationship between Encolpius and Giton in the film, where Giton the younger partner is routinely feminized.  Therefore, the next “partner” of Encolpius takes on a feminine appearance as well.  Fellini may have made Lichas act this way to continue his fascination with “weird sexuality”, or may have been showing another construct that is accepted in the world of the film (and antiquity) but would be considered strange for most of the modern audience.

Continue reading →

Satyricon 17 – Scene XI: Encolpius Confined and Pinned

12 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by Gary Devore in Film, Satyricon

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Film, satyricon

(Previously – Satyricon 16 – Scene X: Encolpius Captured)

17aSoon, Ascyltus is showing his reconciled friend how to entertain himself during the journey, since Ascyltus is all about seeking pleasure. He shows Encolpius a spy hole in the wall of their hold, a wall where Fellini artfully arranges almost naked bodies in boxes to further suggest the idea of confined men.

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Satyricon 16 – Scene X: Encolpius Captured

11 Thursday Oct 2012

Posted by Gary Devore in Film, Satyricon

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Film, satyricon

(Previously – Satyricon 15 – Scene IX: Eumolpus’ Bequest)

16aIn the previous scene, an overhead shot showed Eumolpus in the final moments of his speech.  Once silence, except for the wind, descends, Encolpius receives an overhead shot, but we notice that it is different.  It is horizontal (Eumolpus’ was vertical), light appears at the top (Eumolpus was completely in shadow), and it is immediately clear that it is a location shot (the previous scene was obviously staged in a studio).  This marks our transition into another chunk of the narrative, another chapter in Encolpius’ adventures where he is kidnapped and put aboard a ship.

In the Petronius novel, after some more quarreling over Giton, Encolpius and Ascyltus reconcile and they, along with Eumolpus, plan to make a journey somewhere (section 99ff.).  There is a break in the surviving text and suddenly the characters are on a ship.  Fellini has preserved the disjunction in the text on the screen, although he allows a roughly-woken Encolpius to be, like us, momentarily confused as to what is happening.

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