Ancient Language and Cinema

I've been thinking about how films set in antiquity use language, and how the decision about which language to choose is made.

There are three films which I think take a good approach:

• Nostos, Il ritorno, dir. Franco Piavoli (1989)
• The Eloquent Peasant, dir. Shadi Abdel Salam (1970)
• Barbaren / Barbarians, from Netflix (2020)

Barbaren's choice to use modern German for the Cherusci (and the other Germanic tribes), and Latin for the Romans would already have been interesting and pleasant to watch, but I especially liked the interplay between Latin and German used by Arminius - his Latin is perfect, and yet careful, slightly formal; it invades his German subtly. If you really listen, rather than just reading the subtitles, you'll notice that as the series goes on, his code-switching collapses a little, producing heart-breaking little sentences like "Hast du familiam?" (spoken to a Germanic soldier) - changing to Latin for the word family. They dealt with language in a relatively simple way, but the inclusion of these kind of details were very nice, in that they contributed, not to the plot, but to the characterisation. 

The Eloquent Peasant, on the surface, takes a similar approach. In 1977, Qussai Samak noted that Egyptian cinema of the time was still beholden to a particular 'literary approach', dominated by the Western tradition, while mentioning Abdel Salam's work as a promising exception [x]. This makes the director's adaption of a poem from the Middle Kingdom, written in about 1850 BC, compelling - it shows a desire to achieve something new with deeply old material. Abdel Salam uses a translation of the Ancient Egyptian into Arabic for the story; this transposition of the language is probably the necessary choice. Just one year before, Abdel Salam had made The Night of Counting the Years, about the tension between Ancient Egyptian culture and the British colonial presence, and this next film of his can be seen as addressing many of the same issues. In Egypt's post-colonial context, the decision to revisit his country's ancient history, and to choose such a socially-aware text as the medium of this exploration, works so well partly because of the use of modern Egyptian Arabic / Masri. Although this is partly obscured for me by my dependence on my English subtitles, I have to imagine that this would have made the film radically immediate to the contemporary audience. The adept and confident use of language by a peasant like Khun-Anup culminates in a cultural and (!) economic victory - he is awarded the property of those who have wronged him. Some western scholars argued against repatriation of artefacts on the basis that ancient and modern Egyptian culture were too far removed for their return to be meaningful - Abdel Salam refutes this succintly by the sheer power of this film to suggest a clear relation between the socio-economic injustices of the Middle Kingdom and the injustices of twentieth-century colonialism. His use of Arabic is intergral to the political message, as it alters the original material in order to clearly address his contemporary situation.  

My favourite treatment of the 'problem' posed by setting modern films in antiquity, however, is Nostos. For the sparingly-written dialogue, Piavoli uses a 'fictional Mediterraean language' - actually a mixture of Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit.* He could reasonably expect the (Italian) audience to understand much of what is said, through a combination of prior familiarity with the story, an instinct for Latin, some shared vocabulary with Greek, and the carefully presented contextual evidence, but the most interesting part is what is not immediately understood. The complex nature of the language suits Odysseus / Ulisse, and further, obliges you to listen to the rhythmic, intonational and emotional content of what is said, rather than being satisfied with the more every-day communication of information. The director explained (presented with apologies for any mistakes in the translation):

Tutte questi momenti essenziali della vita, li ho fatto senza volerlo dire con parole esplicite e un seguito sempre, questa mia linea cui ho usato anche la lingua umana, anche il linguaggio umana nel suo valore fonico, nel suo valore connotativo, perciò ha usato una lingua che richiamasse appunto l'antica lingua greca.

I wanted to recreate all of these essential moments of life without saying anything in explicit words, and I always followed this course (/style) of mine in which I used both human language, and human speech in its phonic value, in its connotative value, that's why I used language which recalled Ancient Greek. [x]

The human voice is also frequently overwhelmed by environmental sounds, those of the wind or the waves. Only the most important words are allowed to stand out - Odysseus repeating the word mater, or oikos, for example. Oscar Lapeña Marchena writes that there is "a sense of merging with nature: a primitive, basic, nature where man is just one part of a whole, along with the sea, the earth, the flowers, or the moon," and that the film is "pre-Homeric," taking place in an "atemporal world", beyond historicity [x]. There is a lot that we don't understand about the Homeric poems, which have lists of names belonging to men and tribes we have no other record of, and hints at deeper and older mythology than we find in other sources, and which sometimes feature words from a pre-Greek, 'divine', langauge, whose translation we will probably never find out - Piavoli re-introduces a language barrier to remind of us this, but also to make us focus on the orality of the poetry. The words themselves are absorbed by the background sounds, as the human body is often isolated and obscured onscreen. Piavoli privileges the image (rather than dialogue) throughout, though a poet himself, suggesting an effacement of language - with only the return of Odysseus to Ithaka and his reunion with Penelope promising an end to the sense that speech is an insufficient or inferior part of reality.

Incidentally, one film which is crying out for some fun use of old(er) languages is Valhalla Rising, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn (2009). It's one of my very subjective favourites, and I think they could have done some very interesting things with the languages of their setting. It's a film which makes a point of creating silence, and even when the characters do speak, there's very little exposition or truly vital information in the dialogue - perfect for a little experimentation. What with it being set in Cataibh / Súðrland in 1000 AD, the possibility of including speech in Norn, Old Gaelic, and Latin feels like a missed opportunity to confuse the majority of the audience and make me personally very happy.

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* Piavoli, F. (2011), 'Nostos, il ritorno e il mito di Ulisse', in G. P. Brunetta (ed.), Metamorfosi del mito classico nel cinema, pp. 131-137, cit. Oscar Lapeña Marchena 'Ulysses in the Cinema: The Example of Nostos, il ritorno' in Rosario Rovira Guardiola (ed.), The Ancient Mediterranean Sea in Modern Visual and Performing Arts: Sailing in Troubled Waters, (London, 2018). [x]

x

I'm writing my dissertation on the luxury debate during the French Enlightenment, specifically as it played out in the military sphere during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV; I really like the topic because it allows me to bring in a lot of Classical sources, which I'm familiar with from my undergraduate. One of the interesting little side points I've noticed is an ambiguity about what, exactly, Francophone writers meant by the word décadence in this time period.

Decadence is derived from the Medieval Latin decandentia, decay, lapse, or decline. Already in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (if not before?), it was associated with civilisational - and hence military - downfall, usually that of the Roman Empire. My dictionary of Middle French (which deals with the language up until 1500), describes décadence as "tait de tomber en ruine, état d'une construction qui tombe en ruine" - to fall into ruin, the state of a construction which is falling into ruin." [x]. I guess this could be either material or moral ruin. In my primary sources, I consistently see decadence defined in terms of une chute, a falling-off from a previous state of virtue, which for me always recalls the Ancient Greek term καταστροφή (katastrophḗ), which literally means 'a downturn' (c.f. katabasis). This is great for my argument that luxury was still very inescapably seen as a negative force into the eighteenth century (even among the milieux of Versailles' court and Baroque aristocrat-warriors).

I know that by the late nineteenth century, decadence became almost synonymous with the word 'luxury', thanks to the Aestheticism artistic movement - but if I could link the usage of the terms 'catastrophe', 'decadence' and 'luxury' it would be a great way of arguing for limitations to the arguments of some recent scholarship which points to the 'demoralisation' of the term luxury during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (my main argument is that writing about and from the French military sphere was more conservative, and an exception to the trends noticed elsewhere, while still being influenced by other Enlightenment ideas). Nearly all the usage examples on TLFi [x], however, are sourced from the first half of the nineteenth century, which is just a hundred years too late for my purposes ...