Early Film Versions

1. Early Film Versions

2. Essential Filmography • Cleopatra (1912) Starring Helen Gardner, Charles L. Gaskill, Director • Black and white, silent • Also Known as Helen Gardner in Cleopatra • Cleopatra (1917) Starring Theda Bara, J. Gordon Edwards, Director • Black and white, silent • Based on the novel by Rider Haggard • Caesar: Fritz Leiber • Antony: Thurston Hall • Octavius: Herni De Vries

3. Filmography continued • Cleopatra (1934) Starring Claudette Colbert, Cecil B. DeMille, Director • Black and white • Grandiose, epic, and vintage Hollywood. Claudette Colbert stars as • the captivating and powerful Queen of Egypt in this classic Hollywood • film. When Julius Caesar, the leader of the Roman Empire, succumbs to • the charms of the sultry Cleopatra, he creates a scandal big enough to • shake the marble pillars of Rome. The ruler pays dearly for his romance, • for the outraged Roman Senate repudiates him and the fickle Cleopatra • decides to protect her interests by bestowing her affections on her former • lover's rival, Marc Antony. • Caesar: Warren William • Antony: Henry Wilcoxon • Octavian: Ian Keith

4. Filmography continued • Cleopatra (1963) Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, • Director • Color • A lengthy, sprawling and spectacular love story depicting Cleopatra's • manipulation of Caesar and Mark Antony in her ill-fated attempt to • save the Egyptian Empire. Film was cut from 243 minutes to 222 at the • time of its release. The most expensive film made (before Titanic in • 1997) due largely to overruns caused by Taylor and Burton's • tempestuous relationship on and off screen. • Antony: Richard Burton • Caesar: Rex Harrison • Octavian: Roddy McDowall

5. Plays on Film • Antony and Cleopatra (1974) Starring Richard Johnson and Janet • Suzman in a Royal Shakespeare Company Production • ColorCaesar and Cleopatra (1945) Starring Vivian Leigh, Gabriel Pascal, • Director • ColorA film adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's play, alleged to be one of • the most lavish spectacles of it's time. Brilliant cast, headed by Rains, • whom the critics lauded as "the best Caesar portrayal of our time."

6. Parody • Carry On Cleo (1964) Gerald Thomas, Director • Color • The Romans invade the wet and miserable Britain, and, among others, • enslave the cowardly inventor Hengist, and the fearless warrior Horsa. • In an attempt to kill the Roman Emperor Caesar at a Roman temple, • Horsa kills Caesar's enemies, but Hengist gets all the credit, and is made • Caesar's bodyguard. Meanwhile, Mark Antony, Caesar's best friend, • becomes besotted with the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra, but the only way • to achieve his heart's desire is to kill Caesar and Hengist. • Caesar: Kenneth Williams • Antony: Sid James • Cleopatra: Amanda Barrie

7. Travesty • Cleopatra (1999) Starring Leonor Varela, Franc Roddam, Director • Color, ABC TV miniseries • Cleopatra, the famed Egyptian Queen (Leonor Varela) born in 69 B.C., • is shown to have been brought by Roman ruler Julius Caesar (Timothy • Dalton) at age 18. Caesar becomes sexually obsessed by the 18 year old • queen, beds her, and eventually has a son by her. However, his Roman • followers and his wife are not pleased by the union. In fact, as Caesar • has only a daughter by his wife, he had picked Octavian (Rupert Graves) • as his successor. The out-of-wedlock son of Cleopatra is seen to be a • threat to his future leadership. Thus Brutus (Sean Pertwee) and other • Roman legislators plot the assassination of Caesar. Caesar's loyal • general, Marc Antony (Billy Zane), and Octavian then divide up the • Roman empire.

8. Cleopatra flops: why? • The 1934 version is not ranked as among the director’s best: • "Gorgeous optically but mentally weak…a handpicked audience was polite but not over-enthusiastic" (Variety). • The 1963 version was the most expensive film to that time. • It was poorly received by critics, almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox, did not recover costs until TV sale.

9. Mainstream Cinema as Economic Institution • Requires large investments. The risk of investments can be offset by predictability, and every large scale financial venture will find some way of balancing the two. • Mainstream cinema seeks predictability through the public’s prior acquaintance with: • Literary contents • Creative personnel (esp. producers, directors) • Performers. • Social and Cultural Levels • Depending on the level of investment, the ideas involved in any text for sale must be • Culturally conservative enough not to alienate a broad audience or • Culturally adventurous enough to constitute an incitement or • Both • Sex and violence constitute potential offenses but also potential sources of appeal. • Moral values constitute a counter-force.

10. The Cleopatra story and commercial risk • The story requires expensive pageantry--which is both a risk and an appeal. • Sexuality and violence may draw an audience but may also conflict with dominant moral values. • The story is pre-sold. • Well-known personnel help to guarantee return: • A producer or producer-director: DeMille, Mankiewicz • A female star: Colbert, Leigh, Taylor. • All of which make commercial failures more puzzling.

11. Who can play Cleopatra? • For economic reasons, Cleopatra should be played by: • A great beauty (aesthetic and sex appeal), • A great star (for commercial reasons), • A great actress (for commercial and narrative reasons)

12. Cinema and Ghosts • Goal of realism and eternity (mummy complex) • Early example: Fantasmagorie (18th c. France, projection of "moving slides" in a deserted chapel in a Capuchin monastery) • Some of these shows had Egyptological topics with images taken from the Description of Egypt; theaters also have coincidental similarities to a mausoleum or pyramid and original subject matter concerns raising the dead The Capuchin Crypt, Rome

13. Egypt and Cleopatra as “other” • In narrative films Egypt provides a convenient other: it is a foreign place and the gateway to other foreign places • Cinema also reflects society's fascination with Egypt and Cleopatra • Cleopatra is the ultimate vamp (a term common in the early 20th century): a woman who drains men of their wills and ultimately of their blood.

14. Theda Bara • It has been pointed out that her name is an anagram for "Arab Death" • Not her real name: • According to her studio, Theda Bara was born around 1892, in the shadow of the Pyramids, the daughter of an Italian artist and a French actress. Everyone knew from the start what nonsense this was; these stories were never meant to be taken seriously. • Film history books state that Bara was actually born in 1890, in Cincinnati, Ohio. • Yet this also turns out to be a myth: Theodosia Goodman was really born in Avondale (a wealthy, largely Jewish, suburb of Cincinnati) on July 29, 1885.

15. Theda Bara: biography • Unlike so many silent stars, Theda (a childhood nickname) had a happy childhood. Close to her parents and two siblings, she even went to college for two years  • She was also enamored of the theater, and dropped out of school (to her father's dismay) in 1905 to pursue an acting career. • Theda Bara did not have what it took to become a stage star. From 1905 through 1914 she labored in New York and in various travelling stock companies, but was never able to rise above playing bits on Broadway or supporting roles on tour. • She was already pushing 30 when director Frank Powell cast her as The Vampire in William Fox's film version of the Broadway hit A Fool There Was (released in January, 1915). •  Theda became an instant, overnight star with the release of the film, and saved the fortunes of the fledgling Fox Studios, which supplied her with a new family history (and past life) for each film role, and Theda played along. • Reporters played along and printed the interviews with a straight face, for the most part. • She wore a ring supposedly given to her by a blind sheik in whose family it had been passed down for more than 2000 years • Fox published a text in hieroglyphics apparently sent by a fan convinced that Theda Bara was the reincarnation of the most famous vampire in history. • Unfortunately, her Cleopatra film has been lost.

16. Theda Bara movie stills

17. More Theda Bara images

18. Claudette Colbert • Synopsis: • "Cleopatra" uses well-known historical facts to form the story's outline, but the contents are pure Hollywood fantasy. Cleopatra (Claudette Colbert), who is of Greek ancestry, is the Queen of Egypt in first century B.C. Powerful Rome threatens her kingdom, and to preserve it she takes first Julius Caesar (Warren William), then Marc Antony (Henry Wilcoxon) as lovers. But Octavius (Ian Keith) is dismissive of her charms, and vows to take Egypt as Rome's prize possession. • Colbert plays a flirtatious, scheming, pampered Cleopatra but puts more warmth into the role than Elizabeth Taylor. While not a household name today, she was one of the most famous and successful actresses of the 1930s and 1940s. • Caesar and especially Antony are cast as stupid, grasping egotists, giving their characters welcome if unintentional comic aspects. The cinematic tendency to depict Roman rulers as selfish and corrupt is present as well. Claudette Colbert

19. Cleopatra 1934 • "Cleopatra" was nominated for Best Picture, but settled for Best Cinematography (Victor Milner). It was also nominated for Best Assistant Director (Cullen Tate), Best Editing (Anne Bauchens) and Best Sound (Franklin Hansen). Despite the presence of DeMille, the 1934 version of "Cleopatra" cost one-fiftieth of its 1963 successor. • The master showman Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra (1934) is a modernistic 1930s costume spectacle that reshapes the Cleopatra story - the kind of film for which DeMille was best known. Unarguably, the Paramount Studios film is campy, grandiose and unreal and ludicrous historically - filled with DeMille's usual mixture of sin and sex. • Suggestive costumes adorn most of the female characters. The film's screenplay by Waldemar Young and Vincent Lawrence was based on an adaptation of historical material by Barlett Cormack. • The film is well known for its infamous barge scene on a set with silky draperies, falling rose petals, and dancing girls, Cleopatra is reclining aboard her mammoth floating bordello on the sea. After Julius Caesar's death, vengeance-seeking Marc Antony confronts the temptress queen to meet him in the public square - she defuses the situation by admitting that she had hoped to seduce him with an exotic display of decadence by her handmaidens aboard her imperial barge.

20. Claudette Colbert movie poster

21. Vivien Leigh • Vivien Leigh starred as Cleopatra in 1945 in a film version of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra • Casting Leigh, a grown woman as Shaw's child Cleopatra necessarily changed the tone of the performance. In addition, several scenes were added to make it clear that Cleopatra is to be considered an adult. In light of this shift, Shaw's words take on a new dimension of meaning. Her prattling and clinginess now seem flirtatious. Helplessness and flightiness are signs not of a child but of a woman who defers to her man. • Like Theda Bara, Vivien Leigh's real life in some ways mirrored Cleopatra's. Leigh, like Cleopatra, was the other woman: she and Laurence Olivier became lovers in 1936 while each was married to someone else. (Such behavior was by the standards of the time shocking and reprehensible, but stars could get away with more; almost like fictional characters they could enjoy the pleasures forbidden to ordinary people and the public could live vicariously through these larger than life figures who remained at a distance safe from disrupting societal conventions.) Public fascination in turn enhanced the careers of these stars. Vivien Leigh

22. The Cleopatra narrative in film • Every Narrative Has an Addressee • A person who is expected to receive the message and to be capable of interpreting it. •  Thus for each text it is possible to ask: how do the represented narrative agents relate to the contemporary audience? • The Cleopatra Narrative and Western Society. • Patriarchal heterosexual monogamy constructs women as men’s property in a relation that is both unilateral and exclusive. • But Cleopatra is affiliated with two men successively. In this framework, Cleopatra’s story becomes a problem to be solved. The events cannot be changed, but the telling and the values of the terms can, and the two relations can be given different values.

23. Narrative as symbolic ritual • Cultures have rituals for making two individuals into a couple--to change the status of the participants--and even for detaching the pair. • To effects its triangulation, the Cleopatra narrative must perform some such ritual work--culture symbolically resolving problems posed by social strictures. • In examining the way versions of the Cleopatra story perform work, we can examine the way the values of the relations are construed. • Cleopatra is to Caesar as Cleopatra is to Marc Antony as... • (in general)...admiration is to romance • (for Shakespeare...[manipulation and conquest] is to romantic passion • (for DeMille)...false love is to true love • (for Shaw)...admiration is to (earlier) romantic idealization.   • Women and Politics • To a great extent, the Cleopatra narrative in cinema is constructed in terms of a mutually exclusive, potentially tragic relation of women and political power: • women can be identified with sexual power and domestic influence, but not statecraft. • How does the Elizabeth Taylor movie accomplish the transition between Caesar and Antony? (question to keep in mind for next time)  

24. Stars and Morality • Stars are people who are signs: • Film Cleopatras carry values, meanings and ideas with them from text to text. • In the case of Taylor, during the making of the film she left husband Eddie Fisher for Richard Burton--much as she’d left her previous husband Michael Todd for Fisher • Results • The star became the story. • The switchover was much publicized, and the Vatican condemned the resulting film • The ritual of divorce was inadequate to prevent affront.

25. Why does Cleopatra flop? • Each time for different reasons, but in general because the costs of producing the films are so high that ‘failure’ is both relative and built-in • The stars required can only serve the role at the cost of repulsing the audience • The latter is true to the extent that our culture may have no symbolically or aesthetically satisfying way resolving the dilemma of one woman loving two men, even successively • Nor does there seem to be any satisfying way of presenting a woman who is both sexual and political

26. Elizabeth Taylor

27. The cult of Liz • Triumphal Entry sequence • Cleo/Liz as the queen of showbiz • She’s literally presented as an idol for the “Romans” (= Americans) to worship • The idol is somewhat “camp”: self-consciously absurd, sent-up, artificial • Hence her wink to the movie audience (as well as to Caesar) • Cleopatra, though carried on The Sphinx, turns out to be the opposite of enigmatic: She’s entirely readable as Liz Taylor the Star

28. Hollywood • It is a fantasy city lodged in the collective consciousness of movie goers everywhere. • Hollywood is a legendary site of urban syncretism: a Neo-Pagan site where all the great “sin cities” of the past (Babylon, Sodom, Rome, Alexandria, Camelot, Florence, Paris) strangely fuse and are recreated as allegorical signs of America. • It can be any city it wants to be, an every-shifting mirage of erotic capitals. Hollywood is always morphing itself into other cities. Yet whatever city it becomes in the foreground – for instance, Rome in Liz’s entry scene – in the background it always “Hollywoodizes” the image of that other city. • Consider what happens when Liz as Cleopatra brings Alexandria to Rome: in effect her allegorical embodiment of Hollywood glamour transforms both ancient cities into an opulent fantasy of American power over Africa and Europe.

29. Shakespeare vs. Hollywood • What is the chief difference between Hollywood’s representation of Cleopatra and Shakespeare’s? • Simple answer: Shakespeare’s Cleopatra TALKS: she’s not a silent “image” pulled on stage by a cast of thousands as a spectacle of erotic glamour; rather, she’s a living, breathing fount of poetical discourse on sex, death, politics. • The movie is all about Cleopatra as “image” and it’s at its best (ironically for a “talkie”) when Liz is utterly silent – as in the triumphal entry sequence. We are meant to be awed as she performs her goddess role for the mass audience as a distant remote “star.” • Even in her talking scenes, Liz is primarily a mask-like face – always brilliantly made up, oddly still as if she were a “still” in the photographic sense, a “painting” come to life (even as the movie “freeze-frames” its action every so often and transforms itself into an archeological fresco).

30. Cleopatra Winks • A key moment in the triumphal entry sequence is Cleopatra-Liz’s wink to Caesar-Rex: it suggests a campy self-consciousness of the image-making process. It’s all just a production number staged to enhance the star’s public image in front of her adoring masses of fans. • Caesar is a stand-in for the Hollywood “rulers” who controlled the whole scenario financially and built the public relations machinery that transformed Liz from a mere studio actress (among many) into the reigning Queen of Hollywood, a Living Legend.

31. Cleopatra-Liz as Idol • Definitions: • An image of a god or goddess used as an object of worship, especially in cultural contexts where the image itself is regarded as sacred or divine Sumerian Goddess Inanna

32. Another Definition • In a bad sense, from a monotheistic perspective: a false god or goddess worshiped by pagans in ignorance or defiance of the One True God Bible story: the golden calf

33. A third definition • In a pop-cultural sense: any object of ardent or excessive devotion or admiration created by a cult of celebrity

34. Back to Liz • In a psychoanalytic sense: any glamorously beautiful figure who induces a transgressive erotic desire in the (male) viewer, who in frustration yearns for iconoclasm [=idol-smashing]

35. What kind of Idol is Liz? • Hollywood as the new Babylon, the capital of modern paganism, where erotic idols are created and their worship promoted through cinema technology for mass cultural consumption. • What is being celebrated in the Procession scene? • Liz as the glamorous apotheosis of the perfectly obedient wife bowing to patriarchy (Julius Caesar): a hilariously idolatrous representation of the Reconstructed Nuclear Family • Recall the “domestic” scene immediately following the procession: Liz as silent wife looks on approvingly while Julius Caesar gives his son Caesarion lessons in patriarchal authority!

36. Transformation: the Barge Scene • Note the romantic doubling of Liz as “icy/sober” Venus and “hot/drunken” Maenad . • No longer able to be the perfectly obedient wife, she “twins” herself and transgressively emerges as her Maenadic Alter-Ego – the Femme Fatale. • Note also the transition from Caesar to Antony as love interest.