Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Rewriting European History: National And Transnational Identities In Rome

2013; Routledge; Volume: 33; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01439685.2013.847653

1465-3451

Andrew B. R. Elliott,

Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics

AbstractThe HBO/BBC/Rai Italia co-production of the television series Rome depicts a turbulent period of Roman history in its transition from Republic to Empire, an era which produced a golden age of heroes (Caesar, Marc Antony, Cleopatra, Brutus) and offers a rich trove of ideas about the emergence of a nation which is integral to most European countries today. However, when it comes to analysing the series as a representation of a specifically national past, its multinational composition, its insistence on history as an accidental process, and its departure from earlier conventions in depicting the national past creates serious problems when trying to identify what Anthony D. Smith terms a ‘composite national mythology’. Rather than offering an easily identifiable mythology for any one nation, I argue that individual national differences have been eroded in favour of a generic, one-size-fits-all, transnational past. AcknowledgementsA version of this paper was first given at the EUPOP conference in London, July 2012. I would like to thank my co-panellists (Dr Finn Pollard and Dr Antonella Palmieri) and other conference delegates for their feedback, as well as my anonymous reviewers and Professor Chapman for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions.Notes1. It is described as a coproduction between BBC and HBO in, to cite only a few examples, The Sunday Times, 21 August 2005, 11, The Guardian 21 July 2005, The Observer, 21 August 2005, 11; indeed, the Sunday Telegraph even describes it as ‘HBO’s new drama series, which … also involves the BBC’ (28 August 2005, 7).2. BBC figures from Sunday Telegraph, 28 August 2005, 7; Rai’s figures from Variety, 26 March 2006, www.variety.com/article/VR1117940324?refcatid+14 (accessed 21 December 2012). In fact, such an imbalance in funding was used to defend the BBC’s unprecedented budget, with Vanessa Thorpe in the Observer reporting that the BBC head of television, Jana Bennett ‘emphasised that HBO invested much more’ than the BBC (21 August 2005, 11).3. Rome Press Pack, BBC Press Office, 26 August 2005, http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2003/10_october/27/bbc_hbo_rome.shtml (accessed 25 November 2012).4. Ibid.5. Monica S. Cyrino (ed.), Rome, Season One: history makes television (Oxford, 2008); Christopher Lockett, Accidental history: mass culture and HBO’s Rome, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 38(3) (2010), 102–112.6. James Chapman, Past and Present: national identity and the British historical film (London, 2005), 6.7. Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London, 1991), 66.8. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London, 1995), 38.9. Jon Solomon, Televising antiquity: from You Are There to Rome, in Cyrino, Rome Season One, 11–28: 25.10. Jason Mittell, Narrative complexity in contemporary American television, The Velvet Light Trap, 58 (2006), 29–40.11. Glen Creeber, Serial Television: big drama on the small screen (London, 2004), 4. See also Robin Nelson, State of Play: contemporary ‘high-end’ TV drama (Manchester, 2007), 100–104.12. Creeber, Serial Television, 7.13. See Catherine Johnson, HBO and The Sopranos, in: Stacey Abbot (ed.), The Cult TV Book (London, 2010), 148–154: 148.14. Ibid., 149.15. Avi Santo, Para-television and discourses of distinction: the culture of production at HBO, in: Marc Leverette, Brian L. Ott and Cara Louise Buckley (eds), It’s Not TV: watching HBO in the post-televisual era (London, 2008), 19–45: 27.16. Simone Knox, Masterpiece Theatre and British drama imports on US television; discourses of tension, Critical Studies in Television, 7(1) (2012), 29–48. See also Laurence Jarvik, Masterpiece Theatre and the Politics of Quality (London, 1999) and Jeanette Steemers, Selling Television: British television in the global marketplace (London, 2004).17. It is also worth mentioning here, however, that this return of the epic in cinema brought with it its own distinct problems in terms of national identity and debates about quality. For more on this see my forthcoming book The Return of the Epic Film: genre, aesthetics and history in the 21st century (Edinburgh, 2014).18. Solomon, Televising antiquity, 11.19. The Guardian, 21 July 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/jul/21/broadcasting.bbc (accessed 21 December 2012); Sunday Mirror, 4 September 2005, 38; The Sunday Times, 21 August 2005, 11; The Observer, 28 August 2005, 68; The Express, 22 August 2005, 9.20. Solomon, Televising antiquity, 21.21. Carl J. Mora, The image of ancient Rome in the cinema, Film-Historia, 7 (1997), 221–243: 236.22. Sandra R. Joshel, I, Claudius: Projection and imperial soap opera, in: Maria Wyke (ed.), Imperial Projections: ancient Rome in modern popular culture (Baltimore, 2001), 119–161: 20.23. Lockett, Accidental history, 104.24. See in particular Arthur J. Pomeroy, And then it was destroyed by a volcano: the ancient world in film and on television (London, 2008), 111–23, and Pomeroy in Martin Winkler, Gladiator: film and history (Oxford, 2005), 111–23.25. Rob Wilson, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and the spectacle of empire: global/local rumblings inside the Pax Americana, European Journal of American Culture, 21(2) (2002), 62–73: 64.26. History seen ‘from below’ is one of Marc Ferro’s four ways of seeing history through film; the other three are from above, from outside and from inside. See Marc Ferro, Cinema and History (Detroit, 1988), 163–164.27. I have argued this point in more depth elsewhere, in my article ‘And all is real; historical spaces and special F/X in Rome’ appearing in a forthcoming special issue of Critical Studies in Television, edited by Stacey Abbot.28. Lockett, Accidental history, 111.29. Cyrino, Rome, Season One, 6.30. Ibid., 4.31. Ibid., 6. See also Lockett, Accidental history, for a full exploration of this argument.32. James Chapman, Past and Present: national identity and the British historical film (London, 2005), 5.33. Hayden White, The modernist event, in: Vivien Sobchack (ed.), The Persistence of History: cinema, television, and the modern event (London, 1996), 17; Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: a psychological history of the German film (Princeton, NJ, 2004); Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History: restaging the past (Oxford, 1980).34. Jeffrey Richards, Hollywood’s Ancient Worlds (London, 2008), foreword.35. Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies: studying history on film (New York and London, 2007), 76.36. Smith, National Identity, 99.37. Jérôme Bourdon, Unhappy engineers of the European soul: EBU and the woes of pan-European television, International Communication Gazette, 69 (2007), 263–280: 263.38. Tamari Ashuri, The Arab–Israeli Conflict in the Media Producing Shared Memory and National Identity in the Global Television Era (London and New York, 2010), 69.39. Sharon Strover, Recent trends in coproductions: the demise of the national, in: F. Corcoran and P. Preston (eds), Democracy and Communication in the New Europe (Creskill, NJ), 97–123: 98.40. Robin Nelson, State of Play: contemporary ‘high-end’ TV drama (Manchester, 2007), 131.41. See Tim Bergfelder, The nation vanishes: European co-productions and popular genre formulae in the 1950s and 1960s, in: Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (eds), Cinema and Nation (London, 2000), 131–142, and Smith, Images of the nation: cinema, art and national identity, in the same volume, 45–60.42. Sunday Times, 6 November 2005, 3.43. Cyrino Rome, Season One, 3.44. Leverette, Cocksucker, motherfucker, tits, in It’s Not TV, 123–151: 125.45. The Express, 22 August 2005, The Express, 23 August 2005; The Sunday Telegraph, 28 August 2005; The Observer, 21 August 2005. The Sunday Mirror, 4 September 2005.46. For a more in-depth discussion of Rai’s branding and production strategies, see Milly Buonanno’s comprehensive account of the sceneggiato, A Place in the Sun: Global seriality and the revival of domestic drama in Italy, in: Albert Moran (ed.), TV Formats Worldwide: localizing global programs (Bristol, 2009), 255–269.47. 22 August 2005 (translation my own); quoting Hastings, Sunday Telegraph, 21 August 2005, 3.48. ‘Scandali (soft) nell’antica Roma’, Corriere della sera, 16 March 2006, 57. The earlier report related to the US premiere of the series: ‘Roma, sesso e violenza’, Corriere della sera 22 August 2005. ‘Irritated Italos give HBO’s Rome the Thumbs Down’, Variety, 26 March 2006.49. Ibid., 31; Corriere della Sera, 16 March 2006, 57.50. http://www.gay.tv/news/entertainment/troppo-sesso-censura-rai-sul-colossal-tv-rome/ (accessed 5 October 2012) (translation my own).51. Quoted in Nick Vivarelli, ‘Irritated Italos Give HBO’s Rome the Thumbs Down’, Variety, 26 March 2006, www.variety.com/article/VR1117940324?refcatid=14 (accessed 28 June 2012).52. Il Nuovo Peplum, 13 March 2006, http://news.cinecitta.com/fiction/dettaglio.asp?id=160 (accessed 29 June 2012) (my translation).53. ‘Sapevamo fin dall’inizio che chi stava realizzando Rome aveva un concetto dell’Antica Roma diverso dal nostro.’ Ibid. (my translation). Canfora’s assessment of the series can be found in the Corriere della Sera, 26 March 2006, 43.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAndrew B. R. ElliottAndrew B. R. Elliott is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Lincoln, where he teaches on film, media and history courses. He is the author of Remaking the Middle Ages (Jefferson, NC, 2010), and has written several articles about historical film and television, video games, and the return of the epic in cinema. He is co-editor with Matthew Wilhelm Kapell of Playing with the Past: digital games and the simulation of history (New York, 2013), and editor of The Return of the Epic Film: genre, aesthetics and history in the 21st century (Edinburgh, forthcoming 2014).