My review of this book: Robert Burgoyne (ed) The Epic in World Culture New York and London: AFI Film Readers and Routledge, 2011, 391pp, ISBN978-0-415-99018-9 appears in Spanish here, in the online Argentine journal Imagofagia. For an English version see, below.
The epic is a genre that is associated with reactionary and outmoded notions of fixed relationships between the representation of territories, nation states, gender, race and identity. However, Robert Burgoyne and the other contributors to this volume challenge this idea, and explore, not only how recent epics, such as, Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000), 300 (Zach Snyder, 2006) and Red Cliff (John Woo, 2008), upend this facile link, but also how older epics, such as, Sign of the Pagan (Douglas Sirk, 1954), The Fall of the Roman Empire (Anthony Mann, 1964) and Rewi’s Last Stand (Rudall Hayward, 1925) do so too. In Burgoyne’s words, “In contrast to the conventional understanding of the epic as a vehicle of national prestige…the epic film today evokes a different kind of imagined community to homeland and heritage, but now largely untethered from ethnic community and national context” (7). As a consequence of factors such as the changes from studio-based, industrial cinema model, technological developments in filmmaking, transnational flow of capital, the need to recoup large budgets in a global market, epics “have become the very exemplar of transnational and global modes of film production and reception” (1-2). The Hollywood epic has been the subject of many previous studies and suggests that this is the model par excellence to be followed by others; that “Hollywood epic” is a stable term undetermined by outside influences and concerns; and that other models have not emerged both parallel to, in tandem and in counterpostion to Hollywood. These assumptions are destabilised and explored by the contributors to this volume.
The book is divided into five parts: 1. Spectacle 2. Center and Periphery 3. Remembering the Nation 4. The Family Epic 5. The Body in the Epic. 1 and 2 have four and five chapters respectively, whilst the last three have two chapters each. As with the best collections, the chapters work in dialogue with each other, albeit implicitly rather than explicitly, and point to further future areas of study. Interestingly, the aforementioned 300 and Gladiator, probably because of their financial success ($456 million and $458 million, respectively) and global reach, get considerable attention in this book. They prove useful case studies to examine violence, “homoerotic sensibility” (22), and the reconfiguration of the hero for contemporary audiences by Monica Silveira Cyrino; Kirsten Moana Thompson explores how new digital technologies, crowd-replication software, digital set extensions, 3D animation, and performance-capture films “create spectatorial experiences” (40), and how these largely out-sourced effects complicate the authorship of the films; and Burgoyne considers epics as transnational cinema which “place a different accent on the legendary past, emphasizing the multi-ethnic community, the nomadic passage across the boundaries of empire, and unknown and unknown or anonymous hero” (82). These chapters move the discussion of the contemporary Western epic outside of the usual binaries and into the arena of transnational cinematic practices.
Likewise non-Western productions are examined in new ways, whereas previously they had been largely relegated to “the realm of specialist film historiography” (Iordanova, 101-2). Dina Iordanova’s chapter, for example, provides useful tables and graphs, showing budgets and earnings, but also considers how their technical proficiency has been influential on Hollywood in a reversal of the assumed flow of knowledge and skills. There are many important contributions in this book such as: a study of New Zealand epics by Bruce Babington, Phil Wagner’s consideration of Cecil B. deMille, and a look at the significance of blood, biblical references and nation building in There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007), to name but a few, however, of particular interest to this reader was Bhaskar Sarkar’s chapter comparing Ritwak Ghatak’s Indian epic Meghe Dhaka Tora/The Cloud-Capped Star (1960) and Principio y fin (1993) by the Mexican director, Arturo Ripstein. Both are adaptations of work by the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz. Sarkar’s discussion is both intelligent and wide-ranging, and considers the “paradoxical category” that is the epic melodrama, a genre much employed in Mexican film and one that his chapter would provide a useful framework for future analysis.
This collection is a valuable addition to the field, with Burgoyne’s own book The Hollywood Historical Film (2007) as well as Vivian Sobchack’s many significant contributions proving to be useful reference points for many contributors. The variety of contributions from diverse authors, and the multiple themes mean that this is a useful point of departure for the understanding of recent and contemporary epic cinema. It is also an indicator of the popularity and variety of epics being produced and, far from being the last word on the subject, opens up the field to exciting new possibilities and analysis.