Hugo: Cinema History Come to Life

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20th Century Europe, 20th Century France, A Trip to the Moon, Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Gare Montparnasse Derailment, Georges Mélies, Hugo, L'Arrivée d'un train, Martin Scorsese, Paris, The Invention of Hugo Cabret

I know I promised to look at Empire, but I felt I needed a break from the Julio-Claudians. So last night I sat down and rewatched Hugo (2011, dir. Martin Scorsese, based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick).

It’s a charming film about an orphaned boy Hugo (Asa Butterfield) who lives in the Gare Montparnasse railway station in Paris at some point in the 1930s, where he maintains the station’s clocks and eludes the station’s inspector (Sasha Baron Cohen), who wants to send him to an orphanage. Hugo’s only possession is a broken automaton that his father was trying to repair when he died in a fire. He develops a complicated love/hate relationship with Georges (Ben Kingsley), who runs the station’s sweet and toy shop and from whom Hugo steals the parts he needs to fix the automaton. Eventually it’s revealed that Georges is actually Georges Mélies, one of the first commerical film-makers in the world. The automaton turns out to be something Georges created when he was a professional stage magician. But when his studio, Star Films, went bankrupt, Mélies lost the automaton as well as everything else except his mistress and later wife, Jeanne d’Alcy (Helen McRory), and was forced to make a living running his small shop in the train station.

Georges Mélies

Mélies (1861-1938) was one of the most important early film-makers, serving as screenwriter, director, actor, and producer, and churning out a staggering 500 films between 1895 and 1913, when bad business decisions left him bankrupt. The Great War put the last nail in the coffin of Star Films, and about 80% of Mélies’ oeuvre was melted down for silver and celluloid, destroying them forever.

Butterfield and Kingsley as Hugo and Georges

Prior to discovering the new medium of film, Mélies had worked as a stage magician, and he brought a magician’s eye to his work as a film-maker. So he specialized in films that told fantastic stories and often employed stage magic tricks. For example, in Robbing Cleopatra’s Tomb, considered one of the first horror films, Cleopatra’s mummy is chopped into pieces and then burned in a brazier, from which a woman emerges, while in The Famous Box Trick, a magician cuts a boy in half with an axe, producing two boys, whom he procedures to turn into other things. In his One Man Band, Mélies becomes seven different musicians playing a tune together.

He eventually moved up to telling stories with more complex plots. His most famous work, 1902’s A Trip to the Moon, tells the story of Professor Barbenfouillis, who builds a space-ship in the form of a bullet, which he fires at the moon, striking the Old Man in the Moon right in the eye. The crew nap until the goddess Phoebe causes it to snow on them, forcing them to take refuge in a cavern, where they are taken prisoner by the insect-like Selenites. Escaping, the crew climbs back into the bullet, which falls off a cliff and into the Earth’s ocean, where they are rescued and given a parade to celebrate their accomplishment.

In addition to being one of the first film-makers to tell narrative stories, Mélies also invented a number of simple special effects that he used repeatedly, including multiple exposure (filming something, rewinding the film, and then adding something to the scene, which is how Mélies become seven men playing instruments together), advancing the camera on a track to make something seem to grow in size, split-screen exposure, and dissolves. By putting a fish tank in front of the camera, he created the illusion that he was filming underwater. In his films, men and women turn into skeletons, butterflies, and other creatures, people explode in burst of smoke and sparks, travelers encounter fairies, aliens, and Satan, people take off their heads and argue with them, and many other delightful things happen.

The man was a visionary and for a period the most popular film-maker in the world, and he profoundly infuenced the development of all later film. In many ways, the film is Scorsese’s love-letter to Mélies, and an effort to make sure that this pioneer isn’t forgotten by modern audiences.

The film’s treatment of Mélies is pretty accurate. The middle portion of the film is a reasonably factual, though simplified, account of Mélies’ career. It omits the fact that his brother played an important role in his film company, and it condenses Mélies’ two wives into his second wife Jeanne (his first wife Eugenie having died young in 1913). He really did build an automaton that wound up in a museum where it was ruined. He really did go bankrupt (though less because of the Great War and more because of poor decisions) and wind up running a toy and sweet shop in the Gare Montparnasse. And he really did enjoy a final period in his life when film enthusiasts recognized his enormous contributions to the medium. It’s refreshing to see an historical film that actually tries to get the facts more or less correct.

Georges Mélies

The Train

But in addition to being a wonderful introduction to the work of Mélies, Scorsese has another point to make. Hugo was made in 3D, and Scorsese was trying to get away from the use of 3D to simply make the audience gasp, exploring its potential as a cinematic device. He plays with snow, steam, and a cloud of papers in a way that is reminiscent of the way Mélies played with his film tricks.

The film twice shows the famous early film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, a brief 1895 film that simply shows a train pulling into a French train station. The film repeats as fact what is quite possibly an urban legend that when the audience saw the train approaching, they panicked because they were unable to distinguish the film from reality because the technology of film was literally brand-new and the audience was unfamiliar with it.

Later in the film, Hugo has a dream in which he finds himself on the train tracks of the Gare Montparnasse as a train is bearing down at him. The train runs him over, jumps the tracks, and plows through the station, plunging out of a window and down to the street below. This scene is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it recreates an actual train accident that happened at the Gare Montparnasse in 1895 (the same year L’Arrivée d’un train was first shown). So Scorsese cleverly conflates the train footage with an actual train crash the same year.

The 1895 Montparnasse derailment

But what I find even more clever about this sequence is that by doing it with the relatively new modern 3D technology, he gives 21st century audiences an experience not unlikely the one the audience in 1895 had, of having a train appear to come hurtling toward them in a way that unnerves the viewer. In a film about the early history of cinema, Scorsese has brilliantly given audiences a sense of what it might have been like to be one of those early film-goers, thus increasing our ability to understand the whole point of the film.

Hugo’s dream of the Montparnasse dereailment

This isn’t the only time Scorsese references early cinema in Hugo. At one point Hugo, fleeing from the station inspector, is forced to climb out onto the minute hand of the station’s largest clock in a scene that directly references Harold Lloyd’s famous stunt in Safety Last. There are also more subtle homages to Buster Keaton’s The General (1926) and Jean Renoir’s La Bete Humaine (1938). And throughout the film, Scorsese and his team tried to work in as many of the techniques that Mélies pioneered as they could, so that the film’s cinematography and special effects were as much an homage as the story.

Want to Know More? 

Hugo is available through Amazon, as is Selznick’s Caldecott-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

You should totally watch Mélies’ A Trip to the Moon. It’s on Netflix, and also available through Amazon. Although its special effects are primative by modern standards, it really is a must-see. If you want to know more about Mélies, try Elizabeth Ezra’s Georges Mélies. It’s more a study of his films than a history of the man, but it treats him as a serious film-maker, not just a man playing around with special effects.

If you want to dig a little deeper in the film’s use of visual effects, here is a good page on the subject.

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Exodus: Gods and Kings: Does It Whitewash?

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Aaron Paul, Ancient Egypt, Ben Kingsley, Christian Bale, Exodus, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Joel Edgerton, Moses, Racial Issues, Ramesses II, Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver, Whitewashing

In my last post I dug into what we know about the race/ethnicity of ancient Egyptians. In this post, I want to dig into the accusations that Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014, dir. Ridley Scott) was whitewashing its story.

 

Film vs Fact

The story of the Exodus involves two distinct groups, the Egyptians and the Hebrews. The Egyptians of the 19^th dynasty period, as I explored last time, were probably somewhat ethnically mixed and would probably look to us like Middle Easterners, perhaps with some Nubian features. Ramesses II, according to a French analysis of his mummy, was fair-skinned and red-haired, and therefore might have looked somewhat more ‘white’ than the people he ruled over. The Hebrews of the period would definitely have looked Middle Eastern.

Ridley Scott

So who did Ridley Scott cast in his film? (In this list, I identify the actor’s country of origin, his or her ancestry to the extent I can determine it, and my subjective opinion of what ‘race’ the actor appears to be based on publicity photos)

Here are the Eygptians:

Ramesses II: Joel Edgerton     Australian, of Dutch and English descent,

White

Seti I: John Turturro                American, of Italian descent, White

Tuya: Sigourney Weaver           American, of British descent, White

Priestess: Indira Varma            English, of Indian and Swiss descent, Mixed

Hegep: Ben Mendelsohn          Australian, of British descent, White

Bithiah: Hiam Abbass              Israeli, of Arab descent, Middle Eastern

Nefertari: Golshifteh Farahani  Iranian, of Iranian descent, Middle Eastern

Vizier: Ghassan Massoud           Syrian, probably of Arab or mixed descent,

Middle Eastern

Farahani and Egerton as Nefertari and Ramesses

Here are the Hebrews:

Moses: Christian Bale             English, of English and white South African

descent, White

Nun: Ben Kingsley                   English, of English and Indian descent, Mixed

Joshua: Aaron Paul                  American, of British and German descent,

White

Zipporah: Maria Valverde     Spanish, probably of Spanish descent, White

Jethro: Kevork Malikyan        Turkish, of Armenian descent, Middle Eastern

Miriam: Tara Fitzgerald         English, of British descent, White

Aaron: Andrew Tarbet            American, uncertain descent, White

Maria Valverde, who played Zipporah

(I classified Varma and Kingsley as looking ‘mixed’ because in different photos they can appear variously as White or Middle Eastern.)

So the major Egyptian characters (those who appear in multiple scenes, have a decent number of lines, or play an important role in a scene) are almost entirely played by white actors. Of the non-white actors, only Farahani’s Nefertari is presented as a significant character, and objectively it’s not a large part. Varma’s unnamed Priestess does appear in several scenes, usually with a line or two in each, but I wouldn’t call her an important character.

Of the Hebrews, the only character of significance played by a non-white actor is Nun, played by the mixed-race Kingsley, whom most Americans probably think of as a white actor. Malikyan’s Jethro does play a prominent role in a couple of scenes when Moses is meeting Zipporah, but disappears into the background after that.

Ben Kingsley as Nun

The only characters of any significance at all played by actual Middle Eastern actors are Nefertari and Jethro, neither of whom is truly a key figure in the film.

But among the Egyptians are large numbers of Middle Eastern and black actors playing minor characters like “Egyptian soldier #3.” If you scroll through the IMDb full cast list you’ll see lots of black and Middle Eastern actors playing uncredited roles like “Moses’ General”, “Fan Handler”, and “Egyptian Civilian Lower Class”.

So all of the important characters are played by white actors, a few supporting roles are played by Middle Eastern or mixed-ethnicity actors, and the minor or uncredited roles are played by a mixture of Middle Easterners, blacks, and Latinos (to judge by surnames and photos).

This photo perfectly captures the racial make-up of the cast

Now, as far as Ramesses, Seti, and Tuya are concerned, one could possibly make a case for casting white actors in those roles. As I noted in my previous post, Ramesses II seems to have been fair-skinned and red-haired, although his statuary suggests he might have had Nubian facial features. One of Seti’s few statues depicts him with thin lips (the nose is missing), and his mummy certainly suggests that, at least in terms of facial features, he could have passed for European, although what he looked like in life is a guess. About Tuya we don’t have much to go on. But if Ramesses was fair-skinned, at least one of his parents might have been as well. So if Ridley Scott had wanted to, he could have said something like “Based on the best evidence we have, Ramesses II and his parents appear to have looked European, so in the interests of historical accuracy, we decided to cast white actors in those roles.” It might not have been a very good answer, but at least there would have been a little historical support for it.

Seti I’s mummy

But that’s not how Scott responded to accusations of whitewashing. What he actually said was “I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such….I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.”

I’ll give him credit for admitting that money and studio politics were a major factor in his casting decisions. What he’s basically saying is “Look, the studio and the financial backers wouldn’t let me do a big budget film with non-white leads, so I didn’t even consider casting non-whites in the important roles.”

Weaver as Tuya

But I don’t buy it. He’s insisting that because he was making a blockbuster film, he needed actors who can really pack theaters, and whether we like it or not, big name white actors ‘open’ movies much more reliably than non-white actors. But let’s look at the big names in that cast list again.

Christian Bale is undeniably a hot actor, having done Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy in the past decade. So Bale can definitely ‘open’ a big film effectively. Sigourney Weaver is a wonderful actress and probably still a household name, but she hasn’t carried a major film since 1997’s Alien Resurrection, or perhaps 1999’s Galaxy Quest if we’re being a little bit charitable. Ben Kingsley, like Weaver, is a marvelous actor and highly respected, but his only ‘big’ film was 1982’s Gandhi. Like Weaver, he mostly adds prestige to a film rather than drawing the kinds of audiences blockbusters require. Joel Edgerton is nice actor (you might remember him as the lead from 2005’s Kinky Boots or in 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty), but he’s not a huge box office draw; I didn’t even know the actor’s name when I saw the film. Aaron Paul is best known from Breaking Bad, so maybe he brought in some fans of that series, but I doubt the studio was banking on him; he’s in a modest supporting role. And after that we get to character actors like John Turturro and Indira Varma. So Bale was cast for his ability to carry a blockbuster. Weaver, Kingsley, and Turturro add some gravitas, but probably weren’t critical to getting the financing for the film, and Edgerton, the number two lead, seems sort of like an afterthought.

Bale in front of a painfully white-looking Sphinx

When you look at in that light, Scott’s defense reads much more like an excuse. He’s shifting the blame for his casting choices onto the nameless suits of the Hollywood system and essentially saying he had no control over whom he cast. Sure, Bale was the anchor; the film wasn’t going to get made without him, so we probably just have accept that Moses had to be played by a white guy. But Ramesses could probably have been played by almost any young male actor, and certainly Seti and Tuya could have been anyone who could plausibly have been presented as Ramesses’ parents. They could even had cast Tuya as a different race from Seti. And they could have cast Joshua, Aaron, and Zipporah with Jewish or Middle Eastern actors, since only Aaron Paul has any significant name recognition at all. Scott’s defense rings mostly false, and I think the real issue is that he just didn’t want to be bothered to go to bat with the studios and try to produce a more ethnically-appropriate cast.

For me, there’s one thing that seals the deal, that really demonstrates that Scott didn’t particularly care that he was whitewashing his film and producing a cast that makes no historical sense whatsoever.

This character:

That’s Malak, the manifestation of God/angel/boy/figment of Moses’ imagination that speaks for God. This character could have been played by literally ANYONE. The character could have been any race whatsoever, could even have been played by a young girl. The character is entirely made up, so he could look however Scott wanted. No one was going to the film to see the total unknown who played Malak (except presumably that actor’s family), so casting for box office draw wasn’t an issue. If Scott had cast a Yoruba child, a Sudanese, a Latino, a Haitian, an Arab, a Japanese, or an Eskimo, it’s not like the studio could say, “There are no angels of color. God has to be white.”

But Scott cast this kid:

Isaac Andrews is a lily-white English schoolboy. That’s right, Scott choose a white kid to represent God. Even Cecil B. DeMille’s 10 Commandments, made at the height of 20^th century American racial insensitivity, didn’t dare to make God white. So in addition to all the actually important and authoritative characters being white, so is God. Whitewashing doesn’t get any worse than that.

Exodus: Gods and Kings: Film vs Narrative

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Ancient Egypt, Ben Kingsley, Christian Bale, Exodus, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Joel Edgerton, Moses, Ramesses II, Religious Issues, Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver

How do you a historical analysis of a movie based on a sacred text that scholars have not been able to find much factual corroboration for? It’s not possible to compare the Biblical story of the Exodus to historical records from Egypt, because Egyptian records make no clear reference to the event, and the Exodus narrative doesn’t identify the pharaoh involved, making it hard to know when the events are supposed to have taken place. So how do I review Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014, dir. Ridley Scott)?

The film tells the story of Moses (Christian Bale) and Pharaoh Ramesses II (Joel Edgerton) as they fight over whether or not Ramesses will free the enslaved Hebrews. We get all the major beats of the Exodus narrative, including the burning bush, the ten plagues and the crossing of the Red Sea. But the film takes substantial liberties with the narrative. Scott decided to take the approach that all of the miraculous events could have had modern scientific explanations, and so he left the question open as to what was actually happening in Egypt.

I guess the place to start my analysis is to see where the film follows the Biblical narrative and where it doesn’t.

 

Moses Gets His Start

The film basically follows the Biblical birth-narrative for Moses (described in back-story rather than shown), that when the Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew boys killed because the Hebrews were multiplying too quickly, Moses’ mother put him in a basket and floated him down the Nile, so that he was found by Pharaoh’s daughter. Bithiah. As a result he’s raised in the royal household and rises to become a general, a detail not in the original text. We get to see Moses and Ramesses fighting the Hittites and Moses saving Ramesses’ life in battle.

This allows the film to develop the relationship between Moses, Ramesses, and Seti I (John Turturro), Ramesses’ father, who quietly regrets that he cannot make Moses his successor, because he can see that Moses is a better leader than Ramesses. Ramesses slowly comes to resent his foster brother. None of this is in the book of Exodus; the ruler is simply called Pharaoh, and there is nothing to suggest that the Pharaoh whom Moses confronts is not the same Pharaoh who ordered the deaths of the Hebrew boys.

Edgerton and Bale as Ramesses and Moses

So the whole “Moses and Pharaoh are foster brothers” element of the film is made up; in doing this, Scott is probably drawing off of Cecil B DeMille’s Ten Commandments. Since DeMille’s 1956 version was a partial remake of his 1923 silent film of the same name, I suspect that the idea to make Moses and Pharaoh brothers ultimately goes back to Jeanie MacPherson, the screenwriter who penned the silent version’s script. The three films certainly have a lot of parallels beyond the ‘foster brothers’ angle: the emphasis on enormous sets, villainous Egyptians whipping Hebrews, white people playing all the principle roles, and many others. But I’ll confess to not having researched the history of Moses fiction, so perhaps I’m off-base there.

The Biblical narrative does not explain how Moses rediscovers his birth family, but in the film Moses meets Nun (Ben Kingsley), who tells him of his Hebrew parentage. He initially conceals the fact, but the villainous Egyptian Hegep (Ben Mendelsohn) tells Ramesses, who threatens to cut off the arm of Miriam (Tara Fitzgerald), a palace slave who is also Moses’ sister and the one who brought the baby to Bithiah’s attention in the first place. So Moses admits the truth, at which point Queen Tuya (Sigourney Weaver, given pretty much nothing to do except dislike Moses), Ramesses’ mother, persuades the pharaoh to exile Moses and send assassins after him. This is a deviation from the original text, in which Moses flees after killing an Egyptian (a detail that does happen in the film, but is not the reason why Pharaoh wants him dead).

Then we get Moses’ meeting with the shepherdess Zipporah (Maria Valverde) and her father Jethro, which happens the way it does in the Biblical text. They get married with suspiciously modern-sounding wedding vows, have a son, and debate whether to raise him religiously or not. Zipporah wants Gershom to be able to decide for himself what he believes when he reaches adulthood, while Moses wants to raise him to believe in himself. This whole sequence is laughably modern in the way it thinks about issues of marriage, family, and religion, and is in some ways the real low point of the film.

Moses and Zipporah swearing to ‘trust whatever they do not yet know’ of each other. The scene with the Unity Candle got cut

 

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Moses

Then Moses wanders up Mt Horeb looking for some lost goats. He gets caught in a landslide during a storm and is knocked out, and when he wakes up he’s trapped in mud. He sees a burning bush and has a conversation with a young boy, identified in the credits as Malak (the Hebrew word for ‘angel’ and ‘messenger’). While the choice to use this mysterious boy as Yahweh’s mouthpiece in the film attracted a lot of attention, I actually don’t find the idea problematic. Throughout the Biblical narrative God and Moses talk a good deal, but the text rarely explains what that looked like. Scott made the reasonable choice that it needed to be depicted visually rather than just using a booming voice from nowhere. And, as Christian Bale said in an interview, “I’m always interested in asking other people’s opinions on it. How would you have represented God, if you were in Ridley’s position? It can be very easy to pick apart someone’s choice for a depiction of God. But if you are put in Ridley’s shoes, it’s an immensely difficult thing. How on earth do you do that?” That’s a pretty fair point. Scott had to make a choice about how to show that, and his choice was inevitably going to bother some people.

Malak (Isaac Andrews)

 

So for the rest of the film, when Moses talks with God, he has a conversation with Malak. Malak is a bit like Harvey the Pooka; only Moses can see him, which raises the question of whether Malak is all in his head. That’s Bale’s interpretation. “I think [Moses] was likely schizophrenic and was one of the most barbaric individuals that I ever read about in my life.”

A bigger issue than Malak’s appearance is his personality. As divine messengers go, he’s very angry, and wants to take revenge on the Egyptians for what they’ve done to His people. As the film goes on, Moses becomes more and more appalled at what is happening to the Egyptians, whom he naturally cares for, and he argues with Malak several times. The notion of arguing with God is a very Jewish notion, and does have at least a bit of support in the text, since Moses is initially very resistant to acting as God’s messenger and keeps trying to offer excuses for why he’s not the best man for the job. But the Biblical Moses slowly becomes more certain over time, and directs his anger not at God but at the Hebrews when they become disobedient. But the film does do a nice job of exploring the uncertainty of a prophet, a common theme in the Tanakh/Old Testament.

 

Back to Egypt

Moses heads back to Egypt and meets his brother Aaron (Andrew Tarbet). In the original text, Aaron is an important figure who accompanies Moses on repeated visits to Pharaoh’s court and performs the famous staff-into-snake miracle. In the film, Aaron is pretty much an afterthought, with virtually no dialog or function. As a matter of fact, I kept thinking Joshua was Aaron, because Joshua keeps sneaking off to watch Moses talk to empty air (since no one else can see Malak) and Aaron basically just disappears into the background.

In the Biblical narrative, Moses and Aaron’s visits to Pharaoh alternate with the various plagues, as Pharaoh remains unmoved by what is happening. Scott’s film pares down the meetings, perhaps because the repetition doesn’t make for compelling cinema, At one point, a visit from Moses is replaced by Moses writing a text on a horse’s side and sending it to the court, a really bizarre choice that isn’t explained and just seems silly.

Pharaoh’s response to Moses’ first visit is the famous ‘bricks without straw’ edict, but in the film Ramesses issues that order long after the plagues begin. Instead, when Pharaoh refuses to release the Hebrews, Moses trains them in guerilla tactics and they start blowing stuff up and attacking ships with fire arrows, because you can’t skip the Shit Blows Up and the Fire Arrows at Night scenes in films like this.

I’m a bit conflicted about this. A charitable reading of this is that the film is trying to highlight the ineffectiveness of violence compared to God’s power. But given that the film doesn’t want to definitively say that Yahweh exists, I think it’s more likely to just be an attempt to bring some macho violence to a film that doesn’t really get to have much of that.

Moses teaching the Hebrews how to do archery

Malak shows up and tells Moses he’s taking way too long to liberate the Hebrews, and that it’s time to get Biblical on Ramesses’s ass. The Ten Plagues all occur, in almost the right order (the death of the livestock and the boils are switched). But Scott favors a naturalistic explanation for the plagues. The Nile turns to blood when large crocodiles slaughter a bunch of fishermen (ignoring the Biblical detail that even water than was kept in buckets and jars was affected), and the blood kills the fish and forces the frogs out of the water. Without the frogs in the river, lice and flies proliferate, giving many people boils. Then a disease strikes the livestock, which die bleeding for the mouth. Then a massive hailstorm strikes, followed by a swarm of locusts that eat all the crops in the field. Because Ramesses is by this point just being an asshole, he refuses to release any food from the royal granaries, which provokes a food riot, which Ramesses crushes with his soldiers.

Then darkness sets in, and Ramesses declares that if one more bad thing happens, so help him God, he’s gonna kill all the Hebrew babies just cuz. But apparently this gives Yahweh an idea…

Malak tells Moses that he wants to humiliate Ramesses and gives him the rules for the Passover, which Moses teaches to the Israelites. A shadow sweeps across the land and all the Egyptian boys die. This is the only one of the plagues that the film makes no real attempt to naturalize.

What is nice about the plagues sequence is that it does a very good job of dramatizing just how appalling the Biblical plagues are in the text; at different moments, they’re frightening, disgusting, dangerous, and tragic, and the made-up detail about the food riot highlights the undercurrent of the Biblical narrative, which is that the plagues are destroying Egypt’s economy, ruining all the sources of food and driving the people to desperation and panic. Naturalistic explanations or not, Scott’s film drives home for those who believe the Biblical narrative just how horrible it would have been to live through.

The Plague of Locusts

 

The Parting of the Sea

When Moses first leaves Egypt, he crosses the sea at what the film identifies as the Tiran Straits, which the film apparently thinks separates Egypt from the Sinai peninsula. In reality, the Tiran Straits separate the southern end of the Sinai peninsula from Arabia and the Gulf of Aqaba from the Red Sea. The Straits are depicted as shallow enough to walk across, when in reality its shallowest channel is 240 ft deep. So the geography is way off. Moses tries to lead the Israelites to the Tiran Straits, but decides that because Pharaoh will easily be able to follow them with his chariots, so instead he takes a mountain pass, gets lost, and runs into the Red Sea. So apparently Moses is as bad at map-reading as Ridley Scott is.

Egypt is to the left of the Sinai peninsula

Frustrated, Moses takes a nap, and when he wakes up, the water has inexplicably receded. Scott says that his treatment of this event is based on a tsumani caused by an earthquake that happened around 3000 BC off the Italian coast. I’m a bit skeptical about this claim, since there aren’t records about Italy reaching back that far, and I’m not sure how archaeology could document the temporary recession of water like that, but let’s put that aside. The film ignores the Biblical details about the pillar of smoke and fire that separated the Hebrews and the Egyptians or the powerful wind that split the water in two. Moses hurriedly leads his people across and Ramesses foolishly leads his men into the sea. Then tornadoes and a huge tidal wave sweep in and destroy the army and Ramesses barely gets out alive.

The Red Sea, starting to un-part

A little later, Moses carves the 10 Commandments at Malak’s instruction and rides off to Canaan.

Although the film deviates from the narrative in a variety of ways (the reason Moses has to leave Egypt, the guerilla war against Egypt, omitting most of the meetings between Moses and Pharaoh), these are comparatively small alterations to the text that can mostly be understood as simplifying the structure of the narrative and trying to add more ‘action’ to the film (which is to say, violence). It’s hard to have a blockbuster film without at least one major battle and a Shit Blows Up scene.

The biggest deviation from the text comes in the desire to pare out or naturalize the various miracles. The idea of using science to explain away Biblical miracles emerged in the 18^th century as a way of demonstrating the superiority of the Scientific Revolution over the supposed ignorance and superstition of the past. I’ve never found it a particularly useful way to understand Biblical miracles because it relies on the assumption that ancient people were so steeped in ignorance and superstition that they were incapable of exercising even the smallest bit of rational thought, curiosity, or skepticism. It assumes that people who lived far more intimately with nature than we do today were unable to actually observe nature. It also ignores the whole question of why ancient people interpreted a scientific phenomenon in a particular way, so it doesn’t actually explain very much. And Biblical miracle stories often emphasize that the observable facts don’t fit with naturalistic explanations. The whole point of saying in Exodus 7:19 that even water in jars and buckets will turn to blood is to demonstrate that natural explanations couldn’t explain it. For the first several miracles, Pharaoh’s wise men are able to duplicate the miracles, but after the third plague they admit they can’t reproduce the effects. The text is fairly plain; these events defy natural explanation. Accept the story as a miracle or discount it and explore why a culture would tell stories about miracles that didn’t happen, but trying to naturalize the miracles is just condescending to our ancestors.

Sucks to be Egyptian

Scott was clearly trying to avoid having to replicate DeMIlle’s Ten Commandments, and you can’t blame him. While that film also makes alterations to the text, it plays the miracles pretty much as written, so if Scott had followed the same strategy, all he would have gotten was a bigger remake of a Hollywood classic, and critics would probably have complained that he wasn’t bringing anything fresh to the film. Like it or not The Ten Commandments works quite well, as long as you accept the 50s film conventions and Heston’s acting style. There’s no point in remaking a successful film (although these days Hollywood doesn’t understand that), so I think Scott made the right choice to take the film in a very different direction. Its portrait of a deeply uncertain and conflicted Moses who argues with a very certain and angry Yahweh is an interesting one, one that highlights elements of the original text that don’t normally get a lot of attention. I’m not sure the film really succeeds, but it’s a valiant effort to breathe new life into a familiar story.

Next time, I’ll take a poke at the historical issues around the Exodus narrative.

 

Update: When I wrote this post, I forgot about a reference in Exodus 2 about the pharaoh who raised Moses dying before Moses saw the Burning Bush. So the Moses and Pharaoh are foster brother” thing is actually readily derivable from Exodus itself, although it is not pointed out in the text.

“Want to Know More?

Exodus: Gods and Kings is available on Amazon. If you want to read the story, check out the Bible!

The Physician: Getting More Things Wrong

Tags

Ben Kingsley, Medical Stuff, Medieval Islam, Medieval Persia, Movies I Hate, Religious Stuff, The Physician, Tom Payne

The majority of The Physician (2013, dir. Philip Stölzl, based on the novel by Noah Gordon) takes place in and around Isfahan sometime in the later 1020s, as we watch the Englishman Rob Cole (Tom Payne) studying medicine at the hospital run by the great Muslim intellectual Ibn Sina (Ben Kingsley). I really applaud the film for choosing a settling so unfamiliar to Western audiences, and for trying to depict one of the cultural glories of medieval Islam, namely its Golden Age, when Muslim intellectuals were at the forefront of human knowledge, well beyond Western Civilization. The film’s prologue text even foregrounds the superiority of Islamic medicine over Western medicine. Given the current tendency in the West to view Islam as a religion of violent, intolerant extremists, such an attitude is a nice corrective.

The film also deserves some credit for showing some of the religious complexity of the Islamic world. In the film, Isfahan is a Muslim city but it also hosts Jews and Zoroastrians. And the film acknowledges that the different religions are judged according to their own laws rather than Muslim law. So the film makes an attempt to show the relative tolerance that characterized Muslim society.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that the film actually gets things right. In fact, the film rather subtly undermines its message of Islamic medical superiority with its choice to make its hero an Englishman. And the film wildly bends the facts at a couple of key points.

The Plague

One of the major crises of the film occurs when the Bubonic Plague breaks out in Isfahan. People start dying, naturally, and the shah orders the gates locked, trapping everyone inside. But the brave scholars of the hospital reject the chance to leave before the gates are shut, deciding that they will stay and treat the sick.

Eventually, Rob realizes that the disease is transmitted by rat fleas, so Ibn Sina orders the use of rat poison and all the rats die, effectively ending the plague once the bodies are burned. There are problems with that idea; the poison isn’t likely to kill all the rats (especially since rats are notoriously cautious about what they eat), and the fleas that prefer to host on rats are more than capable of hosting on humans, since that’s how the disease gets passed to and between humans.

Ibn Sina (Kingsley) tracking the number of deaths from the Plague

Oh, and there’s also the small problem that there was no outbreak of the Black Death between the 7^th century and the 14^th century. This epidemic is entirely fictitious. (But, to  be fair, it’s not inconceivable that the Bubonic Plague could have broken out somewhere in this period.)

But the real problem to my eyes is that in a hospital full of Persian, Arabic, and Jewish scholars, including Ibn Sina, who is explicitly presented as the greatest living medical expert in the world, it’s the one plucky European who figures out that the Plague is transmitted by fleas. So while the film is presenting Islamic medicine as being superior to Western medicine, it takes a Westerner to figure out how to apply Islamic medicine to treat the problem.

The Dissection

During the epidemic, Rob suggests dissecting a corpse to see if the buboes could be surgically excised, but Ibn Sina refuses, saying that Islam forbids dissection. The lack of anatomical knowledge due to a supposed ban on dissection of corpses is a theme in the film. But although contemporary Islam does see medical dissection as a problematic issue, most contemporary experts on Islamic law agree that it’s permissible with a few limitations, and there’s no clear evidence that medieval Muslims were much different. A number of medieval Islamic medical experts supported the practice. So it’s unlikely that Ibn Sina would have refused to dissect a body in the middle of a medical crisis if doing so offered hope of a potential treatment.

But after the epidemic, Rob meets an elderly Zoroastrian man who is dying. When he learns that the Zoroastrians place no value on a person’s corpse, when the man dies, Rob hides his body in an ice cellar and over the next several weeks gradually dissects the corpse and draws what he sees.

Rob dissecting the old man’s corpse

However, there’s a villainous mullah in Isfahan, one who is in league with the Seljuk Turks who want to conquer Isfahan, and the mullah has agreed to cause trouble in the city. The mullah’s motives aren’t really clear, except that he’s a fanatic who thinks the shah is too lax. The mullah despises the hospital for being unislamic and orders his men to search it. They find the dissected corpse and drag Rob and Ibn Sina in front of the mullah, who sentences them both to death.

There’s a lot wrong here. It’s a wild misrepresentation of how Muslim communities operate. Mullahs are Shiite religious expects; they lead mosques, deliver sermons, and perform a variety of rituals that make them very loosely the equivalent of a Christian priest or minister. But like Christian priests, they have no legal authority and no power to compel people to obey them. The medieval Islamic court system was staffed by qadis, men who were trained in sharia (Islamic law) and then appointed to their office by the local ruler to act as a judge. Some mullahs were qualified to act as qadis, and vice versa, but the two offices were as distinct as a priest and a judge are today. And the villainous cleric is definitely a mullah; he’s shown preaching sermons in a mosque. So the mullah would not have any more legal authority to order someone’s execution than my Lutheran minister father did. And it’s highly unlikely that the shah would have allowed the execution of his star physician anyway. And, so far as I can tell, mutilating corpses was not a capital offense in medieval sharia. But, if I have learned anything in writing this blog, it’s that in the cinematic past, clergy just made up the law as they went, so they could use religion to justify absolutely anything they wanted.

 

The Operation

However, before Rob and Ibn Sina can be executed, the shah’s men arrive. The shah is having an attack of “side sickness”, Ye Olde Timey name for appendicitis, which won’t be medically recognized for another 500 years. And of course, appendicitis requires invasive surgery, which can’t be done without a good knowledge of anatomy, so there’s nothing to be done. Except that, totes coincidence!, Rob has just acquired a good knowledge of anatomy by dissecting that corpse. So Ibn Sina helps Rob operate on the shah and save his life by removing his appendix.

Again, the film glosses over a number of big problems here. Sure, Rob has learned a lot about anatomy, but how does he know that ‘side sickness’ is caused by the appendix as opposed to any other organ, and how does he know that removing the appendix is the right way to treat the condition? How do they deal with the problem of blood loss in an age that has no ability to perform transfusions? They drug with shah with opium to anesthetize him, so at least the script considers that issue. But the whole scenario is just wildly implausible.

And once again, the film resorts to the Westerner saving the day by employing Islamic medicine in a way that Muslims weren’t able to do, in this case because their religion is an obstacle to the advance of science. The greatest physician in the Muslim world is reduced to helping his English student perform an operation because the Englishman has miraculously surpassed him just by cutting open a corpse. So after establishing the superiority of Islamic medicine, the film subtly reasserts the notion that Islam is an obstacle to science.

And that view of Islam as backward is reinforced by the villainous mullah, who hates the hospital simply because it’s unislamic in some unspecified way. This point is driven home because, while Rob and Ibn Sina are operating on the shah, the mullah’s men are ransacking the hospital and lighting it on fire, and, for good measure, they attack the Jewish quarter as well, killing a lot of the Jews and burning down the synagogue. Rob conveniently finishes up the operation in time to rescue the Jews trapped in the synagogue’s mikvah. So once again, our Western hero saves the day from the forces of Islamic irrationality.

Rob and Ibn Sina watching the library burn

The film wants to show how scientifically advanced and religiously tolerant the Islamic world was, but it still somehow manages to fall prey to the clichés about Muslims being fanatical, hostile to non-Muslims, and anti-intellectual, and it resorts to the trope of the Westerner rescuing all the non-Westerners who are simply incapable of making the intellectual leaps that he is capable of.

Oh, and One More Thing

When Rob Cole gets back to England, he founds a hospital, 300 years before such things will exist in Western Europe. Have I mentioned lately that I hate this film?

Want to Know More?

The Physicianis available on Amazon. Noah Gordon’s The Physician (The Cole Trilogy) is available too.

The Physician: Who the Heck is Ibn Sina?

Tags

Ben Kingsley, Ibn Sina, Medieval Middle East, Medieval Persia, Noah Gordon, The Physician

Ok, after my last post about Stonewall, I’ve recovered enough to get back to The Physician (2013, dir. Philip Stölzl, based on the novel by Noah Gordon). Our protagonist, the anachronistically-named Rob Cole (Tom Payne) has gotten himself to Isfahan in Persia because he wants to study medicine with Ibn Sina (Ben Kingsley), whom he’s been told is the greatest physician in the world. He discovers that Ibn Sina maintains a hospital in the city where he teaches students and treats patients, up to and including the Shah Ala ad-Daula (Olivier Martinez). So who was Ibn Sina?

Ibn Sina

Abu ʿAli al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allah ibn Al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Sina (d.1037) was one of the giants of medieval Islamic culture. (Incidentally, his name translates to “Father of Ali, Husayn son of Abdullah son of Hasan son of Ali son of Sina” so ‘ibn Sina’ isn’t his ‘last name’ in the Western sense; instead it’s a patronymic, sort of like ‘Lars’ son’, my last name.)

He was born in the Central Asian town of Bukhara in modern Uzbekistan around 980 and enjoyed a remarkably cosmopolitan education, studying mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and fiqh (Islamic legal scholarship). Over the course of his life he worked as a physician, scholar, and eventually advisor to Ala ad-Daula, the ruler of Isfahan. Although known as a great intellectual and physician, he was also known to be arrogant, and extremely fond of both wine and slave girls. Later in life he suffered from colic, which in this case was probably either gallstones or kidney stones. The condition eventually killed him in 1037, perhaps due to a serious blockage or infection of the affected organ.

A 13th century drawing of Ibn Sina

However, his true importance lies in his writings. He wrote at least 450 works, around half of which still survive. His two greatest works were medical treatises, but more than a quarter of his writings dealt with philosophy. He wrote on psychology, metaphysics, epistemology, logic, mathematics, physics, alchemy, astronomy, kalam (Islamic theology), music, and poetry. In particular, he was profoundly influenced by the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, whose works had continued to circulate in the Arabic world even though they had mostly been lost to Western Europe.

He was certainly celebrated for his medical knowledge; he was the first to diagnose meningitis, for example, and his Canon became one of the foundational texts for pharmacology in the medieval period. But it is his impact on philosophy that is probably his greatest legacy. He is generally considered the greatest Muslim philosopher, and he applied his understanding of Aristotle to analyzing and interpreting the Koran and kalam, a path that later Muslim philosophers followed him down. Indeed later Muslim intellectuals of a more religiously stringent mindset accused him of heresy for trying to apply the principles of pagan philosophy to matters of divine revelation.

Another important element in his legacy was that his writings were translated into Latin and began to circulate in Western schools in the early 12^th century, right at the beginnings of the Western intellectual revival that occurred with the establishment of the first universities. Avicenna (as Ibn Sina was known in Latin) exercised an enormous influence on Western understanding of Aristotle’s ideas. Thomas Aquinas, for example, was profoundly influenced by Avicenna, which means that Avicenna has had an influence on modern Catholic theology. In fact, some scholars of philosophy consider him the most influential philosopher ever, although I’d be inclined to give that honor to Plato or Aristotle.

 

Ibn Sina in The Physician

Noah Gordon focuses almost exclusively on Ibn Sina’s work as a physician. He’s presented as running a large hospital dedicated in equal measure to treating the sick and teaching students. In one scene, he and his students discuss astronomy, but apart from that, the film entirely omits Ibn Sina’s other intellectual interests. And the film also gets his personality wrong, making him a gentle, humble, open-minded man rather than the rather intellectually arrogant man he actually was. And it portrays him as a fairly traditional Muslim when both in his intellectual work and his personal life he was more than a little unorthodox. But Kingsley gives a wonderful performance, if you like the whole ‘wise teacher’ trope. Kingsley is pretty much the best part of the film.

Ben Kingsley as Ibn Sina

The film also completely misrepresents his death. In the film, a riot breaks out in which the hospital is burned. Rob frantically searches for Ibn Sina and finds him in the library, staring at the burning books. He tells Rob that he has taken poison, gives him a book, and then readies himself for death as Rob leaves. This is 100% untrue, as I’ve already explained.

The film deserves major props for trying to introduce this incredibly important but largely unknown figure to Western audiences. In an age when Islam is mostly associated in Western minds with religious violence and the oppression of women, it’s refreshing to see a film that wants to look at Islam’s great intellectual heritage. It’s too bad the film couldn’t find a way to address the importance of Ibn Sina’s philosophy, but that would probably have blurred the film’s focus a great deal, and honestly, this film isn’t good enough to pull that off anyway. So I guess I’ll have to be content with a nice performance by Ben Kingsley. But as we’ll see in my next post, the Isfahan sequence has way more problems than not getting Ibn Sina exactly right.

Want to Know More?

The Physicianis available on Amazon. Noah Gordon’s The Physician (The Cole Trilogy) is available too.

If you want to know more about Ibn Sina, a good introduction to medieval philosophy in general would be the appropriately-named Philosophy in the Middle Ages, which has a whole chapter on him. You might also consider this short biography of the man, although the author is not a scholar.