Agora: Religious Troubles in Alexandria

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Agora, Alejandro Amenábar, Alexandria, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome, Christianity, Hypatia of Alexandria, Movies I Love, Parabalani, Rachel Weisz, Roman Empire, St Cyril of Alexandria

One of the central themes in Agora (2009, dir. Alejandro Amenábar) is religious conflict. The film’s prologue text tells us “The Library [of Alexandria] was not only a cultural symbol, but also a religious one, a place where the pagans worshipped their ancestral gods. The city’s long-established pagan cult was now challenged by the Jewish faith and a rapidly spreading religion until recently banned: Christianity.”

One of the very early scenes in the film takes place in the agora, the marketplace/public square that was the center of any Greek city. We see a Christian monk, Ammonius (Ashraf Barhom) debating with a pagan philosopher over a bed of burning coals. Ammonius demonstrates his faith in Jesus by walking across the bed without getting burned, and then he grabs the philosopher and throws him into the fire, where he is badly burned. This ‘miracle’ plants a seed of faith in the mind of Davus (Max Minghella) that will gradually blossom into a full-blown and violent conversion.

The religious upheaval in Alexandria remains front and center throughout the film. In 391, we see the pagan scholars of the Library attack the Christians for the assault on the philosopher, which turns into a siege when the Christians counter-attack, trapping Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) and Orestes (Oscar Isaac) in the Library. Eventually Emperor Theodosius resolves the problem by ordering the pagans to evacuate the Library and letting the Christians ransack it, destroying all the books in it and tearing down the statue of Serapis. Eventually, it is turned into a Christian church.

The second act opens in 415 and explores the rising tensions between Christians and Jews. Ammonius and Davus sneak into a musical performance that many Jews are attending and break it up by throwing stones. The Jews retaliate by raising a false alarm that one of the churches is on fire, and then trapping a bunch of monks in the church and stoning them to death. This leads to the expulsion of the Jews from Alexandria.

In the third act, Hypatia becomes the focus of the tensions, as Christians begin to suspect that she is the driving force behind Orestes’ conflicts with Patriarch Cyril (Sami Samir). They pressure Orestes to cut off all contact with her, and eventually she is attacked by a mob of Christians and murdered. Her death is presented as a sort of martyrdom to the cause of freedom of thought and intellectual inquiry.

When the film came out, there were complaints by Christian organizations that the film was propagating stereotypes about Catholics as narrowminded, irrational anti-science bigots. It’s easy to see why the critics felt this way—the Christians certainly come off as intolerant, violent thugs with no interest in understanding the physical world.

The Religious Situation in Alexandria

4^th century Alexandria was an extremely complex place. It was one of the largest cities in the ancient Mediterranean. It was one of the major centers of pagan worship, and it also housed one of the largest Jewish communities anywhere in the world after the Jewish diaspora. It occupied two of the city’s five quarters (although that doesn’t mean that 40% of the population was Jewish).

Alexandria was also a major center of Christianity from the 1^st century AD onward. Legend claims that the Evangelist Mark was one of the founders of the Christian community there, and by the 3^rd century the bishop of Alexandria was considered to be one of the five patriarchs of the Christian world (alongside those of Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome, and later one Constantinople). Other bishops looked to the Patriarch of Alexandria for leadership, although the patriarchs had little formal power over other bishops. (The patriarchs were essentially ‘first among equals’, rather than hierarchically above other bishops).

By the end of the 4^th century, the Christian community was extremely large, although it’s hard to say if it was the majority of the population or not. In the later 4^th century, the shifting religious balance of the Roman Empire created all sorts of religious conflicts in many cities. Christians who had up until the early 4^th century been the targets of state persecution began to attack pagans and to a lesser extent Jews, but pagans were still strong enough to fight back. Pagans were unused to having to share political and social power with Christians, and Christians increasingly expressed a sense that pagan temples and festivals were inherent threats to them, temptations to sin, and the like. In that situation, both Christians and pagans could easily become targets of religious aggression. Religious riots were a frequent problem in larger cities. While Christians did not always win the fights, the fact that the emperors were now Christian meant that they usually triumphed at the end of the dispute.

But the Christian community was not a monolithic group. Early Christianity saw many debates over Christology (basically, the theological issue of who exactly Jesus was and is). In the 3^rd century, the Alexandrian theologian Origen emphasized the Unity of God in a way that tended to downplay Jesus and treat him as ‘the image of God’, like light radiating from the sun. In the 4^th century the most heated controversy was over the question of whether Jesus was an original part of God or whether the Father had created the Son as his first act of creation. This debate first erupted in Alexandria in the early 4^th century when Arius of Alexandria (the proponent of the latter position) got into a heated dispute with Athanasius, the Patriarch of Alexandria. In 325, Emperor Constantine convened the Synod of Nicaea, which ultimately sided with Athanasius and declared Arianism a heresy. But it took close to a century for the issue to finally get resolved, because Arius had many supporters, and Arianism continued to find periodic political support in various parts of the Empire.

St Athanasius

Arianism wasn’t the only issue of controversy. 4^th century Christians carried about theology the way that modern Americans care about things like the economy, racial issues, gun control, whose football team is better, and whether Batman could defeat Superman. Alexandria was home to the Catechetical School, a theological school that also taught logic, literature, and natural philosophy (the sort of proto-science that Hypatia taught at the Serapeum). This ensured that there was a substantial number of men who cared deeply about learned matters from a Christian perspective and who were willing to engage in theological debate. In fact in the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries, the leading scholars of the Catechetical School were arguably more important than the Patriarchs of Alexandria in terms of their influence. The Novatianists rejected the idea that mortal sins (such as murder or worshipping of pagan gods) could be absolved, a doctrinal stance that put them at odds with most Christian theologians.

The New monasticism

In the 3^rd century, Egypt saw the emergence of perhaps the first Christian monastic communities. These earliest monks and nuns were seeking to reject the temptations of their bodies by indulging in acts of extreme asceticism (things like prolonged fasting, sleep deprivation, doing without property, permanent chastity, and so on), through which they hoped to learn to ‘turn off’ the physical desires of their bodies so that they could gain a clearer sense of God’s will.

But few of these men were ready to simply go out into the desert all on their own. They recognized that there were a lot of ways that novices could get into spiritual danger. So they tended to gather in communities where the more experienced among them could mentor the novices. One of the major centers of this early monasticism formed at Nitria, quite near to Alexandria. By the 390s, it was a community of thousands, large enough to support merchants and bankers who served the needs of the Nitrian monks. Other major communities developed just slightly further away, at Kellia and Scetis.

Because these monastic communities were so close to Alexandria, it was easy for tourists to come to watch them. And it was easy for the Nitrian monks to get involved in Alexandrian politics. So when controversy was brewing in Alexandria, the Nitrian monks sometimes participated in mob actions.

Alexandria was also home to a group of men called the Parabalani (literally, ‘those who risk their lives as nurses’). This group is very poorly documented but it seems to have been a quasi-monastic organization of men who devoted themselves to caring for the sick and burying the dead. This meant they were exposed to things like infectious diseases, especially during epidemics, and were thus risking their lives as an expression of Christian charity (especially since caring for the sick is one of the 7 Works of Mercy that Christ ordered his followers to perform). They were considered to be members of the clergy, and enjoyed some legal benefits that meant that people sometimes falsely claimed to be members of the group and the wealthy sometimes bought their way into them.

The group seems to have been notoriously disruptive in Alexandria. A law issued probably around 416 declared that there should not be more than 500 Parabalani, that their members should all be poor, and that they not attend public theatrical events or law courts. This was issued “on account of the terror of those who are called ‘parabalani’. “ This suggests that the Parabalani had a tendency to cause trouble at theaters and law courts. In 449, they were accused of bursting into a church and threatening a priest who was quarrelling with the patriarch of Alexandria. So it seems that the patriarchs of Alexandria (or at least the less scrupulous ones) had a tendency to use the Parabalani to bully their opponents into submission.

Turbulence in Alexandria

In 379, the Emperor Theodosius I decided to impose Nicene (Athanasian) Christianity on the entirety of the Empire. He expelled all the Arian clergy from their churches (including in Constantinople, a heavily Arian city). He ordered Demophilus, the Arian Patriarch of Constantinople, to embrace Nicene Christianity or give up his seat; Demophilus chose the latter. Theodosius appointed Gregory of Nazianzus, but another faction tried to sneak in Maximus the Cynic. This group appealed to Patriarch Peter of Alexandria, promising him that Maximus would admit that his patriarchate was inferior to that of Alexandria. But the Constantinopolitan populace was outraged and forced Maximus to retreat from the city. Two years later, Theodosius convened the First Council of Constantinople in an effort to resolve these controversies. After a great deal of wrangling over the question of whether Gregory was qualified to be patriarch, he stepped down, but the Council decreed that the patriarchs of Constantinople had precedence over those of Alexandria, because Constantinople was the New Rome. This ruling so outraged the Alexandrian population that a massive riot engulfed the city, during which the Catechecal School was completely destroyed, never to be rebuilt.

A decade later, in 391, Theodosius issued an order forbidding the public performance of any religious rituals that were not Christian. Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria took control of a temple of Dionysius and when a subterranean worship space was discovered in it, he mockingly displayed the religious paraphernalia that were found therein. This provoked the pagans of Alexandria to riot over this insult. The Christians eventually counter-attacked, probably with the aid of either the Parabalani or the Nitrian monks, and forced the pagans to retreat into the Serapeum. Theophilus apparently appealed to Emperor Theodosius, who responded by pardoning all the pagans for the riot but giving Theophilus permission to destroy the temple.

Theophilus standing on the temple of Dionysius

But Theophilus was not just hostile to the pagans. He also persecuted the remaining Origenists, reportedly massacring 10,000 Origenist monks (the number is probably exaggerated). In 403, he also helped orchestrate the removal of the patriarch of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, because John was protecting some Origenists and because Theophilus was hoping to reverse the subordination of Alexandria to Constantinople.

When Theophilus died in 412, a riot broke out over the question of who should succeed him, his nephew Cyril or his rival, the archdeacon Timothy. When Cyril’s supporters won, Cyril quickly began persecuting the Novatianists, evicting them from their churches.

More significantly, Cyril began to quarrel with the Christian governor of Egypt, Orestes, who perceived Cyril as trying to encroach on his political authority. In 415, Orestes issued an edict regulating mime shows, which were extremely popular in Alexandria and were frequently the occasion of violence (remember that law dealing with the Parabalani?). Cyril sent Hierax to find out what the edict involved. Hierax approved of the edict and read it aloud in a theater, which provoked the Jewish population, who considered Hierax a troublemaker and suspected him of trying to incite violence. The Jews rioted and to mollify them, Orestes had Hierax publicly tortured, intending to send Cyril a signal about who was really in charge.

Cyril threatened to retaliate against the Jews, which infuriated them even further. They organized a scheme in which they spread word that a Christian church was on fire. When the Christians turned out to save the church, the Jews attacked them, killing many. Cyril responded by expelling a reported 50,000 Jews from the city and allowing the Christians to plunder them as they left.

St Cyril of Alexandria

Both Cyril and Orestes complained about the other to the emperor and Cyril reportedly tried to broker a peace between them, but he seems to have expected Orestes to acknowledge that as a religious leader, Cyril had the superior authority, which Orestes refused to accept. A group of monks (either Parabalani or Nitrians) attacked Orestes and one of them, Ammonius, hit the governor on the head with a rock. In the ensuing brawl, Orestes’ bodyguard fled, but the Alexandrian population intervened to rescue him.

Orestes had Ammonius tortured to death, but Cyril promptly confiscated the corpse and declared the monk a martyr. The Christian population wasn’t convinced, and Cyril eventually had to abandon his attempts to canonize Ammonius. Popular pressure forced the two leaders to reconcile, but both seem to have attempted to get the upper hand. Orestes sought support from Hypatia, who was influential with what remained of the city’s pagan community, while Cyril began claiming that Orestes was abandoning his faith and that Hypatia was seducing him either sexually or with magic.

Eventually, a mob of Christians attacked Hypatia and either dragged her out of her chariot, took her to a church, stripped her naked and then stoned her to death or else dragged her through the streets until she died. Neither of the two descriptions of her death says exactly who did this, saying only that they were Christians led by Peter, who is variously described as a ‘reader’ (a church official) or a ‘magistrate’ (a secular official). Given the violent tendencies of the Parabalani, modern suspicion has tended to fall on them, and since we know that Cyril’s successor as patriarch used them to violently intimidate his opponents, it’s usually suggested that Cyril was behind the killing, either directly or indirectly. It’s certainly a plausible reconstruction from what we know, but it’s going beyond the sources to say either that Cyril ordered it or that the Parabalani were the ones who did it.

Hypatia (Weisz) about to be stoned by the Parabalani

Agora

Agora does a pretty good job of capturing the turbulent nature of Alexandrian politics in the period from 391 to 415. Historically, pagans, Jews, and Christians all took their turns both as instigators and victims of violence, and the film shows this. The sequence it offers of Christians harassing pagans in the marketplace, which grows into an anti-Christian riot until the Parabalani get involved and siege the pagan scholars inside the Serapeum until the emperor orders the destruction of the temple is essentially factual. Where the film takes a liberty is that it emphasizes the destruction of the Serapeum’s library, which is not mentioned in the surviving sources, which instead dwell on the destruction of the pagan idols.

Orestes (Oscar Isaac) rioting against the Christians

Later, the film shows the Parabalani throwing rocks at a theatrical performance, which triggers first a Jewish protest to Orestes, then a Jewish scheme to lure the Parabalani into a church and stone them. That triggers the expulsion of the Jews. Hierax is omitted, as are a few other small details, but the sequence of events is basically true.

Cyril’s attempt to reconcile with Orestes is presented as a power play in which the patriarch puts Orestes on the spot during a church service, reading out 2 Timothy 2: 9-12 (“I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God. A woman should learn in quietness and full submission.  I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.”). It’s a blatant attack on Hypatia, and when Orestes refuses to kneel before the Bible, he appears to be defying not just Cyril but God. This incident happened, but we don’t know what verses Cyril read out in the church, or that the incident was an attack on Hypatia. Nor do we have any specific reason to think that Cyril was a misogynist, although it would not be surprising if he was.

After that, people mob Orestes as he leaves the church, Ammonius hits Orestes with a rock, and Ammonius is executed. Cyril proclaims him a martyr, and his fellow Parabalani plot to murder Hypatia, despite Davus’ efforts to save her. Davus stabs her to death out of mercy before she can be stoned, but beyond that, Hypatia’s death happens roughly the way one of the sources says it did.

Patriarch Cyril (Sami Samir)

So the film’s narrative is based around a pretty solid core of fact. Some details are left out or simplified, and a few (such as Cyril’s attack on Hypatia during the church service and Davus’ mercy killing) are invented. The parts of the film that focus on the political and religious strife in the city are about 80% accurate and much of what is not accurate is reasonable invention.

However, the film does oversimplify the conflicts. As I noted, the Christians of Alexandria were not a unified group. Theophilius and Cyril orchestrated violence against the Origenist and Novatianists and other Christians whom they felt were religiously in error. In the film, the Christians seem mostly united behind Cyril. Orestes seems to be almost the lone Christian opposed to him. One of Hypatia’s other former students, Bishop Synesius (Rupert Evans) attempts to support Orestes, but ultimately feels compelled to side with Cyril. The incident that starts all the violence, the throwing of a pagan philosopher into bed of burning coals by a group of Parabalani, actually involved two different groups of Christians.

The film also oversimplifies things by making the pagans, including Hypatia, the only people genuinely interested in ‘science’, while making the Christians almost entirely disinterested in the physical world. The one time the Parabalani discuss the issue of astronomy, Davus (who understands the heliocentric theory because he’s heard Hypatia explain it) says that only God knows the answer. That essentially puts the Christians in the situation of believing that the physical world is just a mystery of faith that cannot be understood through reason. But that’s a caricature of what late ancient Christians actually thought. While they wrestled with the question of how to use traditional (that is, pagan) knowledge, they did not necessarily deny the many accomplishments of natural philosophy. The Catechecal School taught many of the same things that would have been taught at the Serapeum. Christian authors were hostile to the parts of ancient learning that seemed to them explicitly polytheistic, but not necessarily to subjects like mathematics and natural philosophy.

I don’t think the film is actively anti-Christian, although it seems likely that Amenábar’s atheism influenced his treatment of the story. But I can understand why some have seen the film as hostile to Christianity. The problem is that historically, the Alexandrian Christians were in fact pretty violent during this period. Cyril is one of the most unpleasant men ever to have been accorded sainthood, and if anything the film goes a little easy on him by omitting some of his machinations against his fellow Christians.

However, the casting decisions do perhaps unintentionally make the Christians seem more villainous than the pagans. Hypatia and Theon are played by two light-skinned British actors (Rachel Weisz and Michael Lonsdale, although Weisz’s family is Jewish), whereas the two main villains of the piece, Ammonius and Cyril are played by more swarthy-skinned Israeli and Israeli-Arab actors (Ashraf Barhom and Sami Samir). Since American audiences are accustomed to seeing Middle Eastern actors in roles like terrorists, this casting choice tends to encourage the audience to read Ammonius and Cyril as villainous even before we understand what they want.

Ammonius (Barhom) and Davus (Minghella)

The depiction of the Parabalani is also probably unfair to them. In one scene, Ammonius shows Davus the pleasure of feeding the poor, and in another scene they are show disposing of the dead (victims of the riots the Parabalani were involved in), but overall the film offers minimal awareness that this group was devoted to charity. Instead, they tend to be shown lounging about waiting for an excuse to be violent, and many of them are shown carrying swords. We have little information about how this group was organized, how they lived, or how much of their time was devoted to charity, but the film draws them in broad strokes and never tries to give the audience an understanding of who the Parabalani were other than violent extremists.

Agora is not a perfect film. As noted, it simplifies and at times oversimplifies things. Its depiction of Hypatia’s research into the heliocentric theory is pure conjecture (although given what we know of her actual interests, it’s not implausible conjecture). It conflates the Serapeum with the Great Library and depicts a single catastrophic destruction of that library when in reality it was more a slow death by many cuts. Its narrative of peaceful pagan science vs violent Christian faith is more simple and tidy than things were in reality. Its depiction of 1^st century Roman soldiers in 5^th century Alexandria is nonsensical.

But overall, the film approaches its subject with far more respect for the historical facts than most movies. Of its two plotlines, one is basically true while the other is at least respectful of the facts. It delves into a poorly known figure and a moment in time that cinema has rarely (if ever) attempted to depict and manages to provide a reasonable depiction of the events. It treats its audience with respect and manages to explain a complex intellectual puzzle in ways the audience can understand, and it takes as its centerpiece the joy of intellectual inquiry and makes the joy intelligible to non-scholars. I’d rank it as one of the better films on ancient Rome.

This review was paid for by Jerise, who made a donation to my Paypal account. Thanks, Jerise! If there’s a film you would like me to review, please make a generous donation via Paypal and let me know what you’d like me to review. If I can track it down and if I think it’s appropriate, I’ll review it.

Want to Know More?

Agora is available through Amazon.

St Cyril, despite being a rather unpleasant man, was extremely important in the development of early Christianity, and there’s a good deal written about him. Norman Russell’s Cyril of Alexandria would be a good place to start. Russell has also written about Theophilus of Alexandria, Cyril’s predecessor. Taken together, these books would be a good look into the turbulent religious world of Late Roman Alexandria.

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Agora: Hypatia and the Heliocentric Theory

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Agora, Alejandro Amenábar, Alexandria, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome, Hypatia of Alexandria, Interesting Women, Middle East, Movies I Love, Oscar Isaac, Rachel Weisz, Roman Empire

Agora (2009, dir. Alejandro Amenábar) is a surprisingly fresh film about ancient Rome. Unlike most films about ancient Rome, which tend to focus on the period from roughly 100 BC to 68 AD, Agora is set in the late 4^th/early 5^th century AD, as the Roman Empire was entering the decline from which its western half would never recover. Instead of focusing on sword-and-sandal heroics, it tells the twin stories of the religious upheavals in Alexandria, Egypt (one of the largest cities of the ancient world) and of the intellectual pursuits of the female philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria (Rachel Weisz). One of my readers, Jerise, has kindly made a donation to my Paypal account and asked me to review it. I was planning on getting to this film eventually, so thank you Jerise for giving me a reason to get to it sooner rather than later!

Agora tells a complex story, so this review is going to focus specifically on its depiction of Hypatia. We’ll look at the political and religious upheavals in Alexandria in the next post.

Hypatia

Of the historical Hypatia we know only bits and pieces. She was probably born between 350 and 360 AD, and thus was in her 30s or 40s in 391 when the film opens (making Weisz just about the right age to play her). Her father was Theon of Alexandria, a mathematician of some note who was probably responsible for her unusually high degree of education in an era when women were rarely educated at all. She became a Neoplatonic philosopher and taught male students at Alexandria, numbering both pagans and Christians as her pupils. That in itself indicates that she was held in remarkable regard. One of her pupils, Synesius, went on to become the bishop of Ptolemais in Libya, while another, Orestes, became the praefectus Augustalis, essentially the governor of Egypt, although the film simply calls him Prefect.

According to the Greek historian Damascius (d. after 538 AD), one of Hypatia’s students professed his love for her. Damascius gives two different versions of her response. The more polite version (which he discounts) is that she told him that music was the antidote for love. The less polite version is that she handed him a bloody menstrual rag and said “this is what you really love, my young man, but you do not love beauty for its own sake.” Her point in the latter story is that he is merely infatuated with her body, but her body has an ugly side to it.

Of her scholarly works, comparatively little is known, because none of her writings have survived. She is known to have been a mathematician like her father. She was clearly interested in astronomy, because she edited and corrected the most important ancient work on the subject, the Almagest of the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy. The Almagest still survives, so we do have something with Hypatia’s fingerprints on it, as it were. She was also interesting in the geometry of cones. She has incorrectly been attributed as the inventor of the astrolabe and the hydrometer (a device for determining the density of liquids). Beyond that, all we know is that she subscribed to the Neoplatonic school of philosophy and that she was a pagan, a fact that was to become extremely important to her eventual fate. As a Neoplatonist, she probably believed in a single god who had much in common with the Christian Creator.

Since we have no historical images of Hypatia, here’s Rachel Weisz instead

Unfortunately for Hypatia, late Roman Alexandria was an extremely tumultuous place religiously, with intense political and religious disputes between the pagans, multiple sects of Christians, and Jews. The city was subject to frequent religious riots and acts of violence. The patriarch of the city, Cyril of Alexandria, was locked in a struggle with Orestes, and because Hypatia was a good friend of Orestes, Cyril’s supporters became convinced that she was preventing a reconciliation between the two men.

In 415, a group of Cyril’s supporters attacked Hypatia. According to Socrates of Constantinople (an historian who died some time after 439 AD), a religious official named Peter led a crowd who waylaid her as she returned home on day in a chariot, dragged her to one of the major churches, stripped her naked and stoned her to death with tiles. They dismembered her corpse and had it burned. The 7^th century historian John of Nikiu (who seems to have been quite hostile to Hypatia) says that Peter’s crowd seized her, stripped her naked, and dragged her through the streets until she died, and then burned her body. A later and more lurid account claims that the rioting crowd flayed her with sea-shells, a detail that modern scholars entirely discount. Regardless of exactly what happened, it’s clear that a mob of Christians led by Peter murdered her and burned her body. Thus died the most highly-educated woman of the ancient world (at least that we know anything about).

Hypatia in Agora

Amenábar’s film manages to include virtually everything we know about Hypatia, although it fleshes out the details considerably with its own invention. But one of the things I love about this film that, with the exception of two fictitious slaves (Davus and Aspasius), virtually every named character in the film was a real historical person. That in itself suggests that Amenábar (who wrote the script) was serious about trying to be historically accurate.

The film opens in 391 with Hypatia teaching Orestes (Oscar Isaac) and Synesius (Rupert Evans). Since Orestes is a pagan, this correctly captures the fact that she taught both pagans and Christians. Orestes is in love with her, makes a public declaration of his love by playing a tune he has composed on the aulos in a theater, and then giving her the aulos. The next day, she responds by giving him her menstrual rag, which he throws down in disgust, not really getting the point she was making. Historically, Orestes is not the student who professed his love to her, but this modest adjustment to fact allows the film to set up the idea that Orestes will be in love with her his whole life, even after he becomes the Prefect.

Oscar Isaac as Orestes

In the film, Hypatia teaches at the Serapeum, an important temple dedicated to the late Egyptian god Serapis. Her father Theon is described as the ‘director’ of this institution, which contains an enormous library, all that’s left of the Great Library of Alexandria. Although the film does distinguish between the Great Library and the Serapeum library, it doesn’t really go out of its way to do so, giving viewers a sense that Hypatia taught at the Great Library.

The Great Library of Alexandria was founded at the end of the 3^rd century BC by Ptolemy Soter, the first member of the last pharaonic dynasty of Egypt, the Ptolemids. At its height, it had over 500,000 books housed in it, far and away the greatest library of the ancient world. It was large enough that the collection wasn’t all housed in one building. The Serapeum was one of the ‘daughter’ libraries.

One of the little puzzles of ancient history is what happened to the Great Library. Although various people have been accused of destroying it, it probably was destroyed gradually by a series of crises, including Julius Caesar’s siege in 48 BC, Emperor Aurelian’s siege in 269 AD, Emperor Diocletian’s harsh actions in 298 AD, Bishop Theophilius’ destruction of the Serapeum in 391 AD, and the Arab conquest of the city in 641.

The film’s version of the Serapeum. The library is the round building in back

Theon may possibly have been associated with the Serapeum, perhaps being educated there, but there is no evidence either that he was the director of the institution or that Hypatia taught there. As a leading philosopher of Alexandria, it’s not a huge stretch to make her one of the Serapeum’s faculty, but that’s an invention of the film.

Hypatia’s Astronomy

Another thing I love about this film is that one of its two plots is Hypatia’s drive to figure out an astronomical puzzle. The film opens and closes with the shot of the whole Earth, making it clear that this film is to some extent about astronomy. Early in the film, Hypatia lays out the classical Greek understanding of the universe. The Earth must be the center of the universe because while objects in the heavens move in perfect circular orbits, on Earth objects move in a linear direction downward, toward the center of the universe. If the Earth were not the center of the universe, objects would fly off the planet seeking the center of the universe. In the absence of any concept of gravity, the idea that physical things have an inherent attraction to the center of the universe makes a pretty good explanation.

Hypatia’s slave Davus (Max Minghella) is in love with her. Having listened to her lectures, he builds an orrery, a model of the universe according to the astronomer Ptolemy’s system. It shows the Sun and the planets moving in circular orbits around the Earth, but each planet (including the Sun) also rotates around the moving point on their own circular orbits, known as an epicycle. This was Ptolemy’s attempt to explain some of the irregularities in the observed motion of the planets, irregularities actually caused by the fact that we are observing the motion of the planets from a platform that is itself moving. Orestes ridicules this system as needlessly complex. Why, he demands, wouldn’t stationary planets be more perfect than moving ones?

Hypatia looks at Davus’ orrery

That question sets Hypatia off on an intellectual journey that will last throughout the film and through the rest of her life. Every so often the film gives us a scene in which Hypatia and others try to reason out what’s actually going on with the planets.

In my opinion, the film does an excellent job of explaining the logic of ancient astronomy as well as how Hypatia slowly solves the problems inherent to it. In a later scene, she and her students discuss the Heliocentric theory, first proposed by Aristarchus of Samos centuries before. As one of her fellow scholars points out, the Heliocentric theory makes no sense. If the Earth was moving, why wouldn’t there be a constant wind against us as the planet moved? Why wouldn’t objects we dropped fall a distance behind where we were when we dropped them (since the planet would have moved on)? These are entirely reasonable objections to the Heliocentric theory based on what knowledge the Greeks had access to. So while most films tend to depict pre-modern people as scientifically backward and foolish, Agora treats its characters as intelligent, capable of observation and reason, and coming to reasonable conclusions based on what they know.

Later on, Hypatia conducts an experiment in which Aspasius, her slave and research assistant, drops a bag of sand from the mast of a ship as it sails. Instead of falling a distance behind the mast, the bag lands near the mast. So, she reasons, the objection that objects would fall away from us as the Earth moves must be invalid. She begins to think that maybe the Heliocentric theory might be right.

Still later, Hypatia debates the problem of the Earth moving around the Sun with Orestes. She suddenly realizes that the problem is that everyone has been blinded by the perfection of the circle. Maybe the Earth’s movement isn’t circular. But what sort of shape could explain things?

Then she realizes that one of the shapes contained within a cone, the ellipsis, might do the trick. In a scene that is one of the climaxes of the film, she works out the puzzle of the Heliocentric theory as Aspasius watches. It’s a truly beautiful scene that celebrates the joy of intellectual discovery. Have a look.

However, to be clear, there is absolutely no evidence that Hypatia actually did find a way to prove the Heliocentric theory. The film acknowledges in a epilogue text that Johannes Kepler is credited with the discovery. It doesn’t say that everything it’s shown us is hypothetical, which is unfortunate. When the film first came out, I was teaching Early Western Civilization, and I decided to allow my students a little bit of extra credit by going to see the film and then writing a 2 page paper about it. I told them beforehand that there is no evidence that Hypatia proved the Heliocentric theory, but every single student who decided to take the extra credit came away from the film convinced that she had.

That’s why historical accuracy in film matters. Despite the active admonition of a college instructor that the film was going to show them something entirely hypothetical and probably untrue, all of my students found the dramatic visual presentation of the material more persuasive. Film is an incredibly powerful teaching tool, and film makes owe it to their audiences to be more careful about what they teach their audiences. Remember that there is no such thing as ‘just a movie’.

Despite this major flaw in the film, I find myself forgiving Agora on this point. While the film overstates what we know about Hypatia intellectually, Amenábar is careful to base his film’s speculation on two things that we actually do know about Hypatia: she was interested in astronomy, and she was interested in conic sections. Had she combined those two interests with a certain degree of experimentation, it’s not impossible that she could have worked out a proof for the Heliocentric theory 1200 years early. And in the film, she makes her discovery and is then killed by the Christian mob before she has a chance to tell anyone, so her discovery dies with her. In a nice touch, as she’s dying, she looks up and sees an ellipsis in the dome of the room.

It’s also incredibly rare for a film to depict a woman as an intellectual, a scholar, and a discoverer of truth. Typically, our cinema celebrates the intellectual work of men while glossing over the critical contributions of women. So I find myself liking this film the way I like Hidden Figures, for highlighting a woman for her smarts, not her beauty.

But…

There is one really egregious anachronism in the film that bugged me the whole way through. Although it’s set in Alexandria in the late 4^th and early 5^th century AD, the Roman soldiers are shown dressed in gear from about the 2^nd century AD, with rectangular shields, metal breast-plates, pilums, and helmets with a neck-flap, instead of the mail tunics and round shields they should have had. That would be like making a movie set in the modern day and dressing and equipping all the American soldiers as minute men.

Want to Know More?

Agora is available through Amazon.

There hasn’t been a lot written about Hypatia by scholars, since the hard facts about her are so few. But Edward J. Watts’ Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher might be worth your time.

Also, novelist Faith Justice has written a number of blog posts about Agora, so you might find what she has to say worthwhile.

I, Claudius: First Comments

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BBC, Claudius, Derek Jacobi, I, Claudius, Movies I Love, Robert Graves, The Julio-Claudians

As I was growing up in the 1970s, my parents were devotees of Masterpiece Theater, which ran a seemingly endless series of BBC costume dramas. We only had one tv set (apart from a crappy little black and white set that lived in the kitchen), so I watched what they watched: The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Elizabeth R, Upstairs Downstairs, and I, Claudius. I think those shows played a big role in teaching me to love history. By the time I Claudius rolled around, I was old enough to have some real understanding of what was going on. It was my first introduction to Roman history, and I confess that whenever I think of Augustus, Livia, Caligula, and Claudius, I still tend to picture Brian Blessed, Sian Phillips, John Hurt, and Derek Jacobi. I watched the show again when I was in college and had studied some Roman history, so I appreciated it more. And over the years, I’ve thought about watching it again, now that I’ve had a chance to dig further into Roman history.

So I was incredibly excited when a reader of this blog made a very generous donation to my Paypal account and asked me to review I, Claudius. Last night as I sat down to watch the first episode, I felt a thrill of childhood nostalgia as the brash, jarring opening music played and a serpent slithered across a portrait of the Emperor Claudius. So my next couple of posts will be about this classic look at Rome’s first emperors.

The show has a lot to recommend it. The cast is excellent and one of the joys of the series is spotting actors you know for elsewhere, like Patrick Stewart, John Rhys-Davies, Simon McCorkindale, Bernard Hill (Theoden in the the Lord of the Rings movies), Kevin McNally (from the Pirates of the Caribbean series), Patricia Quinn (of Rocky Horror fame), John Castle (from my favorite movie ever), Patsy Byrne (Nursie in the second season of Blackadder), and someone from damn near every episode of Doctor Who ever made. The script is rich and complex, the characters fully-realized, and the story combines the emotional complexity of a family drama with the high melodrama of political intrigue. This show has everything: scheming, adultery, false accusations of rape, murder, poisonings, insanity, betrayal, incest… It’s everything American soap operas hope to be, but done much better and solidly based in historical fact.

The series is based on Robert Graves’ novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God, published n 1934 and 35. Graves was a celebrated poet, novelist, and non-fiction author; his White Goddess exercised a profound influence on the nascent neo-pagan revival, his collect of Greek myths still sells well, and his translation of the Latin classic The Golden Ass remains one of the best. The two I, Claudius novels, however, represent his greatest work; they still rank high on the list of the best English-language novels ever.

Robert Graves

The novels purport to be the autobiography of the Emperor Claudius (41-54AD). According to the conceit, after Claudius became emperor he decided to write his autobiography to reveal all the sordid truths about his extended family and predecessors, the Julio-Claudian dynasty. But a sibyl prophesied to him that the book would not be read for 1900 years. The scenario is less preposterous than it sounds, since Claudius was actually an historian and is known to have written an autobiography, although none of his writings have survived.

Graves’ books and the tv series are heavily based on three major narrative sources for the first century, the Annals and Histories of Tacitus, the 12 Caesars of Suetonius, and the Roman History of Cassius Dio. While there are other sources for the Julio-Claudian dynasty, these three sources give the most sustained narratives for the period. Graves’ novels draw heavily from the stories these three authors tell, but he fills in a lot of blank spots with his own invention to create a fiction that draws heavily from historical sources.

One of Graves’ concerns with these novels was to liberate historical novels with the self-conscious archaizing that was so common in 19th century historical novels. His characters don’t use ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and other such old-fashioned language meant to convey a sense of the seriousness and importance of the past. Instead, his characters speak in common 20th-century English, employing contemporary idioms, to communicate a sense that the past felt like the present to those who lived it. So, for example, early in the series, Augustus comments that he wants some information ‘chapter and verse’. That’s a reference to the division of the Bible into verses, which was done in the 13th century by Archbishop Stephen Langton, so there’s no way Augustus could have used such a phrase. But the anachronism works because it makes Augustus seem like a contemporary of the reader, which was Graves’ whole point.

However, Graves used his sources very uncritically. His goal was to create a satisfying fictional story, not a truly accurate historical piece of work. The major problem with the three Roman authors is that all three were writing in the 2^nd century AD, long after the establishment of the imperial office, and none of them were fans of the Julio-Claudian emperors. Tacitus provides the most coherent narrative but consistently speculates in negative ways about his subjects. Suetonius had access to the imperial archives and therefore probably had the best source of information, but was deeply hostile to the emperors, was happy to rely on sources like drinking songs and obscene graffiti, and generally twisted his material to present his subjects in the worst possible light. Dio’s narrative is much more removed from the events, since he was writing at the end of the 2^nd century AD, and large portions of it have not survived; he also made a lot of factual mistakes.

The result is a rather lurid story about these men and women, but one that is probably not really true in its essence, despite being rooted in historical sources. While Graves was interested in history, he was far more interested in getting to what he considered the higher poetic truths behind the facts. In the next several posts, we’ll look at some of the problems with I, Claudius’ version of events.

The Eagle: Worst Prologue Text Ever

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Bad Prologue Texts, Hadrian's Wall, Movies I Love, Roman Britain, Roman Empire, Roman Scotland, Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle, The Eagle of the Ninth, The Ninth Legion

The Eagle (2011, dir. Kevin McDonald, based on Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Eagle of the Ninth is at least the third movie set in Roman Scotland (along with King Arthur and Centurion), and it’s by far the best of the three. There’s a lot of things to like about this film, but the prologue text is not one of them. It might, in fact, be the worst prologue text to a historical film I’ve ever seen, because virtually every element of it is problematic.

Here it is:

“In 120 AD, the Ninth Legion of the Roman Army marched into the unconquered territory of Northern Britain. They were never seen again. All 5,000 men vanished, along with their treasured standard…The Eagle. Shamed by this great loss, the Emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of a giant wall that cut off the North of Britain forever. Hadrian’s Wall marked the end of the known world.”

Normally in historical films, a prologue text is used to provide important historical background for audiences unfamiliar with a particular historical setting. Some films also use them to set a mood or establish the film’s viewpoint on the setting, but they almost always provide a little basic fact to orient the viewer.

With that in mind, let’s take this prologue text an element at a time.

“In 120 AD, the Ninth Legion of the Roman Army marched into the unconquered territory of Northern Britain. They were never seen again. All 5,000 men vanished, along with their treasured standard…The Eagle.”

As I’ve discussed before when I looked at Centurion, this isn’t historical fact at all. It’s entirely the invention of British children’s author Rosemary Sutcliff. When she wrote The Eagle of the Ninth, she offered an interesting explanation for what happened to the 9^th Legion, which disappears from the historical record in the early 2^nd century AD after being stationed in Britain. Her theory that the Legion was sent into Scotland and subsequently destroyed is certainly a possibility, but there’s literally no evidence for it. It’s more likely that it was destroyed during a rebellion in Roman Britain. There’s a bit of weak evidence that it was redeployed to the Rhineland. Perhaps it was just disbanded for administrative reasons. But it’s important to realize that the film’s scenario is entirely made-up.

Rosemary Sutcliff

“Shamed by this great loss, the Emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of a giant wall”

If the Legion’s debacle in Scotland didn’t happen, it should be obvious that it wasn’t the reason Hadrian built his famous wall. We don’t actually know what Hadrian was thinking when he ordered the construction of the wall for the simple reason that we don’t have any documents about that decision. We can certainly make some reasonable inferences based on Roman policy toward its European frontier, but it’s not provable what the intention was.

Also, calling it a ‘giant wall’ is a bit misleading. It was a very long wall, but ‘giant’ suggests size more than length, and as far as we know, the wall probably wasn’t more than 10-12 feet tall. The surviving ruins don’t allow us to know much about its height or battlements, but what survives doesn’t really suggest that the wall was unusually tall, just very long.

One of the mile castles on Hadrian’s Wall

“that cut off the North of Britain forever. Hadrian’s Wall marked the end of the known world.”

This is just nonsense. Hadrian’s Wall did no such thing. The Wall is the best surviving example of what the Romans called a limes, which as essentially a wall marking a frontier. But it’s not unique. Similar structures (at least in function) existed in North Africa and in Eastern Europe. Although it was garrisoned at small posts called ‘mile castles’ along its length, it probably was not primarily intended to repulse an invasion, for the simple reason that the small garrisons were a mile apart, and the individual garrisons were probably not staffed by more than a half-dozen men at a time. It would have been very easy for an invading force to simply climb the wall in between mile castles, and it would not have been too challenging for a decent force to overwhelm the garrison at a particular post. Furthermore, sailing around it wouldn’t have been too difficult. As a military structure, the Wall would simply have slowed down an invasion a little, giving the Roman forces stationed further south advanced warning of an attack.

Instead, a limes was much more like a customs station than a truly defensible position. Each mile castle had a gateway running through it (although some of the gateways opened onto such steep slopes that they can’t have been seriously intended to handle much traffic). Those gates (one of which the film shows) allowed regular passage between Roman Britain and what we’ll anachronistically call Scotland. It served to allow the Romans to control (and perhaps tax) trade with the tribes to the north of the Wall.

The Romans had no intention of cutting off all contact with the tribes of Scotland. Their first line of defense against those tribes was to maintain regular contact with them. It was standard for the Romans to reward a few tribes beyond a limes with the Roman version of ‘most favored trading status’. By singling out a couple of neighboring tribes to receive trade and periodic diplomatic gifts; this gave the rulers of those tribes privileged access to exotic goods from within the Empire, like wine, silk, and silver tableware. In exchange those tribes provided the Romans with intelligence on the other tribes and might ally with the Romans against hostile tribes. If an allied tribe became a problem, the Romans would simply make one of their enemies the most favored trading partner. By playing the tribes off against each other this way, the Romans rarely had to actually defend their frontiers.

Far from marking the end of the world, Hadrian’s Wall regulated Roman interactions with southern Scotland.

Also, Hadrian’s Wall didn’t create a permanent boundary (except in the sense of a physical wall that still survives). His successor Antoninus Pius decided to push the Roman frontier northward. He built a second wall, the so-called Antonine Wall, that ran between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde. He ordered construction to start in 142 AD. For unknown reasons, the Antonine Wall was abandoned around 162 AD, when the Empire pulled back to Hadrian’s Wall. Then in 208, Septimius Severus decided to re-occupy southern Scotland and ordered the Antonine Wall repaired. This occupation was abandoned just a few years later, at which point Hadrian’s Wall became the permanent frontier for the rest of the Roman period.

Remains of the Antonine Wall

Whereas most films use prologue texts to establish the actual historical context, this movie uses its prologue text to assert a set of blatant, nonsensical falsehoods.

Let me summarize the problems with this by rephrasing the prologue text to demonstrate just how nonsensical it really is. “In 2017, the American army marched into the unconquered territory of Mexico. They were never seen again. All the men vanished, along with their traditional standard, the American flag. Shamed by this great loss, President Donald Trump ordered the construction of a giant wall that cut off Mexico forever. Trump’s Wall marked the end of the known world.”

Want to Know More?

The Eagle  is available on Amazon. Sutcliff’s original novel (and its two sequels) is too.

If you want to know more about Hadrian’s Wall, you might try Patricia Southern’s Hadrian’s Wall: Everyday Life on the Roman Frontier. Amazon also has a lot of guides for walking the Wall; it’s one of England’s top tourist destinations. Having visited the Wall myself years ago, it’s definitely worth the visit if you’re in Northern England.

The Witch: Fear and Loathing in Puritan New England

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Anya Taylor-Joy, Colonial America, Kate Dickie, Movies I Love, Ralph Ineson, The Witch, Witchcraft

The Witch (2015, dir. Robert Eggers) got a lot of buzz when it came out last year, but I only got around to watching it tonight. It tells the story of a Puritan family living in rural New England struggling against a machinations of a malicious witch.

The film is set in 1630 in an unspecified plantation in New England. It is probably Massachusetts, but could possibly be New Hampshire or Maine. William (Ralph Ineson) is a devout Calvinist who is forced out of the colony because of a never-explained theological dispute within the church of the colony. He takes his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) and his children, who include teenage Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), Caleb (Harry Scrimshaw), and young twins Mercy and Jonas (Ellie Grainger and Lucas Dawson), and sets up a small farm on the edge of a remote woods about a day away from the plantation.

Katherine gives birth to a baby boy, Samuel, and that’s when things start to go wrong. Thomasin is watching the baby one day by the woods when he simply disappears. The film makes it clear that he has been stolen by a witch and sacrificed to make a flying ointment. So the film immediately establishes that this isn’t simply in the minds of the family. There really is an evil force hell-bent (quite literally) on destroying them, although we only rarely see it.

Taylor-Joy as Thomasin

Although the troubles in the film are clearly caused by the witch, the film is really a study of a deeply devout and conservative Christian family trying to cope with the trauma of (literally) losing a child. Katherine grieves inconsolably and cannot stop praying, and William struggles to hold the family together and make this marginal farm thrive. But the crops do poorly, he proves an ineffective hunter, and the family’s nanny goat starts giving blood instead of milk. Mercy and Jonas’ misbehavior start to wear down Thomasin’s patience, and young Caleb, who is only about 9, tries to be the hunter his father cannot be. The family inevitably spirals down to their destruction; this is a horror film, after all.

The film really impressed me from a historical standpoint. It has a lot to recommend it. The film-makers worked hard to capture the material culture of the period, consulting with museums and historians of the period, and Eggers only filmed with natural light outdoors and candle-light indoors. Much of the dialog was lifted from 17th century documents, and the cast does a great job making the archaic language sound real. Even the children turn in excellent performances and make the dialog work.

The film tries to capture genuine 17th century Puritan beliefs of witches. Nearly everything supernatural that happens has a solid foundation in the writings and trial records of the period. The disasters that befall the family are not wild Hollywood spectacle but simple rural crises–the corn grows badly, they keep seeing a rabbit they can’t catch, something kills their dog– that prey on the family’s economic vulnerability. Witchcraft was always primarily about economic and personal disasters, and Eggers does a great job getting us to understand that.The witch’s malevolence is simply a given; she destroys the family purely because she is evil, and that’s where the family’s religious anxieties come in.

Ineson as the strict but loving William

The film also does justice to the Calvinist beliefs of the Puritans. As William teaches Caleb, they are deeply sinful people, and only Christ’s redeeming sacrifice can save them. Caleb, understandably unnerved by the implication that his baby brother was a horrible sinner, begs his father to tell him what sin the infant committed. William replies that he does not know and that he cannot know that the baby was saved, because they must simply pray that they are among God’s Elect. As a result, what mattered for Puritans was having a spiritual experience that shows them that they truly are one of the Elect. While most movies and tv shows (cough Salem cough) treat such beliefs with contempt and assume that Puritans simply didn’t love each other, The Witch accepts Puritanism as a genuine belief system and shows how deeply William and Katherine love their children and desperately desire their salvation. But prayer isn’t enough to stop the evil assailing them because if it was, this wouldn’t be a horror film.

A big part of the reason that New England saw so may witchcraft charges is that in the 17th century, the American colonies were small and precarious. Life was genuinely hard for these people, and witchcraft provided an explanation for the various things that could go wrong. Additionally, the Puritans saw themselves as God’s tiny minority of the Elect under siege from the forces of Satan. Native Americans were understood to literally worship the Devil, so Satan’s agents lurked just beyond the tree line, unseen but waiting to strike. And witches were the embodiment of many of the moral failings that Puritans struggled against–lust, envy, disobedience to authorities, resentment. So as Thomasin tries to be a good Christian girl and cope with the tragedies befalling her family, her struggles slowly push her into the suspect category of witch.

All in all, I’d have to call The Witch one of the best historical films I’ve ever seen. The cinematography is gorgeous, and Eggers is willing to take his time building the tension for both the family and the audience. The film avoids the usual cheap tricks of horror films, like sound spikes, false scares, and gore, in favor of drawing the viewer into the growing fear and madness of the family, and making you squirm over the way the family inevitably turns against itself. It is certainly the best depiction of early modern witchcraft beliefs I’ve seen on screen.

Got a specific movie you’d like me to tackle? Please make a donation and tell me what movie you’d like me to review. If I can get access to it, I’ll review it for you.

Want to Know More? 

The Witch is available on Amazon.

If you’re looking for an introduction to New England witchcraft trials and beliefs, you can’t do better than Carol Karlsen’s The Devil in the Shape of a Woman. It’s hands down the best thing I’ve read on the subject.

Chi-Raq: Ancient Athens in Modern Chicago

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20th Century America, Ancient Greece, Chi-Raq, Chicago, Comedies, Jennifer Hudson, John Cusack, Lysistrata, Movies I Love, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, Teyonah Parris

Chi-Raq (2015, dir. Spike Lee) is a modernization of the classic Athenian comedy Lysistrata, first performed in 411 BC during the Peloponnesian War. When I heard about Lee’s film, I was intrigued, since it’s not every day a movie based on an ancient play gets produced, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t seen the film, you may wish to do so before reading this post, since it discusses major plot points, including the end of the film.

 

 

Lysistrata

Lysistrata was first performed during a war between the Athenians and the Spartans. The war began in 430 BC, and had continued ever since. By 411, the tide of the war had begun to turn against the Athenians. 4 years previously, they had opened a new front in the war with a disastrous invasion of Sicily; they had lost much of their navy and large numbers of citizen sailors had been captured. The failure of that invasion probably marked the point at which the Athenians should have decided to cut their loses and sue for peace, but the Athenians stubbornly refused to do so.

So in 411, Aristophanes, who was part of the anti-war faction at Athens, staged Lysistrata as a critique of the war. In the play, Lysistrata proposes to bring the war to an end by persuading both the Athenian and Spartan women to go on a sex strike. They vow not to have sex until the men arrange a peace. To advance their cause, Lysistrata’s followers occupy the Acropolis and seize the state treasury, which will hinder the war cause, since the city will not be able to pay its war expenses without it. During a conversation with one of the city’s magistrates, Lysistrata accuses the Athenians (who are literally sitting in the audience watching) of having made disastrous decisions in the war. Eventually a desperately tumescent Spartan herald arrives with news that the Spartans want to negotiate, and the equally desperate magistrate agrees to sit down and discuss terms with him. Lysistrata shows up with a young woman named Reconciliation and uses their lust for her as an incentive to keep the negotiations moving. The peace is celebrated with a feast. Throughout the play, choruses of Old Men and Old Women clash in bawdy ways, dramatizing the struggle between masculine lust and feminine chastity.

The play is often today read as an anti-war play, which is probably reading more into it than Aristophanes intended. The play does not condemn war in general, only this war in particular. By 411, the Athenians were clearly tired of war, but could not seem to find a way to extricate themselves from the conflict without damaging their pride. The play wittily suggests that male military aggression and male sexual desire are somehow combined.

Lysistrata is not an easy play to stage nowadays. In this period, Athenian comedy was extremely topical, and many of the play’s references no long make sense to audiences who don’t know who, for example, Hippias or Cleisthenes were. Many of the jokes are directed at men who were probably sitting in the audience, satirizing them for their personal foibles and reputation. The play also contains a lot of jokes so deeply connected to the exact situation that modern audiences won’t get them any more; during the negotiations, the herald and the magistrate treat Reconciliation’s body as a map of Greece, discussing which parts of it they want to claim, but without understanding the actual geography of the war, the double-entendres lose much of their punch.

Another challenge to staging Athenian comedy is that it is extremely bawdy, far more so than all but the most raunchy of modern comedies. This mixture of political satire and sex jokes is off-putting to most modern audiences. Imagine a Saturday Night Live political sketch crossed with American Pie and you start to get the effect. Athenian comedy is so frankly sexual that one scholar commented, “if you don’t find a dirty joke in a line of text, you’re probably not looking hard enough.” The women of Lysistrata want the war to end because it’s interfering with their ability to get laid and purchase dildoes. The Spartan herald’s erection is given almost an entire page’s worth of attention, as people try to guess what he’s got hidden under his cloak. This is not some genteel Victorian farce; this is comedy all about penises and vaginas.

 

Chi-Raq

Lee has transposed the action of the play to the south side of Chicago, often nicknamed Chi-raq by its inhabitants because there is enough violence for a war zone. The two warring factions are rival gangs, the Spartans, led by the rapper Demetrius ‘Chi-Raq’ Dupree (Nick Cannon), and the Trojans, led by Cyclops (Wesley Snipes). One day, Chi-Raq’s woman, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) stumbles across the scene of a gang shooting in which an 11-year old girl has become an innocent victim. She sees the girl’s mother Irene (Jennifer Hudson) grieve for her daughter and demand that something be done.

Lysistrata (center) persuading the woman to take the oath

Lysistrata gathers a bunch of her friends and arranges a meeting with some of the women who date the Trojans, including Indigo (Michelle Mitchenor), Cyclop’s woman. She persuades them to swear an oath. “I will deny all rights of access or entrance from every husband, lover, or male acquaintance who comes to my direction in erection. If he should force me to lay on that conjugal couch, I will refuse his stroke and not give up that nappy pouch. No peace, no pussy!”

From there, the movement grows as even the strippers, prostitutes, and guys on the down low take the oath. Then the women seize control of a National Guard armory, and the movement goes global, much to the frustration of Mayor McCloud (D.B. Sweeney), whose wife takes the oath. From there, the story plays out to its conclusion.

Hudson’s Irene

But as the story progresses, Lee inserts scenes of Father Corridan (John Cusack) performing the funeral for the murdered girl and leading an anti-gun march. Although skeptical of Lysistrata’s tactics, he plays an important role in getting Chi-Raq to come to the negotiating table. He and Irene circulate posters offering a reward for information about who shot the girl. Finally, at the end, when it looks like the negotiations between the Spartans and the Trojans will collapse because of Chi-Raq’s resistance, he tearfully acknowledges that he is the girl’s killer. Accepting the magnitude of his crime, he is led away, calling on all the gang members to admit their guilt in the situation and work to end the violence.

On paper this all sounds heavy-handed and tendentious. But Lee manages to make the material work through a combination of three contrasting elements. The film is every bit as vulgar as the source material. Jokes about dick and pussy and blue balls abound. The Old Men of the film just want to get laid again and are determined to restore their masculine pride, while the Old Women aren’t entirely happy to give up sex but see the greater goal behind the strike.

But the coarseness of the humor is off-set by the fact that most of the dialogue is in rhyming verse. Although some of the verse feels a bit clunky, and can be hard to follow, at its best, it becomes Shakespearean, elevating the vulgarity to the level of high art. Chi-Raq’s speech at the end plays as a morality tale, in which the actor is exhorting the audience to learn from his mistakes. Here’s an example, in which Lysistrata confronts the Old Men:

 

And then there is the profound passion of the film. The film opens with a prologue text informing us that more Americans have been killed in Chicago in the past 15 years than in both the Iraq and Afghan wars combined. “This is an emergency!” a voice declares at both the start and finish of the film. Cusack delivers the funeral sermon with an urgency that grows to fury at “this self-inflicted genocide,” and it’s clear that he is voicing Lee’s own feelings about the situation. Both Lysistrata and her friend Dr. Helen (Angela Bassett) deliver powerful speeches about how they are fighting to save the lives of their community.

Cusack’s Father Corridan, preaching the funeral sermon

Jennifer Hudson’s performance is particularly powerful. Her own personal tragedy, in which her brother-in-law murdered her mother, brother, and nephew in their West Chicago home, hangs over the film, a profound reminder that this is not simply an exercise in entertainment. When Hudson as Irene leads an anti-gun march, she is surrounded by dozens of extras all carrying photos of the actual relatives they lost to gun violence. And the film is not afraid to point fingers. At different moments, it accuses the NRA, the prison-industrial complex, Indiana’s gun shows, the Republican party, the media, the banks, and the adolescent gang-bangers of all playing a role in the slaughter. The mayor is a thinly-veiled satire of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who reportedly opposed the film because it was bad for tourism.

Lee has quite masterfully managed to transpose Lysistrata for a modern audience, capturing the marriage of bawdy humor and serious intent and even much of the original’s structure. Both play and film are in verse, both make use of song and dance, and both have choruses that act to set the stage and keep the action moving; Lee’s chorus is Samuel L. Jackson.

Jackson as Dolmedes, the film’s Greek chorus

Given the challenges of reproducing Classical Athenian comedy for modern audiences, Lee has pulled off an impressive feat. While Chi-Raq is not a perfect film (the verse is not always easy to follow, and a few scenes fall flat, including one where Lysistrata seduces the general of the armory), it’s a worthy effort, both in terms of cinema and in terms of the cause it serves, and you should definitely give it a viewing.

 

Want to Know More?

CHI-RAQ [DVD + Digital]is available on Amazon.

Lysistrata is a classic, and definitely worth reading. The Penguin edition of Lysistrata and Other Plays (Penguin Classics) would be a good place to start.

If you want to know more about the remarkable Leymah Gbowee, she tells her story in her book Mighty Be Our Powers.

Queen Margot: Leyrac de la Mole

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16th century France, Alexandre Dumas, Early Modern Europe, Kings and Queens, Leyrac de la Mole, Marguerite of Valois, Movies I Love, Patrice Chéreau, Queen Margot, Vincent Perez

A very significant portion of Queen Margot (1994, dir. Patrice Chéreau, French with English subtitles, based on Alexandre Dumas’ 1845 novel La Reine Margot) deals with Leyrac de la Mole (Vincent Perez). In the film la Mole is a Huguenot soldier who has come to Paris to seek service under the Huguenot commanders gathered in Paris for the wedding of Henry of Navarre (Daniel Auteuil) to Margot (Isabella Adjani). Unfortunately, he gets caught up in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre when Coconnas (Claudio Amendola) tries to kill him. In his desperate flight, la Mole staggers into Margot’s chambers, who prevents Coconnas from killing him. Later that same night, la Mole runs into Coconnas outside and the two men fight until they are both unconscious.

Instead of being buried with the rest of the dead, the two men are rescued by the executioner, who nurses them both back to health. La Mole has fallen in love with Margot and wants to see her again. He learns that Coconnas has access to Margot’s handmaid Henriette (in fact, they seem to be lovers) and when he meets Coconnas again, he discovers that the man has had a change of heart and now repents of the murders he committed that night. So with the aid of Henriette, la Mole becomes Margot’s lover and tries to find a way to help her escape the royal court. Navarre knows of their affair and gradually learns to tolerate it, since he doesn’t love Margot anyway.

Unfortunately, for la Mole, when Catherine de Medici (Virna Lisi) hatches a plan to murder Navarre with a poisoned book, the book that gets used coincidentally turns out to be one that la Mole inherited from his father and sold to a bookdealer. It has la Mole’s name written in it. So when Catherine discovers to her horror that she’s poisoned her own son Charles IX, she blames the poisoning on la Mole, who by this time is known to be Margot’s lover. As a result, la Mole and Coconnas are apprehended and executed shortly after Charles’ death. Margot, acting on a comment la Mole once made to her, claims his head and has it preserved as a memento of their love.

Vincent Perez as la Mole

La Mole’s story is a grand example of the sort of story 19^th century audiences had a taste for: doomed romance, dramatic changes of heart, narrow escapes, the struggle for redemption, and macabre details like preserved heads. But does it have any basis in fact?

The Real La Mole

While not entirely fiction, Dumas’s doomed lover is a far cry for the historical la Mole. Joseph Boniface de la Mole was a French nobleman, who does seem to have been part of the Huguenot faction at court. He was indeed rumored to have been Marguerite of Valois’ lover early in her marriage to Navarre. So that part is basically true.

But Marguerite didn’t rescue him from death during the Massacre. It was another man, the fortunate Huguenot M. de Teian, who benefitted from Marguerite’s somewhat unintentional intervention. Here is Marguerite’s description of what happened:

“As soon as I beheld it was broad day, I apprehended all the danger my sister had spoken of was over; and being inclined to sleep, I bade my nurse make the door fast, and I applied myself to take some repose. In about an hour I was awakened by a violent noise at the door, made with both hands and feet, and a voice calling out, “Navarre! Navarre!” My nurse, supposing the King my husband to be at the door, hastened to open it, when a gentleman, named M. de Teian, ran in, and threw himself immediately upon my bed. He had received a wound in his arm from a sword, and another by a pike, and was then pursued by four archers, who followed him into the bedchamber. Perceiving these last, I jumped out of bed, and the poor gentleman after me, holding me fast by the waist. I did not then know him; neither was I sure that he came to do me no harm, or whether the archers were in pursuit of him or me. In this situation I screamed aloud, and he cried out likewise, for our fright was mutual. At length, by God’s providence, M. de Nangay, captain of the guard, came into the bed-chamber, and, seeing me thus surrounded, though he could not help pitying me, he was scarcely able to refrain from laughter. However, he reprimanded the archers very severely for their indiscretion, and drove them out of the chamber. At my request he granted the poor gentleman his life, and I had him put to bed in my closet, caused his wounds to be dressed, and did not suffer him to quit my apartment until he was perfectly cured.”

If you’re interested, you can read her recollection of the Massacre (including this incident) here, under Letter V. You’ll find that it differs substantially from the film’s depiction of the slaughter.

But La Mole’s historical importance is completely unrelated to his relationship with Marguerite. What he’s actually remembered for is an attempt to assassinate Charles IX. He was a friend of François of Alençon, Margot and Charles’ youngest brother. In the film, Alençon is a secondary character; he participates in the Massacre, it’s hinted that he would like to see his brother dead, and in one scene he humiliates Margot and helps force her to confess her adultery.

François d’Alençon

In reality, before the Massacre, Alençon aligned himself with the Huguenot faction, which included Navarre and Admiral Coligny. When there was a proposal to marry his brother Henry of Anjou to Elizabeth I, Alençon acted as the French negotiator perhaps because he was seen as a Protestant sympathizer. When the Massacre happened, la Mole and another Huguenot nobleman, Annibal de Coconnas, were arrested and thrown in prison but survived, apparently due to their relationship with Alençon.

As Charles began his final decline, Alençon was implicated in a plot to assassinate Charles by means of a wax doll stabbed with pins. The doll was found in la Mole’s possession, and after being tortured, la Mole and Coconnas were both beheaded. Whether they had genuinely attempted to kill the king or were simply convenient scapegoats for Charles’ medical problems is unclear. Charles, however, was still alive when they were executed and only died later on, so Dumas has reversed the order of the events here. Margeurite mentions all of this in her memoirs (see the previous link, in Letter VII), and offers no suggestion that she had any feelings for la Mole at all, although it’s unlikely she would have admitted to the affair in such a document. There was indeed a rumor that Marguerite had his head preserved.

So what Dumas has done is taken two separate men, la Mole and de Teian, and conflated them. He’s built the post-Massacre portion of his story around la Mole’s eventual execution and has greatly changed Coconnas to turn him into a redeemed villain rather than a man who avoided one political plot only to fall victim to a second one. The historical la Mole was not an outsider at court but rather a well-known courtier.

But if you’re a long-time reader of this blog, it won’t come as a surprise that the facts and the story you saw were quite different things, will it?

Want to Know More?

Sure you do! Queen Margot (English Subtitled)is available on Amazon. The novel is available in English there as well, as Queen Margot; Or, Marguerite de Valois – With Nine Illustrations.There’s also a historical biography of Margot and her mother Catherine, The Rival Queens: Catherine de’ Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal that Ignited a Kingdom, although Nancy Goldstone is not a professional historian.

Queen Margot: Poisoned Lipstick and Bloody Sweat

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16th century France, Alexandre Dumas, Catherine de Medici, Charles IX, Daniel Auteuil, Early Modern Europe, Henry of Navarre, Isabella Adjani, John-Hugues Anglade, Margaret of Valois, Medical Stuff, Movies I Love, Patrice Chéreau, Queen Margot, Religious Issues, St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, Virna Lisi

My previous post on Queen Margot (1994, dir. Patrice Chéreau, French with English subtitles) dealt with the film’s treatment of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in 1572. That event and its lead-up takes about a third of the film; the remainer of the film focuses on the fall-out from that event in the lives of Margaret of Valois, the titular Margot, who is by virtue of marriage now queen of Navarre (Isabelle Adjani), her imperiled husband Henry of Navarre (Daniel Auteuil), her lover Leyrac de la Mole (Vincent Perez), and the barely stable King Charles IX (John-Hugues Anglade).

The film opens in 1572, a few days before the Massacre. It closes shortly after Charles’ death and the accession of his brother Henry of Anjou in 1574, so roughly two years pass, although the film gives us few markers for the passage of time except for the death of the king. In between these two solidly historical events, the film essentially descends into romantic political fantasy, as far as I can tell.

The massacre of the Huguenots was a huge blow to the Protestant community in France, which lost tens of thousands of adherents and their leaders to slaughter, flight from France, and fear-driven conversion to Catholicism. The film, however, has only a nominal interest in this issue; it is interested in the Massacre primarily because of the dramatic tensions it creates for its main characters. The ensuing political intrigues revolve not around the Huguenot response to so much death, but rather on the complex web of emotions spawned by the crisis. In the film, Navarre converts to Catholicism the day after the Massacre, because he is essentially held hostage at court and needs to find a way to escape. In reality, he promised to convert, but did not actually undergo a formal confirmation at a Catholic; like Elizabeth Tudor during the reign of her Catholic sister Mary I, he used the period of religious instruction to play for time.

Henry of Navarre

In the film, his conversion opens the door to a growing friendship between Navarre and Charles. Catherine de Medici (Virna Lisi), Charles’ mother, quickly realizes that Navarre is beginning to step into the void Coligny’s death has left for Charles; she orchestrated the failed assassination of the Admiral in order to retain her hold on political power, and now that hold is in danger once again. So she immediately plots to murder Henry. At the same time, Navarre is trying to find a way to escape from the court, while la Mole plots to find a way to rescue Margot. But neither can escape without the other; to do so would leave the other in terrible danger and Navarre feels he owes Margot his life, so he is reluctant to abandon her even though he knows she is in love with la Mole. So the tension in the later portions of the film grows from the question of whether the Catholic assassins will manage to kill Navarre before he and Margot can both get away from Paris.

Marguerite of Valois, about the time of her marriage

In true 19^th century literary fashion, the court is aswirl with plots, poisons, and adultery. Catherine first tries to murder Henry by giving a tube of poisoned lipstick to his mistress, and when that fails, she arranges to lace a book with arsenic. Rumors of political assassination by poison were incredibly common in ancient, medieval and early modern writings, and virtually any political figure who died unexpectedly was rumored to have been poisoned.

But as a historian, I tend to be very suspicious of any claim that a historical figure died from poison. Prior to the 19^th century, the poor state of medical knowledge meant that many potentially fatal medical conditions could go undiagnosed and untreated for years. People could have fatal heart attacks, strokes, aneurysms, and the like with no noticable warning signs. The lack of modern hygiene techniques and the poor state of food preservation meant that food poisoning and other food-borne illnesses were probably far more common than people realized. As a result, there were numerous ways that apparently healthy people might suddenly fall ill and die without being poisoned, and many of those deaths could easily be mistaken for poisoning. That’s not to say that poisoning did not happen, only that we ought to be extremely cautious about attributing unexpected death to poison.

In the film, after the Massacre, there are essentially three key incidents: the attempt to murder Henry with poisoned lipstick, the hunting accident where Henry saves Charles’ life at the cost of giving up a chance to escape the kingdom, and the attempt to poison Henry with an arsenic-laced book.

The first incident revolves around Henry’s mistress, Charlotte de Sauve (Asia Argento), who is given a tube of poisoned lipstick and told that it contains a powerful aphrodisiac. Margot, suspecting a plot, stops Henry from kissing Charlotte, who unfortunately dies a horrible death. Charlotte was in fact Henry’s mistress, but she did not die in 1573 or 74; she remained his mistress until 1579, long after he had left the French court, and she only died in 1617, seven years after he had died. She was, in fact, one of Catherine de Medici’s informants, so if Catherine had wanted to poison Henry, she could just have given Charlotte something to slip into his drink. So the poisoned lipstick and Charlotte’s untimely death are entirely Dumas’ invention.

Charlotte de Sauve

Similarly, as far as I can tell, the hunting accident in which Henry saves Charles from a wild boar also appears to be complete fiction. Charles did enjoy hunting, however, and by the end of his life he and Henry appear to have become good friends (or at least Charles thought they were good friends). In the film, right after the accident, Charles takes Henry to meet his secret mistress, who seems to be a common servant, and infant son. Charles did in fact have a mistress on whom he fathered an illegitimate son, but she seems to have been known at court, and after his death, she received a pension and her son was raised well and allowed to inherit some of Catherine de Medici’s property and a noble title.

What Killed Charles IX?

The third major incident involves Catherine’s attempt to poison Henry using a book on hunting that has been impregnated with arsenic. The pages are stuck together and to unstuck them, the reader must lick his finger and loosen the page; as a result, as the reader works his way through the book, he will inevitably consume a lot of arsenic. Unfortunately, before Henry sees the book, Charles finds it and reads it. so Catherine unintentionally poisons her own son. In the film, Charles lingers for a remarkably long time, constantly exuding a bloody sweat that makes for a ghastly cinematic image, especially because he and Margot wear a lot of white clothes during this part of the film precisely so Charles can bleed on them.

Charles getting blood all over his nice white clothes

The reality of Charles’ death is rather different. Bloody sweat is a real condition, known as hematohidrosis or hematidrosis, but it’s extremely rare and its causes are unknown. It’s not generally fatal, except in newborns. So it’s wildly unlikely that Charles could have died from such a condition, even if there was clear evidence that he had it. But there isn’t any solid evidence that bloody sweat was a symptom of his death.

We have two narratives of Charles’ death, which you can read here. In the first, Charles spends a long time silent and then sends for Henry of Navarre, with whom he has a substantial conversation. Then he dies some time later. In the second, he experiences pain and sweats a great deal, groans, and has a conversation with his nurse during which he cries a lot. Then he apparently dies. The two narratives are not completely compatible, since the first makes no mention of the conversation with his nurse and the second makes no mention of his conversation with Navarre, but it is not impossible that they could both be true; usually scholars read the second account as happening earlier in the evening than the first account. But neither makes any mention of bloody sweat or indeed blood at all, although in the second narrative Charles laments the shedding of Huguenot blood.

The idea that he died of a bloody sweat is probably a Huguenot story meant to convey divine justice; the monarch who shed so much blood died oozing his own blood as a manifestation of his guilt. There is a long tradition in Western historical writing of monarchs who did awful things supposedly dying in horrible ways. These stories nearly always revolve around the idea that the ruler’s moral corruption somehow becomes physically manifest at the end of his life. For example, William I of England (often called William the Bastard) was badly injured during siege in which his troops burned a church; his horse shifted and threw him against the pommel of his saddle. He died not long thereafter, but according to a monastic chronicle, when his body was placed into his sarcophagus, it burst open and produced such an awful stench that the funeral service had to be hurriedly finished so everyone could flee the smell. While it is not completely impossible that William might have ruptured an internal organ and died of a severe infection that would produce a terrible odor, it’s just as likely that the chronicler in question is trying to demonstrate William’s moral decay with a story about literal rot and stench.

Charles IX

Additionally, Charles’ symptoms do not match those of arsenic poisoning. The classic symptoms of arsenic poisoning include headaches, confusion, diarrhea, sleepiness, convulsions, discoloration of the fingernails, vomiting, bloody urine, hair loss, and stomach pains. Bloody sweat is not one of the symptoms. In the film, Charles experiences several abdominal pain, and possibly confusion (a general issue for him) and hair loss (his hair looks quite thin at the end), but none of the messier and less glamorous symptoms like vomiting, diarrhea, or bloody urine.

In reality, most historians attribute his death to pulmonary tuberculosis, the symptoms of which include severe coughing, coughing up blood or bloody mucus, chest pain, weight loss, fatigue, fever, night sweats and chills, and loss of appetite. It’s clear he was producing blood; shortly before his death he had a violent hemorrhage and after his death, one Catholic bishop claimed that the amount of blood he produced was a sign he was a saint. But he seems to have been coughing it up, rather than sweating it. His other symptoms included bursts of manic energy, general weakness and fatigue, heavy sweating, severe weight loss (the English ambassador described him as being “no more than skin and bone”) and pain. Additionally, his brother Henry III also died of a form of tuberculosis, so his family may have been particularly susceptible to it for some reason. Tuberculosis is not a slam dunk diagnosis, but it certainly fits the symptoms more closely than arsenic poisoning.

Alexandre Dumas

But Dumas is at least drawing off of 16^th century claims that Charles had died of bloody sweat, and his plot uses this story to good effect, dramatizing his moral complicity in the massacre and working in the irony that Catherine, who is trying to murder Henry to maintain her position with her son, instead murders her son and enables Henry to escape the court. It may not be good history, but it’s certainly a good story.

Want to Know More?

Queen Margot (English Subtitled)is available on Amazon. The novel is available in English there as well, as Queen Margot; Or, Marguerite de Valois – With Nine Illustrations.There’s also a historical biography of Margot and her mother Catherine, The Rival Queens: Catherine de’ Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal that Ignited a Kingdom, although Nancy Goldstone is not a professional historian.

If you’re inclined to learn more about Henry of Navarre’s rather eventful life, the only thing readily available is Desmond Seward’s The First Bourbon: Henry IV of France & Navarre. Seward is a popular historian rather than a scholar, but his work is highly readable.

Queen Margot: Like Reign But with More Corpses

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16th century France, Alexnadre Dumas, Catherine de Medici, Charles IX, Daniel Auteuil, Early Modern Europe, Henry IV, Henry of Navarre, Interesting Women, Isabelle Adjani, Marguerite of Valois, Movies I Love, Paris, Patrice Chéreau, Queen Margot, Religious Issues, St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, The Protestant Reformations, Virna Lisi

One of the most infamous events in all of French history is the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, during which French Catholics, with apparent royal backing, slaughtered thousands of Huguenots (French Protestants) in the streets of Paris. That horrible event is at the center of Alexandre Dumas’ novel La Reine Margot (published in 1845), which was adapted for the screen as Queen Margot (1994, dir. Patrice Chéreau, French with English subtitles).

 

The Massacre as It Happened

When the French king Henry II died in 1559, he left behind four minor sons and a widow, Catherine de Medici, who acted as regent. It was Catherine’s tragedy to watch three of her sons become king and die without heirs. Francis II died at age 16 after reigning only one year, and was succeeded by Charles IX, his ten year brother, who reigned for 14 years but died without a legitimate son in 1574. He was succeeded by his brother, the probably homosexual Henry of Anjou, who ruled as Henry III until his death in 1589, likewise dying without heirs.

Charles has often been depicted as a weak king, but that may be unfair. He took direct control of the kingdom when he was 13, but looked to his mother for guidance his entire reign, which makes sense given that by the end of it, he was still only 24.

Charles IX

And Charles was ruling during a period of extreme political tensions. France was torn by the Protestant Reformations, divided into hard-core Catholics and Huguenots, who were followers of Jean Calvin. The Catholics were led by the House of Guise, while the Huguenots were led by the House of Bourbon. In between was a faction known as the Politiques, who were Catholics and Protestants who wanted to find a way for the two rival faiths to co-exist peacefully. Members of both factions sat on the Royal Council, and Charles and his mother had to find a way to navigate the competing demands of these two groups. As Catholics, they naturally sympathized with the House of Guise, but they did not want to make the Guises politically dominant by relying on them too much, and so Charles entrusted a good deal of power to Gaspard de Coligny, the Admiral of France and leader of the Huguenots. And to keep Coligny from growing too powerful, Charles and Catherine relied heavily on Henry of Anjou, Charles’ younger brother, as a counterbalance.

Catherine de Medici

Sadly, Charles’ reign was marred by a series of civil wars, conspiracies, and political assassinations. Coligny took over as Huguenot leader after the murder of Louis, Prince of Condé, while Duke Henry of Guise loathed Coligny for orchestrating the murder of his father. Catherine was rumored to have poisoned Jeanne of Navarre, mother of the Huguenot Henry of Navarre, with a pair of poisoned gloves. Both Francis II and Charles IX had been the target of Huguenot kidnapping plots, and at one point, the Guises had orchestrated a slaughter of Huguenots during a worship service. Coligny narrowly survived an assassination plot.

When the Third War of Religion was brought to an end with the Treaty of Saint-Germain, which Charles and Catherine seem to have arranged in good faith, it made sense to try to bring the two warring factions together with a marriage. The proposal was to marry the Huguenot leader Henry of Navarre to Charles’ sister Marguerite. The Treaty granted Huguenots freedom of conscience and the right to worship everywhere across France, so a mixed-religion marriage would act as a reasonable symbol of that treaty. So on April 18, 1572, with large numbers of Huguenots visiting the Catholic stronghold of Paris, Henry and Marguerite were married.

Henry of Navarre

Unfortunately the marriage was ill-conceived. Charles and Catherine were trying to walk a tight-rope between angry Catholics and suspicious Huguenots. There were enormous amounts of bad blood and mistrust on both sides. (Imagine trying to end World War II by marrying one of FDR’s daughters to Adolf Hitler. That’s how much Catholics and Huguenots disliked each other.) Catholics were appalled that Charles would re-admit Coligny to the Royal Council when the Admiral had just been fighting him a few weeks before. European society had not yet developed the notion that Protestants and Catholics could live together; both sides insisted that the other side was wrong, was going to Hell, and did not deserve political or civil rights because they were religiously in error. Additionally, many Huguenots had begun to reject the idea of monarchy entirely and had called for the overthrow of the monarchy or at least the ruling family. On the other side, the Catholic bishop Simon Vigor had been calling for the deaths of Huguenots from Paris pulpits for some time. So the Parisian population was deeply unhappy to suddenly be hosting literally thousands of Huguenots in their midst for the wedding.

Henry and Marguerite

And then, four days later, someone shot Coligny, seriously wounding him. The identity of the assassin is known, but historians have never been able to definitively prove who was behind the assassination attempt. Many have speculated that Catherine was afraid that Coligny’s rising influence over her son would mean the end of her political power, but the most likely suspect was one of the Guises; the assassin was a client of the Guises and had taken his shot from the window of a house owned by them; Charles certainly thought they were the guilty party. Coligny survived the attempt on his life, but it ratcheted up the tensions in the city enormously.

Admiral Coligny

Two nights later, the municipal government of Paris was ordered to shut the gates of the city and arm the citizenry, and in the early hours of St. Bartholemew’s Day, the bells of Saint-Germain rang out. The palace guard of the Louvre forced the visiting Huguenot nobles to leave the palace. Henry of Guise forced his way into Coligny’s house with a band of men, dragged him from his bed, killed him, and threw his corpse out the window. That was the trigger for an orgy of violence that lasted three days. Although the target of the violence seems to have initially been the Huguenot nobility, the general population of the city soon turned their wrath on their commoner Huguenot neighbors, slaughtering men, women, and children. The bodies were thrown in the Seine.

Francois Dubois’ depiction of the Massacre; note Coligny’s body hanging out a window in the background

Marguerite reportedly saved Navarre and a cousin of his by sheltering them in her bedroom and refusing to allow anyone in. Afterwards, he feigned willingness to convert to Catholicism until he was able to get away from Paris, at which point he renounced the notion of a conversion. (Decades later he would actually convert in order to inherit the French crown. Paris, he is reported to have said, “is worth a mass.”)

As the violence spread the following day, Charles frantically tried to stop the killing, to no avail. He sent letters out across the kingdom in an effort to stop the violence from spreading, but as word of the killing spread, at least a dozen French cities experienced their own massacres.

Exactly how many died in the massacre is unknown. Estimates range from 2,000 to 70,000, but the figures generally used today put the deaths in Paris in the 2-3,000 range and nationally in the 7-10,000 range.

The massacre was a profound blow to the Huguenots. They had lost many of their most prominent leaders in the slaughter, and tens of thousands of them had converted to Catholicism out of fear. Many fled the country entirely. Protestant countries were appalled at the carnage, and the Massacre became a rallying cry for opposition to Catholicism across the Protestant world. Pope Gregory XIII was so overjoyed that he ordered a special mass of thanksgiving, sent Charles a golden rose, and issued a commemorative medal. He also commissioned a trio of murals that are still in the Vatican today.

Giorgio Vasari’s depiction of the Massacre; note Coligny’s body falling out a window

 

Who Ordered the Massacre?

While it’s easy to guess the basic reason the Massacre happened, there’s been a good deal of argument over who ordered it. Well into the 19^th century, blame for the Massacre was usually placed on the shoulders of Catherine. She was widely viewed as a domineering schemer who completely controlled her weak-willed son. The wedding was sometimes viewed as a plot to lure the Huguenots into Paris so that they could be slaughtered. In this view, Catherine was vicious, power-hungry, and ruthlessly determined to impose Catholicism. According to a letter attributed to Henry of Anjou, when Catherine finally forced Charles to accept the killing of the Huguenot leadership, he said that if they were going to kill the leaders, it was necessary to kill all the Huguenots, so that he would not have to listen to them accusing him of the crime.

Henry of Anjou, the future Henry III

Early modern historians tended to take a very negative view of women exercising political power. While Queen Elizabeth I of England (a younger contemporary of Catherine) was able to win the admiration of scholars, they were more likely to point to women as unacceptably ambitious and ruthless, the way Catherine was, or as overly sexual and swayed by bad men, as Mary of Scotland was. The notion that female rulers were simply trying to govern while having to overcome obstacles arising from their gender was rarely considered. Instead, their failings were viewed as evidence the women ought not to be involved in politics.

However, that letter of Anjou’s was proven to be a fake in the mid-19^th century, and since the collapse of the ‘Evil Catherine’ scenario, alternative views have been put forward. Charles has been accused of orchestrating the killing out of fear that the Huguenots were planning to overthrow him after the attack on Coligny. In favor of this claim is the fact that when Charles sought to end the killing, he issued a decree that said he had taken action to prevent a Protestant plot.

Robert Knecht has argued that the failed attempt on Coligny’s life threw the royal court into a panic. Charles and his council concluded that a Fourth War of Religion was inevitable and decided that the best option was to kill all the Huguenot leaders right away in an attempt to avert the war by killing those who would be leading it. There were 4,000 Huguenots soldiers sleeping outside the city, so if violence broke out, the Huguenots might be able to seize control of Paris. Again, that fits with the royal decree Charles issued. But it doesn’t explain why Catherine initially denounced the killings.

However, a recent theory put forward by Thierry Wanegffelen offers a more complex explanation of the events, especially when combined with Knecht’s views. As Wanegffelen sees it, Catherine and Charles opposed taking any action against the Huguenots after the attempt on Coligny’s life. However, Anjou saw this as an opportunity to advance his power and made an arrangement with Henry of Guise to orchestrate the killings of the Huguenot leadership. Wanegffelen points out that during the slaughter, Anjou’s men claimed to be acting under his authority, not the king’s. Catherine initially denounced the killings, but then realized that she was in danger of ruining Anjou, whose support she needed against Guise. So then Charles took credit for the killings as a way to cover up his brother’s role in it. However, after things had settled down somewhat, Catherine worried that Henry was becoming too powerful and found various ways to get him out of Paris.

Duke Henry I of Guise

This explains the start of the Massacre, but does not explain why it grew so large and resisted Charles’ efforts to stop it. To explain that, we have to turn to the religious tensions and the systematic efforts to demonize the Huguenots made by men like Bishop Vigor. It has also been suggested that there may have been an economic dimension to the killing; the Huguenots tended to be somewhat wealthier craftsmen than the average resident of the city.

 

The Massacre in the Film

The film opens with the wedding of Henry of Navarre (Daniel Auteuil) and Margot, as she’s called in the film (Isabelle Adjani); Margot is so reluctant to marry a Huguenot that when she is asked during the ritual if she marries him, she hesitates so long that Charles gives her a violent shove.

Isabelle Adjani as the reluctant bride Margot

The wedding celebrations that follow play like a very tension-packed episode of Reign, with lots of flirting between young men and women and open discussion of the various affairs the nobles are having. Margot’s lover is Henry of Guise (Miguel Bosé), and she vastly prefers him over her new Protestant husband, so much so that she tells Navarre not to come to her room on her wedding night. When Navarre show up anyway, he tells her that he needs her as his ally, because he knows he is among enemies. She reluctantly agrees that she will not be his enemy, but she will not sleep with him. Instead, she and her handmaiden, Duchess Henriette of Nevers (Dominique Blanc) sneak out into the streets of Paris to find a lover for her. She finds Leyrac de la Mole (Vincent Perez), a Huguenot who bumps uglies with her in an alleyway.

Given that the novel was written in the 19^th century, it is not surprising that it adopts a fairly old-fashioned view of who caused the Massacre. Catherine de Medici (Virna Lisi, with a wonderfully high plucked forehead) is a veritable gorgon, totally dominating her weak son Charles IX (Jean-Hughes Anglade), who is played as virtually insane in his emotional instability. (Given how fiercely he chews scenery when he’s onscreen, it’s a wonder there aren’t holes in the walls.) Catherine has a vaguely incestuous relationship with Henry of Anjou (Pascal Greggory), which is unlikely, given Henry’s strong penchant for young men. Both Charles and Anjou are styled with long, stringy hair (totally wrong for the fashions of the day) and sickly pallors, as if to suggest that Catherine has infected her sons with her malice. Henry of Guise at one point accuses Margot of having had sex with one of her brothers.

Lisi and Greggory as Catherine and Henry of Anjou

Perhaps it plays better in Dumas’ book, but in the film, Catherine’s schemes are malevolent but somewhat ill-formed. Rather than having an overarching plan, she lurches from evil scheme to evil scheme as if she’s making it up moment by moment. She insists that she wants peace with the Huguenots, but she also wants Coligny (Jean-Claude Brialy) dead because she realizes that Charles is coming to see Coligny as a father figure and that means she will lose power. So she is behind the assassination attempt against him, having apparently not stopped to consider the impact killing Coligny would have on prospects for peace.

When it becomes clear that Coligny has survived and the Huguenots are on the verge of rioting, Catherine and Anjou browbeat Charles into authorizing the massacre, forgetting  that peace was the original goal. Charles remarks that if they are going to kill the leaders, they must kill them all, so that he will not have to listen to their accusations; the suggestion is that he fears he will hear voices.

Anglade’s pathetic Charles

So Guise, acting as much out of sexual rivalry with Navarre as anything else, goes out to find men willing to do the dirty work. One of the villains he recruits is Coconnas (Claudio Amendola). When the bells finally ring, Guise, Anjou and Coconnas run rampant.

The Massacre sequence is a tour de force of panic, chaos, and violence. Whereas in reality, the Louvre was not the site of the killing, in the film, the killing starts there and spirals outward. Huguenots are lined up against the walls and bayoneted, women have their throats slit, and young nobles are dragged to their doom begging for mercy. Confusion reigns as the bewildered Margot runs through the halls, trying to understand what’s happening. It’s a shockingly effective sequence; I first saw this film 20 years ago, and the massacre sequence has always stayed with me.

Here’s the first part of it. Warning: it’s quite bloody.

Then the killing spreads to the streets and soon corpses are lying everywhere. Coconnas seems to revel in the chance to slaughter Huguenots, and Henriette seems almost psychotically amused by the spectacle. Guise bursts into Coligny’s room and throws him from the window still alive (another inaccuracy, because Coligny’s killing seems to have started the violence).

The results of the massacre

Coconnas bursts into la Mole’s bedroom, but la Mole wounds him and flees through a window across the rooftop. As he searches for a safe haven amidst the violence, Coconnas doggedly pursues him, wounding him twice. Eventually, by wild coincidence, la Mole staggers into Margot’s chambers. Recognizing him, she intervenes when Coconnas tries to enter, telling him that at Judgment Day he will be asked to account for his murders and telling him that he will have to kill her to get to his target. Later, however, la Mole staggers back into the street, where he and Coconnas slowly bludgeon each other into unconsciousness and are mistaken for corpses to be carted off.

Margot learns that Navarre has been taken to the king’s chamber, where she finds him a captive, being browbeaten until he agrees to convert, which he does the next day. Again, this distorts the facts, since Margot is said to have protected him (not la Mole) and Navarre did not actually make a public conversion but only promised to.

Auteuil as Henry of Navarre

Overall, the film’s depiction draws heavily on 19^th century notions of the event both in terms of who is behind it, what their motives were, and who was doing the killing. Modern historical explanations have tended to emphasize the complexity of the politics over the personalities of Catherine and her sons and have found sociological explanations for why the Massacre grew so out of control. There’s no sense that the general population of Paris were complicit in the killings, or that the violence lasted for three days. The killings seem over by sunrise.

This fits with 19^th century notions of history as being primarily driven by Great Men and Bad Women. If historical events are dictated by individuals in positions of power, then it stands to reason that personal motives such as lust for power, insanity, and sibling resentments are primary historical forces. Thanks in no small part to the historical theories of Karl Marx and his followers, historians now tend to accord a much larger role to the widespread sentiments of the general population and are somewhat less inclined to view personality as the basic explanation for everything. But, as I noted, the source material for the film is 19^th century, and bringing the film more in line with contemporary historical analysis would probably have changed Dumas’s plot too much.

The film also tends to demonize the Catholics. Although it makes clear that the Huguenots are just as intransigent as their opponents, the film makes no mention of their more ruthless actions, apart from the killing of Guise’ father. Nor does it show any interest in the theological issues of the day; it is enough to say that the Catholics hate the Huguenots and are willing to slaughter them. In fairness though, it’s probably hard to offer an even-handed treatment of the slaughter of thousands of innocent people.

In the next post, I’ll explore the rest of the film.

 

Want to Know More?

Queen Margot (English Subtitled)is available on Amazon. The novel is available in English there as well, as Queen Margot; Or, Marguerite de Valois – With Nine Illustrations.There’s also a historical biography of Margot and her mother Catherine, The Rival Queens: Catherine de’ Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal that Ignited a Kingdom, although Nancy Goldstone is not a professional historian.

One good scholarly introduction to 16th century France is Frederic Baumgartner’s France in the Sixteenth Century.A simple introduction to the Massacre is The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford Cultural Editions Series).

Out of Africa: Taking the Africans out of ‘Africa’

Tags

Colonial Africa, Colonial Kenya, colonialism, Denys Finch Hatton, Iman, Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Meryl Streep, Movies I Love, Out of Africa, Racial Issues, Robert Redford, Sydney Pollack

Out of Africa (1985, dir. Sydney Pollack) is a wonderful film in many ways. It’s one of those movies that draws me in any time I run across it on cable. But its depiction of colonial Africa leaves a good deal to be desired.

The film is loosely based on Karen Blixen’s memoire of life in Kenya in the 1920s, Out of Africa (written under the pen name of Isak Dinesen). Consequently, the film is not truly a depiction of colonial Kenya so much as it is a depiction of Blixen’s memoires about colonial Kenya. As a result, we have to recognize that the film’s view of Africa is at two removes from history, since it is showing the Africa of Blixen’s memories more than the Africa of history. At least, it claims to be about Blixen’s memoire, although it substantially deviates from the book, as I pointed out in my previous post.

The book is, at a fundamental level, about the contrast between European and African society, and the movie tries to capture that by showing the exoticism of African’s wildlife, scenery, and peoples. The cinematography is at times breath-taking and lyrical. But while the film successfully captures some of Africa’s beauty, it does a much less effective job of capturing African culture. Where Blixen’s book spends a good deal of time exploring her relationship with various Africans and her efforts to make sense of their society, the film’s focus on the relationship between Blixen (Meryl Streep), Bror (Klaus Maria Brandauer), and Finch Hatton (Robert Redford) means that much of the heart of the book gets crowded out.

The major African characters in the film are all taken from the book. Her loyal aide Farah, her young cook Kamante Gatura, and the Kikuyu chieftain Kinanjui are all prominent characters in the memoire. In fact, they are all far more important characters in the book than they are in the film, especially the latter two. Nearly a fifth of the book is devoted to Blixen’s reminiscences about Kamante, and Kinanjui gets a whole chapter. Farah does not get his own section like the other two, but is a constant presence in many of her anecdotes.

Farah was an exceedingly important figure on her coffee farm, handling much of the daily management of the estate and becoming a major confidant. Blixen describes their relationship as a “creative unity”. She describes Kamante’s efforts to get married, and makes frequent references to his comments about various unusual situations. (When a brush fire breaks out nearby, he tells her that she had better get up because “God is coming.” After she points out that it is only a brush fire, he comments that he thought he would be on the safe side, just in case it actually was God.) Kinanjui is a complex figure, wise, proud, and somewhat vain, whose support was vital to her getting the workers she needed for the farm. What makes the book such excellent reading is the way that all the characters emerge clearly as human beings.

Blixen and Kinanjui in the film

Unfortunately, none of these characters emerge strongly as people in the film. Farah (Malick Bowens) appears frequently, but rarely shows himself to be anything more than an obedient servant. Kamante (Joseph Thiaka) features in several scenes regard his sore-covered legs, which Blixen persuades him to get treated at a Nairobi hospital. One of the more memorable scenes involves a conversation in which the two of them discuss Kamante’s leg as if it has its own will; sadly this scene seems to be an invention of the screenwriter Kurt Luedtke. Kinanjui (Stephen Kinyanjui) acts primarily an opponent of Blixen’s plan to educate the Kikuyu, although he eventually changes his mind. This too seems to be Luedtke’s invention.

The film does not permit Kamante and Kinanjui to be real people in their own right. Whereas Blixen and Finch Hatton are permitted to grow and develop as people, Kamante and Kinanjui only grow and change in reaction to Blixen’s actions. We are not allowed to see their personal conflicts or even the moment when they change their minds and agree to Blixen’s wishes; in both cases, they simply show up and demonstrate that their thinking has changed. Whereas the historical Farah and Kamante had wives and children, in the film they are apparently single, because their personal lives are unimportant.

The real Kamante Gatura

The film wishes to portray Blixen’s benevolent paternalism (maternalism?) toward the Africans around her. In several scenes she is shown giving medical help to the Kikuyu (something Blixen actually did a good deal, although she admits she had only a first aid course for training). She wants to educate her Kikuyu (and persuades the missionary she recruits to hold off on evangelizing his students). When she has to sell the farm, her last struggle is to arrange a new home for the tribe that will be displaced when her farm is developed. To a considerable extent, the film uses its named African characters to demonstrate her benevolent generosity. She persuades Kamante to get his leg treated over his initial resistance, and she persuades Kinanjui that literacy would be a valuable skill for his people.

Because the film is more interested in using Africans to demonstrate the cinematic Blixen’s character than in accurately capturing the real Blixen’s experiences with them, Luedtke resorts to inventing scenes that didn’t happen, so that he can show off her character. Most of the more notable scenes with Kamante and Kinanjui are not based in her writings, as far as I can tell. So too is the scene at the end of the film in which Farah expresses his devotion to her (she tells him that she will go ahead of him and light a fire to guide him to her, an odd thing to tell a man who will be staying behind to take care of his family). Kinanjui’s opposition to her school also seems to be an invention. So rather than letting the real characters say what they actually said, we are given Hollywood ideas of what Africans would say to a white woman they have come to love because she’s so benevolent.

(As an aside, another memorable scene at the end of the film is also a Hollywood invention. Although Blixen did persuade the British government to provide the Kikuyu tribe with land, she did not do it by creating a scene by publicly embarrassing the incoming governor and impressing his wife.)

Disguising Colonialism

All of this is emblematic of a wider problem with the film, which is that it has little interest in exploring the negative impact of colonialism on the Africans. In the film, Finch Hatton is worried about the loss of wildlife and untouched land, which is accurate, but he has no such concern for the native peoples. If you watch the film closely, in fact you will see that he is quite condescending toward the natives. He has a black servant that he never speaks to, and tells Blixen to ignore the man entirely. He casually mentions the man’s death later in the film as if he doesn’t care that the man has died. Finch Hatton also asserts that the Masai are incapable of thinking about the future; they die if they are put into prison because they cannot understand that they will ever be let out. He makes a similar comment that animals have no sense of time. While the film presents these comments as a profound insight, as an observation that Africans and animals live in the moment, what Finch Hatton is actually doing is saying that Africans are more like animals than humans mentally (a point reinforced by the fact that both the Kikuyus and the animals are fascinated by his gramophone). One might defend this as representing an historically accurate way that some Europeans viewed Africans, but in the film these comments are offered as examples of his wisdom, not as a way to suggest he looks down on the Africans. (And at his funeral, Blixen briefly sees a glimpse of Finch Hatton’s dead Masai servant, suggesting that this servant, much like Murron in Braveheart, was supernaturally loyal to him, despite his condescension and apparent disregard.)

The theme of African devotion to white superiors runs through the film. In addition to Finch Hatton’s Masai servant, the European Berkeley Cole has a Somali servant Mariammo (Iman) who is also revealed to be his lover; he says that he “thinks” she likes him (one would hope so; otherwise he’s basically been raping her). Farah and Kamante are both devoted to Blixen and want to go to Europe with her when she leaves. Since both men were actually married, the film has subtly stripped away their families in order that they can regard Blixen as a substitute wife or mother. The Kikuyu workers never express any emotion more negative than a certain wariness of Blixen, a wariness that dissipates once they realize she’s a good person.

Iman as Mariammo

What is especially problematic here is that the film makes few efforts to show us what these white characters did to earn the devotion of their servants; it’s just taken as a given. The film never contemplates the possibility that this devotion might be a calculated strategy of self-interest, in which a lower status person chooses to serve a more powerful person as way of getting employment, shelter, legal protection, or whatever else might be needed. Instead, Africans just seem to love their benevolent colonial masters. Mariammo seems content to be treated as Cole’s servant instead of being acknowledged publicly as his de facto wife.

What makes this so frustrating is that the memoire takes a very different attitude toward its African characters. Blixen recognized that the relationship between Europeans and Africans was complicated. She discusses the fact that Africans are slow to trust Europeans and often dislike speaking to them. She contrasts the native justice system favorably to the British system, which allows a man to kill his native servant without punishment. She discusses the fact that the colonial authorities repeatedly tried to suppress the native Ngoma dances out of fear that they will encourage resistance to colonial authority. So it’s not that Blixen herself was oblivious to these issues; the film mostly chooses to remove these elements from her story.

The film touches on these issues only briefly and obliquely. At Cole’s funeral, Mariammo is forced to stand outside the fence around the graveyard. When Blixen tries to get the British government to provide for the Kikuyu, Blixen comments that ‘we’ have taken their land from them. At first glance this seems a rather enlightened comment, until you consider that the reason Blixen can hire the Kikuyu for her farm is that she herself (and her husband Bror) are the ones who dispossessed this tribe of their land. Her benevolence is shown by the fact that, having taken the Kikuyu’s farmland, she is willing to pay them to help her farm it and worries about what will happen when she leaves.

The film is not entirely blind to the power imbalance between Africans and Europeans; it simply doesn’t want to call any serious attention to it. It does at least acknowledge the way Europeans dispossessed Africans of their lands and turned them into servants. Cole’s relationship with Miriammo speaks volumes about the treatment of Africans, but it speaks quite softly.

But the most effective way the film does this lies in a subtle but repeated theme of the challenge of communication between Africans and Europeans. Finch Hatton and his servant do not speak to each other, and he tells Blixen to ignore the man. Mariammo has no dialogue (so the film has literally deprived her of her voice), and Blixen briefly contemplates speaking to the woman at the funeral but chooses not to. No one in the film, even Cole, explicitly acknowledges the reality of the relationship. The servants in the Muthaiga Club bar do not speak to Blixen, and are reluctant to acknowledge her drink order at all. Blixen speaks to Kinanjui only through a translator, because he “has no British”. Only Kamante and Farah have significant speaking roles, and both call her Msabu, indicating their subservience; when Farah finally does speak her name, it only because she orders him to do so as they are parting. In all of this, the film subtly emphasizes that Africans and Europeans could not speak openly and honestly to each other as equals, but only as master and servant. Only Blixen is able to bridge that gap, and even then only briefly at the end of the film.

A Different Kind of Power Imbalance

It’s not that Sydney Pollack wasn’t thinking about inequality in this film. It’s that he’s more interested in gender inequalities than racial ones. Once the decision was made to focus on Blixen’s romance with Finch Hatton, it was natural to develop this into a ‘woman’s film” by focusing on other issues relevant to women in the 1980s, namely sexual liberation, the ability to work, and equal treatment socially, all three of which are addressed in the film. At the start of the film, Blixen is at the end of a pre-marital love affair when she untraditionally proposes to Bror (he wryly asks her “are you sure you’re not being too romantic?”). Later, after Bror and she separate, she starts another unconventional love affair with Finch Hatton, but is dissatisfied that he will not permanently commit to her and ultimately she breaks it off. So she is presented in some ways as a sexually liberated woman, but one who longs for the security of a conventional marriage after her failed marriage.

The film also shows her working on the coffee farm right alongside her workers, planting trees, processing the beans for roasting, bagging up the roasted beans, and so on. She frequently leads her workers in tasks such as repairing the dikes. In Hollywood tradition, this demonstrates her genuineness, because she is a lower class worker at heart, even if she’s actually a woman of money and leisure.

At the start of the film, when she arrive in Nairobi, she makes the mistake of walking into the Muthaiga Club’s bar, which is a male-only space, and she is immediately rebuked and forced to leave. In real life, this is a nonsensical scene; a woman of Blixen’s social standing and training would have known that she didn’t belong there, but in the film it acts to remind viewers that this was a period when women were explicitly excluded from many spaces. At the end of the film the men of the club invite her in for a going-away drink, as a sign that they have come to have respect for her. Again, in the context of her day, this is a false note; the men would have seen themselves as respecting her since in both scenes, the men all stand up when she enters the room, which was a standard gesture of courtesy to a woman at the time. So the purpose of the scene is to vindicate her hard work and virtue.

However, at the same time, the film works to undermine Blixen in subtle ways. When she arrives in Africa, she is scared of the natives and at one point tries to literally shoo them away. Although she knows how to hunt (at the start of the film she is participating in a shooting party), and although the historical Blixen went on safaris with her husband before she met Finch Hatton, in the film, Finch Hatton is the one who teaches her how to hunt. But when she is charged by a lioness, she manages to shoot it herself, impressing Finch Hatton. She needs Finch Hatton’s protection, but not completely. So while the film ignores the racial imbalances in colonial Kenya, it explores the gender imbalances.

Blixen shooting the lioness

And it does this by injecting gender in a way that Blixen never does in the memoire. In the book, she makes almost no reference the fact that she’s a woman (and, given that she was using a male pen name, it might have been odd if she had). So, in a way, the film colonizes Blixen’s memoire the way the Europeans colonized Kenya, taking her story as its own and exploiting it for its own purposes rather than respecting hers.

 

Want to Know More?

Out of Africa is available on Amazon.

If you want to read something about colonial Kenya and the race issues there, Colonial Kenya Observed: British Rule, Mau Mau and the Wind of Change is the memoires of a provincial administrator who lived in Kenya the whole time Dinesen was there. Communal Labor in Colonial Kenya: The Legitimization of Coercion, 1912-1930looks at the labor system that Dinesen benefitted from on her plantation. It is rather pricy, however.