After La rivolta dei gladiatori, you could still think whatever you liked about Cottafavi. As for me, I didn’t think much of him. So seeing Le legioni di Cleopatra offered both the delight of a pleasant surprise and that very particular delight that comes from works which radiate the pleasure their author has taken in creating them.
There was already in La rivolta dei gladiatori a certain sense of color, gesture, and arrangement, but I only saw this — or only knew how to see it — as resulting, at best, in the intermittent creation of the so-called ‘beautiful shot’. Here, the same qualities do more than unify the plot; they create it. They do not merely illustrate it but constitute it, and even go so far as to constitute as history the story we are told.
The relationships of lines and tones in this series of digressions and fantasias on Roman themes are in themselves, in every sense of the word, a frame. They create an immediate language in which the sign is self-sufficient, since it already forms a total expression. Here, the role of this language is to directly imprint upon us the sense of a mythical history which, truer than true, needs to be translated into the super-truth of a ‘colored’ language that rediscovers the magical, mystical values of preconceptual language.
Legendary Romanity is rediscovered through the same means that created the legendary Americanity in the western. The basic gesture of the heroes of epic, returned to the network of rhymes, assonances, and correspondences that must give it all its resonance, is already in itself a Gesture.
Action films that only bear superficial resemblances to the western have often wrongly been likened to it. Here, perhaps for the first time in Europe, we are faced with a film that is deeply imbued with the spirit and language of the western, in the way it understands human relationships through a raw totality whose every element is provocative and tolerates only ultimate outcomes, whether cowardice or heroism.
Such a vision of the world prohibits irony as well as distanciation, but not humor, nor the so-called ‘forced’ line, nor, above all, a certain sense of the absurd: in short, it’s a matter of grasping the offhandedness of facts.
The film’s extraordinary opening already conveys this. The credits are followed by three cards filled to the brim with historical details. This sets the stage for dazzling variations on crowds in streets and taverns, featuring various brawls, discussions, and strolls — in particular, a walk through the slave market. Compacted dialogue is incorporated into gestures like an additional dimension. At the market, the merchant says, ‘This one’s for another use’, as he presents a young boy after praising the qualities of his female merchandise. Here, as always, it is by constantly and totally surrendering to the joy of saying and showing that Cottafavi succeeds in condensing the maximum meaning into the minimum time.
It would be easy to draw on this continuous flow of rapid-fire ideas and discoveries, if not to demonstrate, then at least to indulge in the pleasure of storytelling (and perhaps that would indeed be the best way to arrive at a demonstration), but I will refrain from doing so. I will, however, note how the departure and arrival of an arrow, which are conventionally filmed in separate shots, are suddenly shown in the same shot, in a volte-face that is both a wink to the audience and the most skillful of crescendos.
A word about Cleopatra. At first, we only see her eyes incorporated into a statue’s mask, but later in the tavern, when we see a dancer mask her face with her hands, leaving only her eyes visible, we are mischievously invited to associate the Beauty in the palace with this Beast, as it were, of the seedier parts of town.
I’d like to point out now, since I’ve used the term ‘pre-conceptual language’, that after a dialogue featuring Augustus dressed in a white toga against a night studded with fires, a frenzied charge will drive Caesar’s white legions like a wedge into Antony the Republican’s red legions, which will by nightfall end up imprisoned in a ring of fire.
Many detours, one single movement. Strange openings in the walls through which a voice passes, bringing unexpected messages. Openings through which we ourselves seem to pass, by way of a camera movement at once extraordinary and as simple as possible.
Equally simple is the camera’s way of selecting speakers during a dialogue, alternating between retreats and advances which take on the harmony of breathing.
A harmony that is not at all afraid of the breathlessness of syncopated runs, punctuated by rests, leaps, and repeats, a harmony which knows the value of those vital outgrowths called ‘dead time’ but fears the death knell of lethargy. There’s hardly any time for the necessary weak beats of those classic, interminable lovers’ dialogues.
Finally, I must mention the sensational performance of an unusual Cleopatra, with a ten-horse chariot. She will die on her throne, frozen in her royalty, after Mark Antony has turned her death into a marvelous symphony in red, into which he has poured all his heroism and despair.
For there is also this: Mark Antony and Cottafavi both know how to look upon death as poets and republicans.
Cahiers du cinéma, 111, September 1960, pp. 55–57.
Le legioni di Cleopatra (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1959)