Hyperlinks for the three films are to the IMDb website, there are, of course, other sources of info, but the IMDb site is concise.
Spartacus (debate in Senate when Gracchus maneuvers Caesar into command of the garrison of Rome, and that aftermath at Crassus' house)
Ben Hur (Arrius' triumphal procession, and Ben Hur's adoption)
Caligula (Caligula and Drusilla; the banishment of Ennia; Caligula meditates on moving the Capital to Alexandria)
Great Excavations (John Romer – Documentary on Mussolini's manipulation of Augustus and Roman Empire for his own purposes). Channel 4 have a resource page for this program, but it's not great. The link called 'State Servants' gets you to the material covered in the clip we looked at.
When watching the video clips please think about the following questions:
To what extent do you think that this clip has influenced your personal perception of what ‘Rome’ is?
What kind of visual rhetoric does the clip use to model the viewer’s sense of engaging with Rome?
What kind of story is the clip attempting to tell?
Do the set, imagery, costume etc. seem to reflect the age when the film was produced? Does this make a difference?
To what extent is the Romer clip constructing a story that is comparable to those of the movie clips? To what extent does its serious, didactic intent set it apart from the movie clips?
Is it possible for us to exclude these images from our (re)interpretation of Rome from classical texts?
How comparable are these clips as pieces of popular myth-making with the texts that we have been reading this term?
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