Does every film reflect the era in which it was made, not the era in which it's set? ANNA CAREYtakes a look at Hollywood's history with history and finds it riddled with inaccuracies and revisionism – oh, and aristocrats weeing on their curtains
IF WE’VE LEARNED anything from Hollywood in recent years, it’s that the sun never shone in the Middle Ages. In days of yore, everyone went about their miserable business clad in mud-coloured rags, before dying of bubonic plague or an arrow to the neck under a leaden sky.
They didn’t smile much, for obvious reasons, but if they did, it was because they were off their faces on mead, and you probably wouldn’t notice anyway because of the constant Stygian gloom. The only time they ever saw bright sunlight was when a battle or similar act of horrific violence was taking place, in order to make the tragic waste of human life look even more poignant.
But Hollywood used to give us a very different view of that era. Back in 1938, medieval England was apparently a much jollier and indeed more colourful place. In Ridley Scott's extremely gritty Robin Hood, we meet the eponymous hero grunting away on a muddy battlefield (it's Russell Crowe, so grunting is inevitable). In the extremely ungritty 1938 film, we first see Errol Flynn's heroic outlaw atop a horse looking wryly amused. A light smile plays about his lips, his glittering garments showing that, though they may have been overtaxed in 12th-century Nottingham, they weren't short of sequins.
In 2010, Cate Blanchett's Marian is a convincingly down-to-earth woman who has been running the family farm in her Crusader husband's absence; in her first scene, she warns off a gang of thieves with a flaming arrow. When we meet Olivia De Havilland's Marian in the 1938 movie, she's wearing a gold lamé wimple. Today's Robin spends most of his time looking tormented while bashing people with swords or firing arrows at them. The Robin Hoodof the past spent his time prancing, swinging around on vines, and having impressively bloodless swordfights with Basil Rathbone.
No, gritty realism certainly wasn’t a priority in those days. Movies have always been fascinated by the past, but whether their depiction of said past is authentic or not is another matter.
One of the very first feature films, DW Griffith's groundbreaking The Birth of a Nation(1915), is a historical epic, telling the story of the US Civil War and post-war Reconstruction. It's also mindbogglingly racist. If The Birth of a Nationis to be believed, slavery was a great laugh altogether – witness, if you can bear it, the hideous scene in which happy slaves dance for their owners' amusement. And, of course, there's no indication of the rapes, beatings and forced separation of families that was the norm for slaves – this is a film, after all, in which the Ku Klux Klan are the noble heroes.
Twenty-five years later, another historical epic set in the American South would reflect this unashamedly biased view of the US's past. Gone With the Windpresents a world where the O'Hara family slaves are perfectly happy picking cotton and lacing bratty teenage girls into corsets. After the civil war, the audience are invited to share Scarlett's horror at the sight of sharply dressed former slaves walking around town while their former owners are living on raw turnips. The fact that racial segregation, mass disenfranchisement and lynchings continued well into the 1960s indicates that this view was, to say the least, a little biased.
Horrible politics apart, both films were impressive spectacles, and as time went by, big historical dramas became a great excuse to put on amazing showd. The sets in 1959's Ben Hurmay have had an air of polystyrene about them, but the film was an unforgettable sight. The many historical inaccuracies aside, movies such as Ben Hurand Spartacus(1960) showed the past as a glittering pageant where even the sea battles looked fresh and shiny.
It was this pristine aesthetic that the Monty Python team mocked so perfectly in their film debut, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in 1975. Terry Jones said they wanted to make "an antidote to the Hollywood vision of the Middle Ages with huge sets and large clean floors . . . [we liked] the idea of doing a dirty, funky Middle Ages." Little did the Pythons know that they were creating a new aesthetic that would one day become the norm for any historical epic with a desire to be taken seriously, from Braveheartto Gladiator.
Because, as time went by, film-makers became less concerned with shiny spectacle and more concerned with bringing the past to life in all its grubby glory. While the Pythons had to use some cardboard cut-outs (and couldn't afford horses), today's film-makers use CGI to recreate everything from the Colosseum and its crowds in Gladiator to, in the case of 300, everything, including the bodies of the actors. It has never been so easy to authentically recreate bygone worlds. But that doesn't mean it always happens.
Many of today's big historical movies revel in grime to a preposterous degree, but some clean things up a bit instead. Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinettewasn't exactly the most dramatic film in the world, but it was undeniably very beautiful, in a Fragonard-painting-come-to-life sort of way. In its presentation of pre-Revolution Versailles as a pastel-coloured fairyland, however, it ignored the fact that in the 18th century, the palace was so notoriously short of lavatories that the resident aristocrats used to wee against the walls or behind curtains. In reality, the edges of all those lovely pastel draperies were destroyed by the constant streams of urine. How dreamy.
In fact, modern film-makers are just as prone to ignoring the aspects of the past that don't suit their views as Griffith ever was. Pretty much all sword-and-sandal epics either completely ignore or tone down the fact that in the ancient world, many of the most mighty warriors slept with other men. In 300, the Spartans mock the Persians as "boy lovers", which is a bit rich considering that the real Spartans, as Prof Paul Cartledge points out, "incorporated a form of pederasty into their educational system, as a way of turning a boy into a warrior".
In the film, the Persians themselves are like something out of Edward Said's Orientalist nightmares – effeminate and monstrous. And in the 2004 blockbuster Troy, Brad Pitt's heroic Achilles is very fond of his "cousin" Patroclus; in Ancient Greece, it was widely accepted that the pair were not cousins but lovers.
But while there’s no excuse for blatant historical inaccuracies which ignore details that some of today’s audiences may not like to confront, maybe we should accept that it’s impossible to make a truly authentic historical drama. Even in the unlikely event that you do try as hard as you can to recreate the world of the past, even if your characters are speaking Latin or Middle English or Ancient Greek, even if they’re nearly all several inches shorter than today’s average adult, even if the women have a lot more body hair than today’s stars, it will never be really authentic.
Because every film reflects the era in which it was made, not the era in which it's set. This may not, of course, be evident at the time. It's like famous forged paintings – when we look at them now, we can't believe the art experts of the time were fooled, because today a fake Vermeer painted in the 1940s clearly looks like a painting from the 1940s. And the attitudes, the aesthetics and, most crucially, the hair and make-up of the present era will always find their way into a movie – just think of Costner and Slater's horrendous fluffy mullets in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
No matter how gritty a historical film is, no matter how many grubby-faced wonky-toothed extras run across its artfully muddy sets, future viewers will recognise it immediately as a product of its times. You might as well bring on the sequined jerkins and gold lamé wimples. At least they might cheer up some of the peasants as they labour beneath those constantly miserable medieval skies.
- Robin Hoodopens next week
When history’s all over the gaffe . . .
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
Almost the entire cast of this ridiculous film sport bouffant mullets that were already hideously dated when it was released in 1991.
Titanic
The film's heroine Rose apparently bought some soon-to-be incredibly famous and significant modern paintings on her European jaunt, including Picasso's Les Demoiselles dAvignon,which all go down with the ship. Needless to say, this is rubbish.
Braveheart
Amongst its myriad historical inaccuracies is the fact that the Scottish warriors wear plaid kilt-like garments. The Scottish didn’t wear belted plaid at all at the time.
Alexander
Aside from Angelina Jolie (b. 1975) playing the mother of Colin Farrell (b. 1976), perhaps the most preposterous sight in Oliver Stone’s Alexander is the Farreller’s artificial-looking bleached blonde locks. Yes, the original Alexander was blonde, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t look like he’d been at the Sun-In.
