Reception of Mesopotamia on Film. Maria de Fatima Rosa

Schulze-Mittendorff.

      To my family, above all, I owe a debt of gratitude for all the support and encouragement. My last words go to my dearest niece, Mafalda, who has given me the motivation when I needed the most.

Introduction: Reception of Mesopotamia and the Cinema Lens

      0.1 Reception Studies and Cinema

Studies on Reception of antiquity are relatively recent. Charles Martindale first included Reception Theory in the field of Classical Studies in 1993 with Redeeming the Text: Latin poetry and the hermeneutics of reception. The Professor of Latin from the University of Bristol was inspired by the research line inaugurated by the Constance School, with scholars such as Wolfgang Iser and especially Hans Robert Jauss, who, in the 1960s, boosted the field named Aesthetic of Reception. Jauss postulated that the observer of a work of art should be given an active role. In broad terms, he considered that the work of art was not a static or timeless phenomenon.¹ In his own words, “A literary work is not an object that stands by itself and that offers the same view to each reader in each period. It is not a monument that monologically reveals its timeless essence. It is much more like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among its readers and that frees the text from the material of the words and brings it to a contemporary existence.”² Martindale thus resorted to this seminal work to introduce new conceptions in the study of the Classics, claiming, like Jauss before him, that an author has no control over his work since it does not have an immutable meaning, always depending on the interpretations made about it and hence subjected to the cognitive role of the observer/reader, the “active principle.”³

To Martindale, the fact that reception presupposes the active participation of the reader, being himself an essential part in the relationship between present and the past and its prolific dialogue,⁴ differentiates it from other sorts of analyses. Indeed, reception contrasts with other concepts that can also be applied to the study of the past, although with different meanings and uses, that is: “tradition” and “appropriation.” If, in the first case, we speak of an almost passive acceptance of a legacy from the past, in the second we are perhaps faced with a rupture of dialogue, an apprehension that makes it almost impossible to shape and modify the reader’s sensitivity. Considering the involvement of the reader, reception therefore presents itself as a basis for the study and interpretation of the reason to why there is not a single reading for history.⁵ In fact, we must remind ourselves that neither the culture produced by past civilizations is dead nor its influence on the present is linear.⁶ One should not, therefore, succumb to the illusion of considering antiquity as stationary, since as an object of analysis it changes throughout time, from one generation to the other, and from researcher to researcher.⁷ In other words, Martindale assumes that the same historical vehicle, the same text,⁸ can be interpreted in different ways depending on the agent and on the time of that interpretation. Naturally, history, as much as it wants to find unique and stagnant readings, depends, in large part, on its observer, on its reader, and on the way his present contemplates that past. Jauss inclusively reminded us in his opus of the words of R.G. Collingwood, who “postulate, posed in his critique of the prevailing ideology of objectivity in history – History is nothing but the reenactment of past thought in the historian’s mind.”⁹

      Plus, the text of the past can be perceived by the reader of the present in a way that its author did not foresee or conceive it. The reader is an active part in the process of transfer of knowledge, of formulating interpretations, and of extracting his own sensitivity from the text. Hence, the passage of the text from the author to the reader happens, as we started by saying, through a process of conversation and interconnection. Through the text, the self of now dialogues with the self of before.

The same can be said about a cinematographic text. Once created, the work passes from its creator to those who receive and enjoy it, being subjected to their emotions. The film is as much or more of the viewer than of its director and screenwriter. As Burnette-Bletsch remembers “both filmmakers and film-viewers should be recognized as active participants in the interpretive process. In other words, establishing the meaning(s) of a film is not the sole domain of the filmmaker (…) Like the readers of a text, film-viewers are not passive recipients of meanings encoded in a filmic ‘text’ but actively participate in the construction of a film’s meaning.”¹⁰

When it comes to the film on antiquity, reception is everything. James Porter even acknowledges that we take a serious risk in avoiding the importance of reception. After all, “To oppose the obvious fact that the classical past (so called) simply cannot exist without its being received is to live in the protective vacuum of an illusion – the illusion that classical studies and their objects are timeless and eternal, invulnerable to the impingements of history and to contingency.”¹¹ One could also extend this concern to films set in the pre-classical age. In reality, if we consider that Martindale’s Reception Aesthetic was first applied to Classical Studies, and primarily to Linguistics, and that it was followed by other seminal works, such as Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray’s A Companion to Classical Receptions (2008),¹² also regarding the Greek and Roman worlds, we may say that in its origin it only contemplated a partial fraction of the past. If it is true that the authors of the latter contemplate receptions beyond this universe, highlighting the importance of “interactions with a succession of contexts, both classically and non-classically orientated,”¹³ it is also a fact that they acknowledge that “Additional volumes would be needed to do justice (…) to the cultures of the ancient near east and their receptions.”¹⁴ Thus, it would be fair to state that with regard to a civilization such as Mesopotamia, reception is still taking its first steps. Recently, Garcia-Ventura and Verderame, proposing to contribute to the thickening of Reception Studies on the ancient Near East¹⁵ underlined the way in which this cultural quadrant has always been relegated to the background, often considered “a necessary but undeveloped forerunner of Greek culture.”¹⁶ As they acknowledge, the ancient Near East has been almost completely ignored by Reception Studies, and only in recent years have scholars such as Bohrer,¹⁷ Brusius,¹⁸ or Malley¹⁹ presented studies on Reception, although starting mainly from an art historical or archaeological perspective.²⁰

Frederick Nathaniel Bohrer was probably the first to apply the idea that the meaning of the text is not only passively received but actively produced to the study of Mesopotamia’s perceptions (during the nineteenth century). We must therefore ask what exactly is the text, especially concerning a civilization such as Mesopotamia, so harassed by the past, so intriguing and intoxicating that despite its oblivion of centuries has managed to remain in the imagination of the succeeding civilizations and has reached the present day? As Porter admitted, “One of the greatest ironies of classical studies is that they are themselves a form of reception studies.”²¹ The same might be said regarding Mesopotamian studies. Indeed, when we speak about reception, we need to be aware of the current of different layers of conceptions and receptions that the original historical phenomenon has been subjected to throughout the ages. In this sense, the first part of this book, called “The pre-cinematographic image,” aims to provide a comprehensive guide to the reader, starting in the first interpretations and receptions of Mesopotamian history until the eve of the twentieth century.

In Mesopotamian studies, when one comes in contact with the text, it is already impossible to break the sequence of perceptions and meanings, what Hans Georg Gadamer would call “a continuing chain,”²² that have contributed to its cumulative production process over the centuries. For instance, Luigi Maggi’a La regina di Ninive (1911) is a short film based on Voltaire’s tragedy Sémiramis (1748), which is in turn a creation based on a story presented by the Greek historian and writer Diodorus Siculus, grounded on perceptions of ancient Mesopotamia. Maggi’s text is itself a collection of other texts. The dialogue between writer and reader is thus designed in the stratigraphy of interpretations and interconnections between the sensibilities of the various agents of