Marc'Antonio e Cleopatra (1913) User Reviews

Important silent version of the Antony and Cleopatra story

[oknorr · 6/10 · 22 August 2006]

Based loosely on Shakespeare's play, Plutarch's "Life of Antony", and Pietro Cossa's dramatic poem, "Cleopatra", this movie was spectacular for its time. It offers location shots made in Italy and Egypt, large crowd scenes (e.g., the Roman army embarking in Alexandria), lots of emotional drama (Marc Antony & Cleopatra, his wife Octavia, sister of Antony's rival Octavian, unhistorically coming to Alexandria to beg him to return to her, and some mean, mean looks exchanged between Octavia and Cleopatra. The scene in which the slave Charmian is threatened by alligators is truly creepy. I wonder whether it was this scene that inspired Cecil B. DeMille to have alligators eat the Christians in the arena in his 1932 "Sign of the Cross". He certainly had no basis in fact for this.

The video version I saw was not of the highest quality, but then this may simply be the best print they could find. The organ music that was added to the film, however, does not sound like anything someone would have played in 1913 and is so annoying that you may simply want to turn the sound off.

For another review of this film, see Jon Solomon, The Ancient World in the Cinema (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001), p. 62-63.

orientalist not a Shakespearian view of Cleopatra's Egypt

[kekseksa · 11 August 2018]

Although it is often described as being based on the Shakespeare play Antony and Cleopatra, this film actually resembles the Shakespeare play very little altough obviously the bais story (from Plutarch is he ame). What is noticeable here is that there is remarkably little sympaathy either for Cleopatra or for the Egyptians in general. I have only seen the film in an English version but here the intertitles rather oddly emphasise continually thier "pagan" and "barbaric" nature - oddly since, after all, the Romans were in fact not less "pagan" nor less barbaric (the court culture of the Ptolemies was basically Greek).

One is reminded of the fact that the flourishing of the Italian epic at this period coincided with Italy's post-union attempts to join the ranks of the colonisers with the Italo-Turkish war of 1911-1912 bringing them what is now Libya but it had also acquired Eritrea (from Egypt) long harboured ambitions in the horn of Africa (eventuually leading to Mussolini's extremely barbaric invasion of Abyssian/Ethiopia). So the Italians were eager to present the Romans (seen obviously as symbols for themselves) as a sort of "nearly Christian" power involved in a civilising mission amongst the pagan and barbaric peopes of Africa. None of this is there in Shakespeare but it was probably there in Pietro Cossa's very orientalist 1879 verse play (I have only seen the set designs) and it is certainly there in Guazzoni's film.

Shakespeare privileges the autumnal love of the two principal characters (both in practice middle-aged) above the "wide arch of the rais'd empire" but here it is the imperial project that is regarded not merely as the inevitable winner but also as the desirable outcome.