Monumental film

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As a rule , films produced for the cinema , especially feature films , are called monumental films in which several formal, but also content-related criteria are met that make a film a monumental work (in the sense of "oversized" and "outstanding") do. In addition to high production costs, the formal criteria of a monumental film include, for example, an elaborate staging in which mass scenes with an unusually high number of extras , costumes and / or separately produced or recreated sets play an important role.

Characteristic

In terms of content, not all, but many monumental films are often characterized by an epic breadth (→ epic ). These include B. changing characters in a plot that extends over a longer period of time, sometimes over decades or even over generations. Due to the complexity of the respective films in terms of time and / or location, most of them also result in an excess length of two or more hours.

A monumental film is not tied to any specific film genre . Different forms of dramaturgical representation ( tragedy , comedy , melodrama ) and genres (war film, western, crime, romance, etc.) often overlap in one and the same film. In this sense, the monumental film can also be described as a kind of formal super-genre for productions with a high expenditure of actors, sets, costumes and, accordingly, costs.

Materials that are often used for monumental films are historical themes, often against the background of wars, revolutions or other social, social and / or political upheavals; or biographies of historical personalities. But also fictional stories, for example film adaptations of extensive novels (e.g. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy or Spartacus by Howard Fast ) up to the subjects of fantasy ( The Lord of the Rings ) and science fiction ( Star Wars , Metropolis , 2001: A space odyssey ) can form the background for monumental films. From the so-called sandal film , to war and anti-war films (e.g. The Longest Day ), Westerns ( Heaven's Gate , Who Dances With Wolves ), coat-and-sword films ( Barry Lyndon ), for example from the Greek-ancient one Mythology or the fairy tales from 1001 nights inspired films have hardly been left out of the monumental film genre.

For a long time, historical films , set for example in ancient Egypt or in Greco-Roman antiquity , formed a focus among monumental films; This also includes film adaptations of the Bible and films that are set up in the Persian-Arabic-Indian region ( Thousand and One Nights ).

Continue to be among the early epics and The Birth of a Nation ( The Birth of a Nation , 1915) by David Wark Griffith , Napoleon (1927) by Abel Gance and - based on themes of contemporary history - Exodus (1960) by Otto Preminger or two-piece A total of five hours of film 1900 (1976) and The Last Emperor (1987), both by Bernardo Bertolucci .

Highlights

A well-known director and American pioneer of monumental films in the first half of the 20th century was Cecil B. DeMille . Monumental films reached their climax in the 1950s and 1960s. The sound film remake by Ben Hur from 1959, filmed by William Wyler , which received eleven Oscars and which set new standards in cinema technology, is regarded by many as the epitome of monumental film as an outstanding film and classic . The version by Ben Hur from 1925 directed by Fred Niblo is already considered a milestone in film history . With Ben Hur or Quo Vadis and The Ten Commandments , the monumental film was widely understood by the audience, albeit incorrectly, often with the genre of the ancient drama or adventure film (also known as " sandal film " ) (before or around the birth of Christ) , " Bible film " or " antique film ") equated. Cleopatra (1963; with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton ) is also of importance in this genre for film history . The extremely high production costs of 44 million US dollars had driven the production company 20th Century Fox to the brink of financial ruin.

Since the image of the large-scale productions played in antiquity deteriorated due to mass productions, especially from Italy, the film with this historical background increasingly developed into a wear and tear item in the 1970s and was hardly noticed in Hollywood . Only in the 21st century did it experience a certain renaissance , for example with the successful films Gladiator (2000), Troja and Alexander (2004).

See also

literature

  • Derek Elley: The Epic Film. Myth and History. Reprint of 1984 edition. Routledge, London 2014, ISBN 0-41572-677-8 (English).
  • Marcus Junkelmann : Hollywood's Dream of Rome. “Gladiator” and the tradition of the monumental film. (= Cultural History of the Ancient World , Volume 94). Zabern, Mainz 2004, ISBN 3-8053-2905-9 .
  • Gary A. Smith: Epic Films. Cast, Credits and Commentary on over 350 Historical Spectacle Movies. McFarland, Jefferson 2008, ISBN 0-7864-4081-3 (English).
  • Jon Solomon: The ancient world in the cinema. Revised and expanded edition. Yale University Press, New Haven 2001, ISBN 0-300-08335-1 (English).
  • Diana Wenzel: Cleopatra in the film. A queen of Egypt as a symbol for oriental culture. Gardez, Remscheid 2005, ISBN 3-89796-121-0 .

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