by Nigel Spivey
It was in 1895 that the Lumière brothers of France put on the first shows of ‘motion pictures’ using a device called the cinematograph.The movies, as distinct from still photography, seem to be an essentially modern phenomenon.This is an illusion, for there are, as we shall see, certain ways in which the medium of film is indebted to very old precedents of arranging ‘sequences’ of images.Those precedents will become evident in the course of this chapter. But any account of visual storytelling must begin with the recognition that all storytelling beats with a deeply atavistic pulse: that is, a ‘good story’ relies upon formal patterns of plot and characterization that have been embedded in the practice of storytelling over many generations.
Thousands of scripts arrive every week at the offices of the major film studios. Each one is loaded with the hope of becoming the next big box-office hit. Specialized courses are offered by experts in the field (such as Robert McKee) to assist in achieving that dream. But aspiring screenwriters really need look no further for essential advice than the fourth-century BC Greek philosopher Aristotle. He left some incomplete lecture notes on the art of telling stories in various literary and dramatic modes, a slim volume known as The Poetics.Though he can never have envisaged the popcorn-fuelled actuality of a multiplex cinema, Aristotle is almost prescient about the key elements required to get the crowds flocking to such a cultural hub. Critics and directors often reach for the language of sorcery to describe what happens with successful storytelling – a film is ‘spellbinding’, or contains ‘magic moments’ – but Aristotle analysed the process with cool rationalism. When a story enchants us, we lose the sense of where we are; we are drawn into the story so thoroughly that we forget it is a story being told.This is, in Aristotle’s phrase, ‘the suspension of disbelief’.
We know the feeling. If ever we have stayed in our seats, stunned with grief, as the credits roll by, or for days after seeing that vivid evocation of horror have been nervous about taking a shower at home, then we have suspended disbelief.We have been caught, or captivated, in the storyteller’s web. Did it all really happen? We really thought so – for a while.
Aristotle must have witnessed often enough this suspension of disbelief. He taught at Athens, the city where theatre developed as a primary form of civic ritual and recreation.Two theatrical types of storytelling, tragedy and comedy, caused Athenian audiences to lose themselves in sadness and laughter respectively.Tragedy, for Aristotle, was particularly potent in its capacity to enlist and then purge the emotions of those watching the story unfold on the stage, so he tried to identify those factors in the storyteller’s art that brought about such engagement. He had, as an obvious sample for analysis, not only the fifth-century BC masterpieces of Classical Greek tragedy written by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Beyond them stood Homer, whose stories even then had canonical status: The Iliad and The Odyssey were already considered literary landmarks – stories by which all other stories should be measured. So what was the secret of Homer’s narrative art?
39 Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones in the archeological adventure series directed by Steven Spielberg.
AN ESSENTIAL STOCK OF STORIES?
THE WORLD’S stories are innumerable. To begin with, there is such a prodigious variety of story types, each diffused in different forms – as if any material were useful to mankind in the making of stories. A story can be carried by articulate language, spoken or written; by images, still or moving; by gestures, or by an ordered combination of all these. A story is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novel, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, pantomime, painted tableau … stained glass, cinema, comics, daily news and conversation. And more: within these almost infinite forms, the story exists at all times, in all places, amid all societies. Storytelling starts with human history itself; there is not, nor has there ever been, anywhere, a group of people without stories … international, transhistorical, across all cultures, storytelling is just there – a part of life.’ ‘
This eminently quotable declaration comes from the French theorist Roland Barthes (1915–80). The activity of storytelling – or ‘narrative’, as the French récit is often translated – is, he observes, a basic element of human coexistence. The narrative theory Barthes proceeded to develop from this premise is termed ‘Structuralist’. For Barthes belonged to an intellectual camaraderie, based in Paris, whose various members (including the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the historian Michel Foucault) were united in the belief that structures of nature, language, society, psychology and so on ultimately determine how individuals think and act.We may not be aware of those structures underpinning and overarching our lives; but they are there all the same. So stories may be prolific beyond counting, and pervasive around the globe, but there will be recurrent patterns to these stories, imposed by structures that lie far beyond individual control.
It was Lévi-Strauss who sought to prove, from research among ancient storytelling traditions in North and South America, that myths and rites are generated from a primal human craving to impose order upon the world. He was also preoccupied by the power of myth to operate in human minds at a covert or subconscious level. The desire for order may have been, in his phrase, a characteristic of ‘primitive thinking’, but its persistence was yet to be felt.
Another influential intellect of the twentieth century, the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875–1961), theorized the existence of a ‘collective unconscious’ – a worldwide reservoir of archetypal symbols and stories in which all human minds might find echoes of their own dreams or experience. But at a popular level, no one has done more to define the recurrent and cross-cultural power of myth than Joseph Campbell (1904–87), whose books – most notably The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1948) – have been all the more effective for their permeation of the Hollywood scriptwriters’ world. For Campbell, there exist throughout the many local myths and stories of the world certain pervasive patterns of action: for example, an abandoned child who eventually claims great power; or the hero whose journey takes him through various tests and setbacks before finding self-knowledge. Campbell himself was disdainful of the cinema, but a number of successful film directors (especially George Lucas, maker of the Star Wars trilogy, and his collaborator on the Indiana Jones series, Steven Spielberg) acknowledge Campbell’s doctrine that myth is primal, coherent, and all-explanatory, and the basis of every great movie (Fig. 39).
It was not hard to find. Homer created credible heroes. His heroes belonged to the past, they were mighty and magnificent, yet they were not, in the end, fantasy figures. Homer reported the speech of Achilles, Agamemnon, Ajax, Hector, Odysseus and the rest as if he had heard it himself. He made his heroes sulk, bicker, cheat and cry.They were, in short, characters – protagonists of a story that an audience would care about, would want to follow, would want to know what happens next. As Aristotle saw, the hero who shows a human side – some flaw or weakness to which mortals are prone – is intrinsically dramatic.
‘Hero’ comes from a Greek word (heros) with certain venerable overtones in antiquity. But we would not be totally unjustified in rendering this status in the jargon of the movies, and saying that Aristotle recognized the key importance of a lead role.
While he may be credited with such foresight, what Aristotle did not know – or did not care to admit – was that the first hero-driven story did not arise with Homer. It came from a long way eastwards – and from a long time previously. Our mission to discover the origins of film’s ultimate storytelling power must therefore make that journey, to the ancient land contained between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates – Mesopotamia.
GILGAMESH: THE WORLD’S FIRST HERO
Its name in the Bible is Erech.The people of present-day Iraq know it better as Warka. Collective memory prefers Uruk. All refer to a ruin roughly halfway between the urban sprawls of Baghdad and Basra – one of the world’s oldest cities, and a site known mainly in association with the world’s original hero, Gilgamesh.
T
here are the relics of a ziggurat at Uruk, and the foundations of several scattered temples in the sand. Along with Ur (further south), Uruk was a principal centre of the kingdom of Sumer, later known as Babylonia. Although only traces remain of an 8-kilometre (5-mile) circumference of walls, and visitors today find little to impress (Fig. 40), it is not absurd to claim that when Gilgamesh ruled over the city some 5000 years ago, Uruk was the prototype of urban design, raised high with kiln-fired bricks.
Many levels of occupation have been archaeologically identified at Uruk.What was found at the fourth of these levels, dating to c. 3200 BC, is of particular significance: a number of clay tablets that appear to constitute the earliest evidence anywhere in the world for the symbolic system we call writing.These first signs from Uruk are, admittedly, more like pictures than words: a ‘script of things’, in which abbreviations of form are used to denote a certain object (an ox-head, for example, means an ox). But at Uruk and other Sumerian cities we soon find symbols evolving by the power of association: the image of a sun denoting the concepts of ‘day’ and ‘brightness’, or the image of a foot used to show the activity of walking. A third stage of development sees symbols given phonetic value, and set down in cuneiform (wedge-shaped) letters.
Cuneiform is the key to civilization in Mesopotamia, and further afield, because it was a system of writing that travelled. A version of cuneiform served, for example, the Hittites who dominated Anatolia (modern Turkey) in the late second millennium BC; later, a similar script was useful in the empire of the Medes and Persians, based in the deserts of what is now Iran (see page).This diffusion of cuneiform helps to explain why a tale about just one king of Uruk was not a piece of local history, but an enduring and archetypal myth.
The legend of Gilgamesh is extremely old, yet quite literally dynamic: an epic poem that is still growing as new fragments of cuneiform text come to light. Nevertheless, an essential storyline can be summarized. It goes like this.
Gilgamesh is the arrogant young overlord of the city of Uruk. Semi-divine by birth, imposing to behold, he rules Uruk by fear, greedily asserting his royal privilege to have sex with every new bride on her wedding night. His tyrannized subjects appeal to the gods above.The divine response is to create from clay the creature called Enkidu – hairy, uncouth, reared with gazelles in the wild grasslands. Enkidu comes to Uruk and challenges Gilgamesh.Their fight shakes the city, but is soon halted; they become close friends.Then Gilgamesh persuades Enkidu to join him on an expedition to the cedar forests of Lebanon.The precious timber is guarded by Humbaba, a fearsome monster. Hand in hand, the heroes set off to acquire glory by slaying Humbaba.They do so, decapitating the ogre. On their triumphant return to Uruk, Gilgamesh angers the goddess Ishtar by refusing her advances. Ishtar sends the Bull of Heaven to punish him, and again Gilgamesh unites with Enkidu to slaughter the beast. But sadness ensues. Enkidu dreams of his own end, falls sick and wastes away to a miserable death. Gilgamesh grieves over his friend for a week, refusing to give the body up for burial till a maggot crawls from Enkidu’s nose. He stages a generous funeral; then, oppressed by the prospect of mortality, the king wanders away from Uruk to search for the secret of eternal life. Eventually he reaches the distant abode of Utnapishtim, ‘Finder of Life’, who had survived the Great Flood by building an ark and loading it with all living creatures. Utnapishtim immediately challenges Gilgamesh to go a week without sleeping. If he cannot defeat sleep, how much more unlikely is it that he will overcome death? But Utnapishtim does disclose that there is a ‘plant of heartbeat’ growing on the ocean floor. Gilgamesh dives to fetch this coral wand, but is soon robbed of his prize by a snake. At last he realizes there is no hope. He was born to die, like his friend Enkidu. Disconsolate, he trudges back to Uruk.The walls are high; the city’s expanse is great. So it ends for Gilgamesh. Are these, the bricks of his kingdom, the hero’s sole claim upon posterity?
Gilgamesh the king is left in despair: he has failed to secure life everlasting.Yet Gilgamesh the hero lives on.
He is Gilgamesh, perfect in splendour,
Who opened up passes in the mountains,
Who could dig pits even in the mountainside,
Who crossed the ocean, the broad seas, as far as the sunrise,
Who inspected the edges of the world …
There is no one among the kings of teeming humanity
Who can compare with him …
The poetry of Gilgamesh sings of a reputation that must defy oblivion; and it is the poetry, not the brickwork of Uruk, that has kept the hero’s mightiness intact. Even incidental episodes within the story – such as the swift, impromptu slaying of lions by a Gilgamesh still furious with grief, tersely related in Tablet 9 of the established text – have become emblematic. So in later imagery from Mesopotamia and the Near East the ‘Gilgamesh motif’ signifies a regal figure firmly dispatching a pair of beasts, usually lions (Fig. 41). Do such images qualify as illustrations of the story? Some scholars are unhappy at linking them with Gilgamesh at all. But another site from Mesopotamia gives us direct evidence of how the story of Gilgamesh became a classic in the region. It may be no coincidence that the same site offers generous evidence, too, of how ancient artists tackled the various problems of presenting or representing a story in which images, not words, do most of the work.
How this site was found is, needless to say, a story in itself.
40 (above) View of Uruk as it looks today.
41 (left) ‘The Gilgamesh Motif ’, c.400 BC, showing a bearded hero mastering a pair of lions.
‘GILGAMESH II’: THE RELIEFS OF ASHURBANIPAL
For many centuries, the hill called Koyunjik was simply a mound on the east bank of the River Tigris, opposite the Iraqi city of Mosul. As a long-standing place of pasture (the name means ‘many lambs’), Koyunjik seemed nothing more than contours in the landscape. But on 20 December 1853, by the light of the moon, gangs of men began to dig trenches in the northern part of the hill.They worked nocturnally because full permission to do so had not yet come through. No one knew for sure what might lie underneath, but the leader of excavations, Hormuzd Rassam, had a hunch that something would be found. At dawn the digging ceased, to resume the following night. This time fragments of a wall appeared, along with further debris from a grand building that had been deliberately destroyed.Then, on the third evening, the shout went up that sooar (images) had been found.The images belonged to a marble panel carved in low relief.They showed a kingly figure wearing a high peaked hat gathering weapons from assistants while mounting a chariot.The team of horses pulling the chariot were to be seen there too, being harnessed by royal stablehands. It soon became clear what was represented on this stone.These were the preparations for a ceremonial lion hunt, and they featured a ruler who boasted that he was ‘Lord of the Universe’. Hormuzd Rassam had uncovered one of the great secrets lying beneath the hill of Koyunjik.This was the palace of Ashurbanipal, the most illustrious of all the kings of ancient Assyria.
The discovery of this once-magnificent residence came at a time of great popular and academic excitement about Assyria, the kingdom that dominated the upper reaches of Mesopotamia from c. 1900 BC until its downfall c. 612 BC. Old Testament writers knew about this empire from its hostile incursions into Hebrew lands; ancient Greek and Roman historians were also aware of its former glory, probably basing their semi-mythical figure of Sardanapalus – a caricature of the ‘Oriental despot’, excessive in both his wealth and his cruelty – upon Ashurbanipal, who ruled from 668–627 BC. But Assyria’s collapse into dust had been dramatic. In the early nineteenth century the English poet Lord Byron could fantasize about the debaucheries of Sardanapalus, and imagine an Assyrian chief who ‘came down like the wolf on the fold’, but almost nothing was known then about the topography and archaeology of Assyria. Substantial discoveries came only in the 1840s, with a number of European enthusiasts, among them Rassam’s friend and mentor Austen Henry Layard. Layard was an eloquent writer and adroit at popularizing his rese
arches at Nineveh and other Assyrian sites. Many of the Victorian public had heard of Nineveh from the Bible story of Jonah, the Hebrew prophet. (Nineveh was the ‘wicked’ city that Jonah was trying not to reach by sea when he was thrown overboard and swallowed by a whale.) Thanks to Layard, they were able to view a fully reconstructed ‘Nineveh Court’ at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 – prefiguring the modern resort to computer graphics.
Probed by Layard, the southern section of Koyunjik had already yielded the remains of the palace of Sennacherib, Ashurbanipal’s grandfather, who monumentalized Nineveh during his reign (704–681 BC). Following the example of his royal predecessors, Sennacherib had adorned his ‘unrivalled residence’ with bas-reliefs illustrating his grandiose exploits – notably the siege and sacking of the Judaean city of Lachish – which Layard had transferred to the British Museum. It therefore came as no surprise that Ashurbanipal’s palace should likewise be decorated with scenes defining his absolute power. But Rassam’s consignment of finds to the British Museum was nonetheless exceptional, for the excavated contents of Ashurbanipal’s headquarters included something unique: the remains of the king’s library. It had been wrecked when the Medes and Babylonians laid waste to Nineveh in 612 BC. However, among the thousands of fragments of cuneiform tablets were several complete versions of a story that Ashurbanipal evidently held dear: the epic of Gilgamesh. In fact, Ashurbanipal may be said to have saved the Gilgamesh tale.Without the complete copies he commissioned for his library, we should have a very imperfect knowledge of the text.
It is presuming too much to claim that Ashurbanipal saw himself as a second Gilgamesh.Yet visitors to his palace could hardly have failed to notice the symbolic similarities that were made between the present glorious ruler of Nineveh and the legendary king of Uruk.True, the reliefs installed along the palatial corridors and around reception rooms were thematically in keeping with Assyrian royal iconography as established by the forebears of Ashurbanipal: it was not radically new to show the king dispatching lions, receiving tribute from other potentates, or in company with the winged beasts who are his supernatural bodyguard (Fig. 42). But Ashurbanipal’s artists elaborated on these themes with innovative energy and a flair for making stock scenes come alive as never before.