a follow up on historical movies

[winterbadger]

, but I found this passage in a page about the making of Gladiator to be truly astounding:

More than 2,500 weapons were designed and manufactured for the film by supervising armorer Simon Atherton and his team. Many of the armaments were original concepts, resulting from a combination of research and innovation.

Atherton explains, "I started by looking in books for references to weaponry and armor from this period, but there was not much to be found. So, taking ideas from what we know about subsequent periods and trying to imagine the evolution of certain weapons and armor--with the understanding that they did mainly close-quarter fighting--we were able to come up with some designs and ideas that would have been feasible at that time. I especially enjoyed Ridley's directive to come up with the Roman equivalent of an automatic weapon--the multi-firing crossbow." Atherton also served as a consultant to costume designer Janty Yates in the function of the helmets and some armor.

Yates did an extensive amount of research in creating the widely varied wardrobe for the film, ranging from the resplendent armor worn by Maximus and Commodus, to Lucilla?s exquisite gowns, to the relatively plain tunics of the gladiators. "We must have looked through thousands of books, and visited dozens of museums and galleries," she offers. "We were greatly inspired by the works of artists like Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who really captured the style of the period, and George de La Tour, from whom we got ideas for textures and the finer details."

Now, I'm a big fan of Alma-Tadema, and you can certainly see his influence in the sets and costumes for this movie. But for someone to say "I started by looking in books for references to weaponry and armor from this period, but there was not much to be found" is a testament to the inability of the "supervising armorer" to find his ass with both hands and a magnifying glass in broad daylight. The sheer volume of scholarly and hobbyist work that has been done on researching and recreating the armour, weapons, equipment, and clothing of the armies and civilians of Imperial Rome is staggering. For someone to say they couldn't find much in books suggests to me that the speaker is a person who has trouble finding his way home when he turns around in the doorway on the way out because he's forgotten to dust of and insert his brain before leaving and has just noticed that he can't think without it. Apparently he can't think with it, either.

But then, what would you expect from a director who can say, without apparently the slightest sense of contradiction:

...Scott was determined that "Gladiator" never be seen as a page out of a history book. "There is a great deal written about the Roman Empire, but there are also questions about what is accurate and what is merely conjecture. Therefore, I felt the priority was to stay true to the spirit of the period, but not necessarily to adhere to facts. We were, after all, creating fiction, not practicing archeology."

and then a few moments later

I had the best department heads--people who had been there, seen it, done it or researched it. I knew I could rely on their artistry to craft the world in which our story unfolds, and they did an extraordinary job. You can almost smell the arena and feel the atmosphere of the city. The costumes are authentic. Watching the film, you should believe you're experiencing a contemporary situation--you're living in Roman times."

If you don't care about facts, if all you're creating is fiction, how can the effects be authentic? Perhaps in the same leap of logic that Scott assures us that some of his department heads had been present in Roman times...

Comments

[selki.livejournal.com]

Multi-firing crossbows?

Still not sorry that I missed Gladiator.

[winterbadger]

Well, what they actually ended up with (and here's where I take the "I couldn't find anything in the books" comment with a peck of salt) looked like Roman scorpiones which were (IIRC) multifiring (several rounds at once, not several rounds in succession) close-support-to-infantry artillery pieces that the legions carried around with them in the field (30-60 per legion) and used tactically.