poses and
gestures
by Douglas Messerli
Jerzy Kawalerowicz and Tadeusz
Konwicki (screenplay, based on a novel by Bołeslow Prus), Jerzy Kawalerowicz
(director) Faraon (Pharoah) / 1966, USA 1977
The plot of Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s
magnificent 1966 film, Pharoah,
although extremely important to this film, is actually quite simple, and is
almost able to summarized in two or three paragraphs. The young heir to the
Egyptian throne, Ramses XIII (Jerzy Zelnik), is impatient to make an impact of
Egyptian culture. In some ways, the young Ramses is conservative, longing for
the power of the throne held by his great-grandfather as opposed to the greatly
declined Egypt over which his father and soon he will rule. The young Ramses
would like a world, like that represented by Cheop’s magnificent tomb, in which
great memorials as the pyramids did not just represent the pharoahs’ power, but
their will. If the poor and suffering everymen and women of Egypt had to die in
the process, it was because the Pharoah was the figure of power, not the
people.
On the other hand,
Ramses XIII is also a radical visionary, who, despite the positive effects in
that past power brought about by the priests, now sees the priests as the cause
of his country’s decline.
Throughout Kawaleowicz’s study—and this film, based on a similarly
analytical novel by the great Polish writer Bolesław Prus—Ramses opposes the
priestly caste, ultimately openly battling with them. And, in that sense, the
young warrior represents a new force upon the Egyptian landscape that has the
potential to save the country and its population, as well as, which the
insightful priest Pentuer (Leszek Herdegen) perceives as possible, helping with
the conditions of the poorest of its people.
Ramses, however, is doomed because of this almost single-minded
obsession. Unlike his wiser—but also politically ineffective—father, who
practices a kind of realpolitik in
which he grants some powers in his name to the priests, the young Ramses acts
blindly, without the ability to analyze the intentions of his kingdom’s major
enemies—the Phoenicians and the Assyrians—let alone the capability of
perceiving the truly evil machinations of the wealthy priestly caste, perhaps
the most dangerous of all in their determination to keep the benefits they have
acquired.
Finally, the handsome young heir, who quickly becomes the Pharoah as his
father falls ill and dies, has no comprehension of how he will be affected by
the women he chooses. If his first love, Sara (Krystyna Mikolajewska), seems to
be a loyal supporter, her being Jewish infuriates Ramses’ mother, Queen
Nikotris (Wiesława Mazurkiewicz) and, given the Egyptian class system, her
religion predetermines that his son (Seti/Isaac) will be born a slave, able
only to rule over Israel.
Ramses’ second choice is the Phoenician princess Kama (Barbara Brylska)
who has been schooled in betrayal, and, with the help of a Greek criminal,
Lykon (also played by Jerzy Zelnik), who acts as a kind of doppelgänger to the
young Pharoah, later kills Sara, Ramses’ son, and, finally, Ramses himself.
In his final love affair, with Hebron (Ewa Krzyżewska), Ramses betrays
his best friend and cousin, his most loyal supporter, Thutmose (Emir Buczacki).
In short, Ramses is not only unlucky in love, but, as he proves himself to be
on the battlefield, is absolutely destructive, revealing himself to be a
hot-headed man of action as opposed to the beloved sage who could lead Egypt
out of its indebted bondage.
What this film finally reveals is that, despite all the apparent enemies
Ramses XIII must face, in the end he is destroyed, at least symbolically, by
himself—by his own inexperience and immaturity.
If that were all to Kawalerowicz’s film, however, I think we might not
be discussing it here. The political and social issues of this work, while
certainly fascinating, hardly can do justice, one immediately realizes, to the
mythos of rulers and landscapes that have already proven to have great
entertainment value through movies such as Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments and Mankiewicz’s
failed Cleopatra, screened just three years before. Certainly, the Polish director’s
film might readily be recognized as more intelligent, but even if Ramses Egypt
is less grand than his predecessors, viewers still demand some pomp and
circumstance. The problem, obviously, that Kawalerowicz faced, despite his
grand budget (and larger-than-life problems with location),* was how to give
audiences a sense of glorious grandeur without simply turning his work into
grandly set costume drama. His solution, indeed, is quite ingenious.
The director certainly does not disappoint in his presentation of
gruesome manifestations of epic sword play, but he contextualizes these in a
kind of realist presentation of events. Instead of using thousands upon
thousands of extras to crowd his desert landscapes, Kawalerwcicz, on the advice
of reliable scholars and Egyptologists, uses costumes and weapons that are
authentically close to the historical period, and shows us what might be
described as something nearer to the actual size of the warring battalions. The
troops presented here are rather small ragtag groupings—something closer to
what such “legions” might have been—in which war was fought in crude battles
won by the numbers of dead on each side. Rather than presenting us with
magnificent troops outwitting one another in clever advances and sidereal
sweeps, Pharoah’s soldiers go bravely
forward against a barrage of thrown and catapulted rocks before the final
implanting of knives into the survivor’s guts. These wars are not glorious but
mean skirmishes that do little but wreak havoc on both the winning and losing sides.
At one point, in fact, we are sure that Ramses has lost a battle with the
Assyrians, only to discover—as much to his surprise as ours—that he has won.
Against this diminished realization of battle, however, Kawalerowicz
choreographs, throughout his film, flanks of soldiers, priests, citizens, and
even onlookers in frieze-like positions, where the on-screen characters simply
stand still, flanking royals such as Ramses, clothed in beautiful robes and
displays of jewels. Within temples, the
director moves his camera forward within narrow confines, similarly flanked by
bowing retainers and servants, taking us with it into chamber after chamber until
we reach the very heart of power in the Pharoah himself. Similarly, we explore
the dark grotto walls of a seemingly endless labyrinth mostly in the dark,
until we reach, almost a reward for our probing efforts, a room filled with
glowing cubes, caskets, and containers made entirely of gold. If battle is
presented as a thin lateral positioning of men against the landscape, the
Egyptian capital and its halls of power are balletically conceived as head-on
performances within cramped spaces. Here songs are sung (by Sara and others),
real dances are enacted (particularly by Kama), and the royals are displayed as
if they have been turned into grand statuary or even still photographs.
It is this very artificiality and theatricality, reminding one somewhat
of the emblematic scenarios of Sergei Paradjanov, that transforms what might
have been a sword and sandal spectacular into a stately cinematic masterwork.
Just as his hero seeks to rid his citizens of their slavish adoration of the
magic and hokum (including, in this case, a priestly calculated eclipse), so
Kawalerowicz dares his audience to conceive a world through the lens—probably
all it could offer itself within its own time as well—of poses and gestures.
This is a “picture,” the director keeps reminding us, of a long-lost world, a
simulation of a small place on our planet in the 11th century BCE, which had
little in common with us except for the human dilemmas with which it was faced.
*The original press kit of this film
recounts that the production costs of Pharaoh
outstripped those of any other film ever made in Poland. Shootings in the
desert of Uzbekistan’s Kisil-Kim exacted nearly unbearable conditions of daily
heat, with vipers and venomous insects springing out at its actors and extras
from yards away. The production “team had to journey the 20 miles which
separated the location from the headquarters in Bokhara. For a period of six
months the director oversaw 2,000 Soviet soldiers and hundreds of other extras.
“On the average, 10,000 bottles of soft drinks were needed each day. The
properties and equipment were brought from Bokhara in 27 trucks. The wood for
the Pharaoh’s palace and the Ptah temple was procured from the Siberian
forests, transported from a distance of over 1,200 miles. The film itself had
to be kept in cold storage to protect it from temperatures that often reached
176° fahrenheit.
Los Angeles, June 18, 2014
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (June 2014).
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
