NOS MORITURI

Time in the Peplum

The great assemblage had gathered to see the strong man. ... The lights were turned down throughout the building, to shine with doubled radiance upon the proscenium. A moment later the curtain curled upwards. ... Upon a small red pedestal stood Sandow himself ... bared to the waist. Slowly the red pedestal began to revolve, and the living statue with it.

— The Age, September 8, 1902

... homo sacer is, so to speak, a living statue, the double or the colossus of himself.

— Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer

The Ballerina and the Biceps

Most genealogies of the peplum point back to the 1914 film Cabiria as the origin of the genre. We might also acknowledge the many previous traditions that contributed parts of the peplum, from the classical or mythological epic adventure to vaudeville and circus traditions of the strongman. Still, Cabiria was the first time at which a significant number of the elements that would eventually become the peplum's standard features appeared together, in one image, on film. Although the entire film is classical and fantastic, arguably the very first peplum image in Cabiria is the first time we see Maciste, the physically dominating strongman played by Bartolomeo Pagano, who would eventually parlay his minor role in Cabiria into approximately two dozen spin-offs in the 1910s and 1920s (Usai calls his character "epidemic" [1986, 62] in its spread and longevity). Maciste also had his competitors and imitators — Saetta, Ajax, Ercole, Sansonia, and others — but, as Steven Ricci argues, Maciste remained not only the standard by which these other characters were judged but also distinct in his reliance on pure physical strength, in his de-sexualization, and in his populist, working-class/laborer origins (2008, 81–86; see also Bertellini 2003, 259–261). Almost without exception, Maciste's competitors exemplified a very different kind of body, one that is perhaps more fundamentally cinematic. Willemen (2009) calls this body "the athletic body" and distinguishes it from "the Hercules body," emphasizing the speed and kinetic dynamism of the former and the ideological/political valence of the latter:

The athletic body is part of the discourses of expertise, speed and geographical displacement, while the Hercules body is part of a discursive constellation emphasizing the static expenditure and management of labor power. The statically filmed muscle body is a figure in fantasies about primitive accumulation, that is to say, the transformation of agricultural laborers into factory laborers, valued for the quantity of labor power at their (and therefore the factory owner's) disposal. (276)

Luciano Albertini, for instance, was a competing figure whose promotional shots featured him shirtless and flexing his muscles. Like Pagano, he went to Germany in the 1920s to make action and adventure films, but in films like Mister Radio (1924) and Der Unüberwindliche (The invincible, 1928), Albertini's body always remains covered, and he amazes with his Fairbanks-like rapidity and coordination and performs impressive stunts that showcase his climbing and leaping abilities in particular (he was a former circus performer). By contrast, Maciste's body is regularly exposed to the viewer's gaze, even in circumstances where there is no plausible motivation to expose it. In Maciste alpino (1916), for example, we see Maciste, after having joined the Italian alpine soldiers in World War I, washing himself in the snow. He strips to the waist amid the snow- and ice-covered Alps and, grinning hugely (the strongman always takes enormous pleasure in his strength and endurance), rubs snow all over his bare torso. We find here again a confirmation of the link between admiration for the spectacularly muscled male body and a certain slowing of cinematic time. While Albertini's lithe, gymnastic body lends itself to the kinetic dimension of cinema (not only in his astonishing, rapid movements but also in fast-paced editing and a preference for medium and long shots), Maciste's muscular bulk brings the camera up close to slowly linger over his pecs, abs, and biceps.

In her famous "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey (1987) noted in passing that certain kinds of cinematic attractions that are regular features of narrative films (she specifically cited musical and dance numbers, a point I will return to later) had the curious tendency to retard or even temporarily freeze the forward movement of the narrative. More recently, she has expanded that reflection into a book-length meditation on cinema's inherently "kinematic" character (they are moving pictures, after all) and its simultaneous reliance on the still image (cinema's "hidden past" is both still photography and the individual frames on the strip of film, a "secret ... that might or might not find its way to the surface" [2006, 67], but a past that might be cinema's digital future as well). In this chapter, I argue that the peplum has had, since its very first film — indeed, since the very first peplum image — a curious reliance on the still image, on a variety of visual registers that are in fact opposed to the normal and normatively kinetic register of the moving pictures. Slowed time and stopped time are part of the genre.

The first image of Maciste in Cabiria consists of him not in motion but standing still, performing what will be a central necessity for the principal actors in the peplum from 1914 to the present day: striking and holding a pose. He holds the pose for several seconds while two characters in the background speak animatedly, then moves briskly to block the camera's view of the more distant figures and strikes and holds another pose. His body language conveys a dominant physicality and assertiveness, quite surprising for a character who is supposed to be a slave (figure 1.1). As Oksana Bulgakowa points out in The Factory of Gestures (2008), gesturality and posture have always been primary ways in which spectators have understood a character's class, background, education, attitude, and other attributes. Other servants in Cabiria (Croessa, the nurse, or Bodastaret, the innkeeper) feature the bent back and slumped shoulders that Bulgakowa argues indicated subordination and social inferiority.

No character in the film stands as upright as Maciste does, however. He is broad shouldered, powerfully built, and possessed of a raw physicality, as well as a kind of lightness and grace. Critics have long noted (see Dalle Vacche 1992, 27–28) that his appearance seems designed to evoke not a body in action, but the idealized and static forms of the classical statue. The title card that precedes Maciste's first appearance simply reads, "Fulvius Axilla, a Roman patrician, and his...