| Abstract (english) | Almost three and a half millennia have passed between 1323 BC, when small alabaster lamp was designed to project painted scene from its inner cup to the outer one, and its discovery in Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1923. In that enormous time several civilizations have embedded its own perception of ancient Egypt with their own stories, epics, drama and poetry, sculptures and paintings. The Greeks were the first, with their myths and epics but above all so-called Greek novels. It was precisely they that formed the first narratives about ancient Egypt that dealt with adventure, exotic, erotic and mystical. The Romans continued immortalizing Cleopatra (or rather hear death) more than anybody else. What was designed to be propaganda against her, transformed into the creation of a new cult-in-the-making. Early Christian writers did their best to paint ancient heathen civilization with negative tones but, unavoidably, they managed to preserve stories that will also play integral part in century-latter emergence of cinema – and subsequently popularize her. Arab conquest brought myriads of legends and stories that will define the perception of ancient Egypt until this day. Renaissance immersed itself into discoveries of ancient manuscripts and archaeological remains that added new information to the perception of a lost civilization. It was also for the first time that the ancient Egypt became popular thopos of popular books and legit intellectual sanctuary. The baroque imagination added to the Egyptian imaginarium with music, paintings and novels and, finally, after Napoleonic expedition, hieroglyphs were finally deciphered. This gave voice to the long silent civilization and Egyptomania ensued. Egyptology as a science began to develop parallel to the invention of cinema. This relationship between film and ancient Egypt changed as the film media developed. The influence of politics and censorship but also certain production’s, screenwriter’s and directorial preoccupations often detached ancient Egypt from the historical truth based on archaeological finds. The problematics of depiction of ancient Egypt in the cinema is approached from multiple viewpoints: that of historiography, film history and Egyptology. From its decline, every civilization offered its own perception and vision of what ancient Egypt was and should represent today. Greek, Roman, medieval, Arabic, renaissance and baroque insight directly formed all the future films about ancient Egypt. They are analysed as a theoretical context of those future films while their narratives serve as a proto image of future screenplays. The big archaeological discoveries of the second half of XIX. century, that are commencing right after centuries of looting, helped in forming an art-direction form of every film with our topic. Screenplays of those film was directly influenced by religious and pharaonic ceremonies and ancient and gothics novels alike. It is in this context that the preserved silent films are analysed with special emphasis of the influence of egyptomania and the phenomenon known in film theory as a mummy complex. One of the first authors to deal with the newly revealed ancient Egypt was Théophile Gautier, who created an appropriate literary matrix, bringing the ancient Egyptian dead to life. Edward Poynter’s 1867 painting Israel in Egypt and the 1865–1904 works of Lawrence Alma-Tadema were similarly impactful on Victorian society. The latter’s works literally set the stage for almost every future film that delved into ancient Egypt. Around the same time, Hector Horeau began painting so-called fantasies, in which he added his own personal visions to the existing archaeological matrix, thus creating oneiric depictions of ancient Egypt. His technique has subsequently been used by every film production designer down to the present day. However, no matter how precise painting became over time, it eventually had to make way for an attractive novelty which appeared in 1839: photography. Half a century later, motion pictures appeared. Just a month after the first film screenings in Germany and France, on 5 November 1896 Henry Dello-Strogolo showcased the first projected motion pictures of the Lumière brothers in one of Tusun Pasha’s auditoria in Alexandria. One of the most prominent of Lumieres’ employees, Alexandre Promio, spent time in Egypt between 9 March and 18 April 1897. For the first time ever, he captured Alexandria and Cairo on film, together with their pharaonic remnants. Promio was also the pioneer of feature films with an Egyptian background. In 1898, he shot La vie et la passion de Jésus-Christ/The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ, directed by Louis Lumière. The surviving part of this 15-part film depicts the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt, in a visual style that derived directly from an 1880 painting by Luc Olivier Merson of the same subject and emphasises the knowledge and interest in ancient Egypt derived from the Bible. The genre of ancient Egypt on film was born. It was Georges Méliès who began using numerous Egyptian motifs that same year, directly borrowing from popular literature of the late nineteenth century. Following his footsteps, Walter R. Booth, the pioneer of British film showed in 1901 how ancient Egypt could be brought to life on screen with the help of a rudimentary special effect. Filmmakers in both Italy and France were heavily inspired by Biblical stories so the protagonists of these successful films included Moses, Joseph and Jesus Christ, although the role of Egypt was limited to providing the setting. Classical music also became a source of inspiration for both Italian and American versions of Aida. Not all film plots incorporated stories familiar to the audience. Some of them are particularly interesting precisely because of their departure from the expected. Gaston Velle made Isis for Pathé Frères in 1910; a film about Thyrsa, a worshipper of Isis, followed by Au temps des Pharaons, a tale of the unrequited love between the pharaoh Rameses and a Syrian woman named Elissa. In the same vein, L’Anneau Fatal (1912) by Louis Feuillade recounts the story of Napoleonic soldiers who discover a mummy in Egypt. The Italian film La sposa del Nilo (1911) dealt with Arab story of a virgin sacrificed to end the drought in pharaonic Egypt. Its director, the painter Enrico Guazzoni, took direct inspiration from a painting by the Lombard artist Federico Faruffini entitled Il sacrificio della vergine al Nilo (1865). The second of Guazzoni's dozen silent blockbusters, Marcantonio e Cleopatra (1913), was an interesting blend of his original screenplay with the works of Plutarch and Shakespeare and the propaganda of the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12, fought in Libya. Eight more Cleopatra films were produced between 1899 and 1918 and that demonstrates the immense popularity this screen character. Especially important was 1917. Celopatra with Theda Bara, the first film of our subject that entered and won the battle with the censorship. Thaïs, a 1917 film adaptation of Anatole France’s novel, had the same battle-a and lost. However, it was cinema expressionism that was changing the genre. In Kalida’a, la storia di una mumia (1917), all the motifs were present: mysticism, an archaeologist and a beautiful female mummy coming to life. It was in Germany where expressionism flourished in the crises that arose in the wake of defeat in the First World War. Its main characteristics, a personal experience of the world and interest in the exotic, the subconscious and the occult, blended well with perceptions of ancient Egypt. Most of the numerous Egypt-inspired films have unfortunately been lost, and their rich variety of motives and content can be analyses from the secondary sources only. The surviving ones portray Orient as dangerous and exotic (Ernst Lubitsch’s Die Augen der Mumie Ma/The Eyes of the Mummy Ma), while Lubitsch’s next film, Das Weib des Pharao of 1921, entered ancient Egypt into the genre of big-budget historical epic. The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in November 1922 launched the world into a fresh whirlwind of Egyptomania. It again fitted perfectly with the (still) expressionistic sentiment of the time: hidden treasure; an exotic pharaoh; the (allegedly) curious deaths of expedition members. Thus the ‘Curse of the Pharaohs’ was born, which immediately embedded itself in almost every subsequent film dealing with ancient Egypt. Tutankhamun was a lead character in, now lost, American The Dancer of the Nile (1923.), while French made in Austria the Raymond Dandy satire Tutankhamen. The same year Cecil B. DeMille premiered his first Ten Commandments, where epics confronted personal piety, and Europe answered with Michael Curtiz’s Die Sklavenkönigin/The Moon of Israel. The most expensive Austrian film in history, the film was a huge success, both at home and abroad but subsequent inflation shot down entire Austrian cinema production. Sound was introduced to our genre in the most interesting way: The Mummy, a horror from 1932. included several lines of dialogue in ancient Egyptian language (or, rather, its consensual pronunciation). This film, which was to be renamed from Imhotep to The Mummy, was an instant success because of Boris Karloff's rendition of both the mummy Imhotep and his alter-ego Ardath-Bey. The Mummy’s enormous success resulted in a series of sequels, versions and imitations, many of which did well at the box-office. Cecil B. DeMille made his version of Cleopatra in 1934, starring Claudette Colbert, and successfully avoided the harsh censorship of Hayes’s codex. In the end of the Second World War the British made their own take of the subject. Caesar and Cleopatra was the most expensive British film in history and starred Vivien Leigh. The budget at its disposal and set new standards for period film production, despite wartime handicaps. A decade earlier, in Nazi Germany, local scientific and political-ideological focus had shifted from antiquity to prehistory, with the Ahnenerbe established in 1935 to prove the supremacy of the Nordic race. In this context, Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, by the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, had argued that the ancient Egyptian civilization, as an Aryan product, had been tainted by mixing with ‘inferior’ races. This ideological background generated a distrustful attitude towards ancient Egypt itself after the Nazi assumption of power. On the other hand, modern Egypt, still occupied by the British even after her nominal independence in 1922, was seen as something to cultivate as a potential ally against the British, as well for as its strategic possession of the Suez Canal – a gateway to the alleged cradle of the Aryan race, India. Egypt was also a locus for German anti-Semitic propaganda, via complex activities aimed at pushing its Muslim population towards Nazi ideology. However, all these propaganda activities ultimately failed. As part of this ideological wave, the terrace of the well-known Mena House Hotel at Giza was reconstructed at the studios of Bavaria Film in 1939. Here most of the plot of Germanen gegen Pharaonen takes place, revolving around a debate in front of a group of tourists, between an old Egyptology professor, a hook-nosed ‘pyramid mystic’ and an affluent Pan-Germanist. While the first calmly tells the tourists of the construction of the Great Pyramid as the tomb of King Khufu, the nervous and odious ‘pyramid mystic’ contradicts him, accusing him of deliberately ignoring evidence of the pyramids’ links to Atlantis. This is where the Pan-Germanist joins the discussion, to prove the supremacy of the Nordic over the ancient Egyptian race. Director Anton Kutter, known for basing his films on scientific debates, enriched the film with specially lit models of archaeological sites. Although the censors approved screening on 4 September 1939, the premiere was postponed by an entire year. This was owing to a visit by Germany’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels’s to Egypt in April 1939, which had deeply impressed him. As a result, he felt uncomfortable with the anti-Egyptian chauvinist propaganda that underpinned the film, reinforced by the outbreak of the Second World War exactly five months later, meaning that currying favour with Egypt was even more of a priority, especially after the failure of attempts to return of Nefertiti's bust to Egypt and a fiasco surrounding the Arabic translation of Mein Kampf. The film finally premiered on 23 July 1940 in Munich, presenting a unique intertwining of state ideology, film and Egyptology. The end of the Second World War gave way to new forms of cinema spectacles. Colour, wide screens and an abundance of historical themes defined the era. From 1954. The Egyptian and The Valley of the Kings through 1955. Land of the Pharaohs and ending with The Ten Commandments (all four filmed partially in Egypt), cinema spectacle was populated with ancient Egyptian imagery. An unequalled effort and enormous amount of money was put into recreating archaeologically based props and scenery, resulting into often stunning results hailed by Egyptologists. In Europe, frequent American film productions in the Italian Cinecittà in Rome had made it almost impossible for Italian producers to shoot their own, much less expensive films there. Studio rentals and extra hiring fees, as well as the unavailability of the studios made them move production to Spain and, notably, Yugoslavia. This became the site of the rebirth of Maciste, Giovanni Pastrone’s legendary hero who was first brought to the screen in the controversial Gabrielle D’Annunzio’s 1915 Cabiria. Alongside Hercules, Ursus, Samson and Goliath, Maciste became an integral part of the exceedingly popular film genre known as ‘peplum’ or ‘sword-and-sandal’, a screen rendering of ancient history made with a fraction of the budget of their Hollywood models. Despite the lack of money, often-bad production design and acting, underscored by equally bad dubbing, peplums nonetheless filled box offices in both Europe and the US. The ‘Maciste’ filmed in Yugoslavia was Maciste nella Valle dei Re (Son of Samson for the Anglophone market). The filming of Maciste nella Valle dei Re began on 13 June 1960, the film set that was erected at Jadran Film in Zagreb used as much as 800m3 of timber for 12,000m2 of ‘ancient Egyptian’ structures, including pylons, obelisks, sphinxes and a settlement, recreating everyday life in Egypt at the time of the Persian invasion. Unfortunately, the film later garnered unfairly low ratings owing to its inadequate English dubbing and the distribution of exceptionally bad copies. However, Italy was not the only producer of peplums. Cheap ancient Egyptian films were also made in the American ‘dream factory’. Columbia pictures made a Technicolor Cleopatra film in 1953, under the title Serpent of the Nile and a year later Panoramic Pictures filmed Princess of the Nile. Two Italian films starring Sophia Loren were produced during 1953/54. The first was Aida, condensing Verdi’s opera and with Loren in the lead role and Renata Tebaldi in charge of the singing parts. The second film, the 1954 comedy Due notti con Cleopatra courted audiences with such things as a bathing scene with a naked Loren. Censors in many countries were alarmed, leading to numerous edits. Nevertheless, the film was a great success in American cinemas when it was distributed a decade later, just a few months before Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra premiered. More low-budget films followed, often inspired by Cleopatra, Nefertiti and Joseph. The Italians filmed Legioni di Cleopatra in 1959, La donna dei faraoni, the aforementioned Maciste nella Valle dei Re and Il sepolcro dei re in 1960, Nefertite, regina del Nilo and Giuseppe venduto dai fratelli in 1961, and finally Una regina per Cesare in 1962 and Il figlio di Cleopatra in 1964. Exceptionally expensive (Hollywood) films and (overly) cheap (mostly Italian) ones thus appeared side by side on cinema repertoires at the time. Audiences welcomed both with equal enthusiasm and were just a fraction of approximately two hundred equally successful films basing their narratives in the ancient world. In the UK, Hammer Films remade The Mummy and the film was met with great success, although labelled as “too frightening for small children”. As was the case in the thirties, The Mummy was again followed by sequels The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964.), The Mummy’s Shroud (1966.) and the most interesting, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971). The latter was an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel The Jewel of Seven Stars, who in turn would have several remakes – most notably The Awakening (1980.) and Bram Stoker’s Legend of the Mummy from 1998. Charlton Heston would star and direct in his 1972 Shakespearean adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra. Although not successful, visually film looked interesting since Heston reused outtakes from 1959 Ben-Hur and even 1963 Cleopatra. Few films in history have been as worshipped by audiences and as reviled by the film industry as Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra. An ill-fated filming process, which finally began on 25 September 1961, having moved from the UK to Italy, was accompanied by many cast changes, with only the star, Elizabeth Taylor, remaining in place among the leading players. Filming in Rome took an entire year. However, two further years would pass before the audience could see the film. Thus, in the meantime, unexpected versions of the Cleopatra-story surfaced. A little-known TV version of Anthony and Cleopatra, with silent film stars Buster Keaton and Gloria Swanson in the title roles appeared around this time. Una regina per Cesare, an Italian-French take on the subject, with the title role played by Pascale Petit, also emerged. The final, heavily re-edited Mankiewicz’s 4 hour and 3 minute Cleopatra was first screened on 12 June 1963 at the New York premiere, at the Rivoli Theatre on Times Square. Parody followed almost immediately. It was Carry on, Cleo, “the funniest film since 54BC”, as the film poster said. The extensive modern Egyptian film industry used ancient Egypt solely as a backdrop to modern plots until the 1950s. Then, in 1954, Youssuf Chachine presented his first Egyptian film shot in the Valley of the Kings to local film audiences, Sira‘fi-l-wadi/Battle in the Valley. Then, director Fateen Abdel Wahab used his 1963 Arouss el-Nil/Bride of the Nile to depict evil corporations which, bearing no respect for their own country’s heritage, decide to look for oil in the temple of Karnak, where the ghost of Queen Nefer-Set-Aton-ititi (Lobna Abdel Aziz) appears. In 1965, director Aly Reda filmed Gharam fi el-Karnak/Love in Karnak. In it, a group of young dancers from Cairo arrive to Luxor where they plan to hold a dance festival, which takes place at Deir el-Bahari. Both films attempted to remedy mass unawareness (and some cases denial) of ancient Egyptian history within modern Egypt – but in an entertaining way. Al-moomya/The Night of Counting of the Years, featuring the discovery of the TT320 cache of royal mummies near Deir el-Bahari in 1881, is a unique achievement in both Egyptian and world cinematography. It premiered in 1970 at the Venice Film Festival. The director, Shadi Abdel Salam’s artistic vision was to do what many of his predecessors never tried: to merge modern Egypt’s Islamic identity with its pharaonic past. Having learned his craft on two versions of Cleopatra, his efforts in making his own directorial debut almost immediately met with resistance. As the director noted just before his death in 1986, “Egypt does not recognize its pre-Islamic heritage. I fight to bridge that gap. I want to use film to help young generations understand their ancient history, which is reflected in their present, to find their deep identity which will endow them with elegance. How can we be ourselves if we deny a part of our history?”. The Night of Counting of the Years quite literally changed the way modern Egyptians viewed their past. Egyptian film censors at the time refused to approve Abdel Salam's script and then tried to hinder filming by depriving it of state funding. The film was ultimately kept from local distribution until 1975 when, following the Six-Day War, Egyptian nationalism slowly swelled. This gave new meaning to Abdel Salam's film in the eyes of the state structure, although audiences took time to warm to it, the film ultimately became the most frequently mentioned Egyptian film classic following worldwide success. Abdel Salam went on to film a short movie in close cooperation with Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977) in 1970 – Al-fallah el-fesseh/The Eloquent Peasant, based on the ancient Middle Kingdom story of the same name. It was the first Egyptian film to attempt to create an archaeologically accurate rendition of ancient Egypt. From then until his death, Abdel Salam dedicated himself to his other film named Ikhnatoun (Akhenaten or Tragedy of the Great House). This was meant to be Egypt's first feature film set in ancient Egypt itself, but Salam died before completing his work. Many of the sketches for the sets and costumes are preserved in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Shadi Abdel Salam’s directorial courage in successfully combining modern Islamic and ancient Egyptian tradition led, after Cleopatra, to a job on another prominent ancient Egyptian film, undertaking the production design for Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s film The Pharaoh. This adaptation of Bolesław Prus’s novel of the same title (1895) was filmed in the Kyzylkum Desert in Uzbekistan, the film studios in Łódź, and at Luxor and Giza after that. The film premiered in Warsaw on 11 March 1966. The Pharaoh met with great success in Polish theatres, with more than a quarter of the population estimated to have seen it during 1966, making it one of the greatest triumphs of Polish cinema. The upcoming decades, although they exceed the scope of this volume, didn’t cease to bring Ancient Egypt to the audiences around the world. Although it seemed that invocation in storytelling and usage of motifs will run dry, on several occasions certain film made huge impact. Several of them were financial. In 1977 Lew Gilbert’s 007 film The Spy Who Loved Me, the most of modern Egyptian scenery blended with the ancient backdrop. The same year another detective arrived on the Nile – it was Hercule Poirot, embodied by Peter Ustinov. Assisted by Bette Davis, David Niven, Angela Lansbury, Jane Birkin, Mia Farrow and Louis Chiles, Death on the Nile provided the audiences with the lavish who-done-it, beautifully shot on real Egyptian locations. Franklin J. Shaffner’s 1981 The Spynx, labelled as “the occult thriller”, also perpetuated the idea that the land on the Nile was perfect setting for film mystery and crime while at the same time managing to warn the audience about illegal trade of antiquities. Great success was afforded the same year to Raiders of the Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg-George Lucas blockbuster that rose popularity of archaeology in almost every country where the film was shown. The story of Indiana Jones, set in Tanis, where Nazi’s dig for The Arc of the Covenant looked more like comic-book than cinema – but the young public of the early eighties wanted exactly that – and they paid more than once to see it. The nineties brought the darker tones in filming Ancient Egypt. The French-Italian-Latvian Nefertiti – La fille du soleil by Guy Gilles tried to blend the eroticism of Amarna period, archaeology and cinema together. The wide spreading of new format – DVD – brought to this decade a real flood of, otherwise forgotten, pornographic films that dealt (in various level of depth) with ancient Egypt. So, many of the households were thus exposed to by this time long forgotten “the biggest Adult film ever filmed in Hollywood” – the 1969 The Notorious Cleopatra as well as 1970 Kureopatora, anime by Osamu Tezuka and Eiichi Yamamoto. But DVD boom really emerged with 2003 Swedish Cleopatra by Antonio Adamo. Partially filmed on a real Egyptian locations, this film caused a lot of interest, primarily because of its DVD cover with the actress Julia Taylor that soon started what became known as booty mania. Author cinema in France returned to Egypt the same year with Immortal Ad vitam by Enki Bilal. Combining visual artistry of graphic novels and advanced digital media, Bilal created dystopian world full of not so pleasant Egyptian gods. Much more fun was Astérix et Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre with Monica Bellucci in the role of Ptolemaic Queen. In 2010. Luc Besson presented his version of female Indiana Jones: Les Aventures Extraordinaires de Adèle BlancSec. Although he managed to digitally recreate the mummy of Ramesses II. coming alive, film wasn’t that successful. The best French contribution, in the last few decades, by far was La Reine soleil, French-Belge-Hungarian animated film. It was an adaptation of popular novel by Christian Jacq, and it dealt with the end of Amarna period. Hollywood in the nineties was no dormant either. With the Roland Emmerich’s Satrgate it started the phenomenon that would go from the silver screen to television. However, 1994 film was inspired by the writings of Erich von Däniken and was filmed in Yuma, Arizona. The production team asked the assistance of an Egyptologist Stuart Smith, who provided the actors with lines of dialogue in ancient Egyptian language. Although the film critique was negative, the idea of the film flourished again in 1997 when long-running Stargate SG-1 started to air on TV. Public and critical praise earned The Prince of Egypt when, on Christmas 1998, it opened in the cinemas around the world. It was animated version of DeMille’s The Ten Commandments produced by then fresh new studio Dreamworks Pictures. As a curiosity, one needs to mention that this was the time of the emergence of world wide web, and this film was the first with ancient Egyptian subject that had its own web-page. With the $100 million budget, it was pioneering work that for the first time blended hand drawn animation with the digital one. It was an enormous success of The Prince of Egypt that made the path for Universal studio’s third reboot of the Mummy franchise. Although the past versions were primarily considered as Bmovies, the 1999 The Mummy was Hollywood’s A-film. The story, very much similar to the one with Boris Karloff, wasn’t the thing that excited the audience back then. It was the new possibility of CGI – to create creatures and beings on screen that doesn’t exist in reality. Directed by Stephen Sommers it gathered huge popularity and (now internet) fandom, primarily because of subtle eroticism of the body-painted character of Ankh-su-namun (Patricia Velasquez). It was no surprise than that 2001 saw the sequel – The Mummy Returns. However, the Hollywood climate was by then drastically changed. Just a year earlier big budget cinema spectacle was again being re-introduced. Gladiator by Ridley Scott revived the genre that was virtually non-existent since Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra. The Mummy Reurns was almost all effects, and this took its toll on the overall quality. Film critics despised it, audiences adored it. The film was Egyptologically much more interesting than its predecessor with, again, the touch of poetic pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian language. The film had more than dozen spin-offs (half of them low-budget). Most notable were five instalments of The Scorpion King and finally, in 2008, The Mummy: Tomb of Dragon Emperor – now set in China. In the nineties, modern Egypt gave her share to our topic. It was a film by one of the most important Egyptian film directors Youssuf Chachine. Al-Muhagir/The Emigrant was based on the Koran narrative of Joseph and his endeavours in Egypt. Film was domestically seriously attacked, withdrawn from circulation then returned, while the director was put on trial. First it was charged with blasphemy in portrayal of prophet Joseph, then for distortion of Egypt pharaonic past. All of this helped immensely the film on domestic box-office, making this primarily intimate author’s portrayal of ancient Egypt a box-office hit. On the other side of religious spectrum, 2009 saw the Cannes film festival premiere of Alejandro Amenábar Agora. Filmed in Malta, film gave the portrayal of the last years of famous Alexandrian mathematician Hypatia murdered by Christian fanatics. In their portrayal Amenábar made direct references to the images of post-9/11 terrorism on the one side, and the looting of archaeological artefacts on the other. Critics and the audiences were on the same page here – Agora was an excellent film. However, there were voices that saw this film as anti-Christian, so in 2013 Decline of an Empire was made. This low-budget film was shot in Cyprus and labelled as “the last epic starring Peter O’Toole”. However, film was re-edited and renamed as Catherine of Alexandria having Christian martyr from Alexandria as a lead character. Film went straight to DVD, although in several countries it was shown in cinemas without success. The foundations of Judaism, in turn, was questioned when in December 2014 Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings premiered. Film, shot in Spain, was banned from showing in Morocco and Egypt – first because it “represents God" which is forbidden under Islam”, and the second because “the film is Zionist one, it shows history from a Zionist point of view and falsifies historical fact». Although Exodus: Gods and Kings with Christian Bale as Moses was a commercial and critical failure, there were individuals who praised its daring subversives inside the genre and the more than successful and innovative effort of modern interpretation of archaeology of ancient Egypt. In the end, two films that flopped commercially offered a lot of motives much closer to Egyptology than originally thought. First was The Gods of Egypt by Alex Proyas. Basically, drawn from Contendings of Horus and Seth and shot entirely in Australia, it was too unfamiliar territory for the audiences’ grasp. A year later, Universal pictures tried for the fourth time to revive The Mummy franchise. Now, with Tom Cruise in the lead, this American-Chinese-Japanese coproduction shot in Namibia, UK and France was considered as a first part of Dark Universe, Universal pictures revival of its old characters: Frankenstein, Dracula and Werewolf. Film had a huge budget ($190 million+$100 million more in marketing), while returning $402,3 million. Considered by the executives as a serious failure, the announced sequels were cancelled. This film blended Hammer/Universal tradition with certain new approach. Its innovation was that the eponym character was Egyptian princess Ahmanet on the rampage across the UK. Hero of the day was, quite unexpectedly, Tom Cruise. Female monster, after long series of men, brought us back to the beginning of our story and Théophile Gaultieres’ Roman de la momie. The third part of the dissertation analyses certain films, motives and cinema attractions from the Egyptological perspective. Based on a motive outlined by C. W. Ceram, it analyses representations of the ancient Egyptian gods, depiction and the genre purpose of cinematic tombs and takes as an example of a most-filmed scholars: Joseph, Sinuhe, Moses and Cleopatra. The analysis ends with a conclusion that the more historical and archaeological based the film is, the more specific it becomes, the more demanding, exotic and different. In this way it necessary takes distance from the contemporary cinema audience, denying itself, thus, of popularity, wider acceptance and understanding and, in the end, the box-office success. It is this paradox exactly that doesn’t allow modern viewer to identify with the ancient Egyptian cinematic characters and/or story aside from oriental, exotic and all those Greek, Roman, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Renaissance and Baroque perception. For a modern viewer, if he wants to understand what’s going on the silver screen, it is mandatory that the portrayal of ancient Egypt on film must have exact and recognisable motives, similar storylines and exotic yet superficial characters. It is exactly they who are embedded into centuries of stories, paintings, music, novels and art in general that helped form cinema of today. Thus, they can be avoided – bus at a (literal) cost. |
