For every history there are alternative histories…

That is one theme to emerge from two of the DVDs from Surry Hills Library I viewed in the past few days.

First was Carthage: The Roman Holocaust from Channel Four. There were thinly veiled references throughout to our current mythologising as we saw how an empire that lasted for eight centuries finally went down to a ruthless superpower who then blithely rewrote its history, traducing and expunging as they went, so that the patriotic soap opera, utterly spurious as history, so elegantly phrased in Virgil’s Aeneid became the remembered version, and the fanatical terrorist Cato became an ongoing folk hero for conservatives. Good as a dose of salts, a bit patchy in production, but well worth watching.

Second was Ridley Scott’s 1992 1492: Conquest of Paradise. Check the comments there; the film is more accurate historically, for all its faults, than many were willing to concede at the time — but it does take on too much. I agree with When Good Directors Go Bad: 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992, Ridley Scott) on one point at least: “even with a two-and-a-half-hour running time, 1492 feels rushed.” On the other hand it is visually quite stunning, superb at times in fact. Again, it is worth giving it a look now that a few years have passed.

There is a good brief discussion in Brian J Robb’s small book Ridley Scott.

I will add a couple of YouTubes to the Vodpod on the right…