Nolan has portrayed Antiquity without colors in ‘The Odyssey’. It is a major error that has been around since the 18th century.

The new trailer of ‘The Odyssey’ by Christopher Nolan It has everything that is expected from the director: enormous ambition, armies of extras, a Trojan horse, a cyclops, and its share of controversy. Beyond the anachronistic armor, both this and the previous trailer have highlighted how the film is bathed in a color filter (or non-color, rather) that turns Ancient Greece into a twilight, joyless place. What is significant is that this is not an innocent choice.

Color missing. The new trailer, which makes the visual muscle of the film very clear (four months of filming at sea, 250 million dollars budget) has unleashed opinions that speak of “lack of color“, or of a proposal “dark, dirty and full of black armor.” Nolan affirms which has sought a realistic approach to the Greek epic, with locations in Greece, Morocco, Sicily and Iceland, practical effects and without the artificial shine of the classic Hollywood peplum. However, its approach is also a visual convention.

Dirty past. The phenomenon is more than studied among experts in historical representation. The blog ‘Tragedy and Farce’ analyzed it in depth in 2021documenting how historical cinema has come to systematically associate the past with dirty browns, metallic grays, and unpolished armor. The trend became so dominant that it ended up filtering into epic fantasy: the Gondor of ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’ works with a completely desaturated palette that contrasts with the vivid colors of the rest of the saga.

The story. What is significant, as said the historian Patricia Gonzálezis that this is how a story is constructed: we are sent the message that the past was dark, brutal and primitive, and modernity consists of color and light. Going from black and white to technicolor, a bit in one inverted and less innocent version of ‘The Wizard of Oz’. The past is different from the present, it is described to us as distant and pre-rational, and at the same time it is romanticized in the military: man against the world, his own against what is foreign, the epic of noble violence. A message ideologically loaded to the brim, although there are authors like Nolan who, when adopting it, have no intention of launching an explicit political message.

What archeology knows. Since 1981, the Liebieghaus Polychromy Research Projectin Frankfurt, analyzes traces of color preserved in classical sculptures and architectural fragments thanks to a combination of techniques including ultraviolet photography, X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, and chemical analysis of pigments. Their conclusions are that the marble and bronze sculptures were painted with bright reds, deep blues, greens and gold. His physical reconstructions were shown to the public for the first time between 2003 and 2004 in Munich, the Vatican and Copenhagen, under the title ‘Gods in Color’.

Polychromy was not limited to sculptures. Clothes were dyed, walls were painted, weapons of the elite were decorated, tapestries told stories with intensely colored illustrations captured with complex and intricate techniques. It must be taken into account that the very term “polychromy” It was coined by the theorist Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy in 1814. from the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The origin of the problem. In the Renaissance, restorers convinced that the paint covering the sculptures was accumulated dirt removed it, and by the 18th century there were hardly any visible traces left. It was then, in 1764, that the German historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann published his ‘History of the Art of Antiquity’, which for generations established the canon of classical beauty. in itWinckelmann maintained that color contributed to beauty but was not beauty, and that the whiter the body, the more beautiful it was.

Liebieghaus Polychromy Research Project

Winckelmann and the neoclassicists who followed him built on that historical accident an entire aesthetic ideal, that of white marble as the pinnacle of civilization and art. Museums displayed the sculptures in their deteriorated state as if that were their original appearance. Today’s public, upon seeing the polychrome reconstructions of the Liebieghaus, reacts with discomfort, but in reality this rejection is the result of two centuries of conditioning.

White history. The most important Nazi propaganda forum on the internet, Stormfront, uses images of the Parthenon as iconography, invoking a “white history”. Identity Evropa, an American far-right organization, uses classical white marble sculptures in its propaganda. “Molon labe”, the legendary roar of Leonidas at Thermopylae, is today the slogan of armed Nazi militias. Before all that, Hitler banned any representation of classical art other than white marble in Nazi Germany. Sparta and Rome serve to sustain racialized narrativesxenophobic and Islamophobic, with the whiteness of marble as a central element of the imagination.

A gray, violent and militarized past fits perfectly into that story: epic, where the hard man prevails (hence the famous “Roman Empire” in which men, apparently, they can’t stop thinking), separated from the “soft” present… Nolan is not propagating Nazi ideas, of course, but his imaginary, absolutely contrary to historical reality (is there anything more luminous and colorful than the Mediterranean?) is born from these trends that date back to the 18th century. Therefore, the decision of filming in Western Sahara It is not only economic: it is necessary to erase the light of classical history.

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