Queen Cleopatra VII is one of the most widely known figures of Egyptian history, being the last of the Ptolemaic dynasty to rule the country before it became a Roman province. Her memory has been continually appropriated throughout the centuries, starting with the emperor Augustus, her biggest rival and contemporary, responsible for the propagation of a huge part of the queen’s negative image that persists until today. Writers from antiquity that came after, such as Plutarch and Suetonius, helped the continuity of this image, given that they produced some of the few writings about her that survived into our time. Their books served as a basis for literary works like “The Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri in the 14th century, and the play “Antony and Cleopatra” by Wiliam Shakespeare in the 17th century.

The Shakespearean play, in turn, inspired orientalist paintings by artists like Jaques Louis David and Eugene Delacroix, in the 19th century, and numerous films throughout the 20th century. Therefore, we can see how the successive reinterpretations of the queen’s life converse with each other and inspire future ones – the movie Cleopatra (1963), starring Elizabeth Taylor, for example, mentions Shakespeare as inspiration. This work in particular is part of a more than a hundred years old canon of films about the rise and fall of the last queen of Egypt. And yet, Taylor managed to secure a prominent place within this range of movies that include performances from other legendary figures like Theda Bara (1917), Claudette Colbert (1934) and Vivien Leigh (1945).

Still, it is important to point out that the success of Cleopatra is more related to its permanence in the public’s collective memory rather than box office returns. Its profit was diluted in its high production costs, which rose exponentially during filming thanks to delays that resulted from various setbacks during the movie’s creation process, including firings and quarrels between the director and the studio. Curiously enough, these problems ended up helping to consolidate its status as a multimillion superproduction that almost led FOX Studios to bankruptcy. Nevertheless, the grandiose atmosphere of the film also depended on its actors, thanks to the “star system”^[1] that defined this Hollywood era, in which the handling of actors’ public image was made by studios themselves.

Fig. 1: LIFE (19 april 1963) and Photoplay March 1963 (Source: Old Life Magazine and Ebay)

In this context, tabloids and gossip magazines were a fundamental part of the Hollywood universe, integrated in films’ publicity through “bombastic news” regarding the movie’s backstage stories and actors’ personal lives. There was, in this sense, a constant dialogue between the film narrative and movie star’s “real life”, established mainly by media outlets. Thus, there is a possibility of the film Cleopatra having deliberately used the extramarital case between two of the protagonists,^[2] Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, to promote the film, given that both played the historical couple of Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII, creating an interesting parallel between the movie’s story and what was happening behind the scenes.

In this sense, the convergence between the film’s advertising, the publicization of Taylor’s personal life and the story of Cleopatra VII resulted in a phenomenon of a fusion of their images. As a result, the actress became the main visual reference of the Egyptian queen in western imagination. This happened also, in part, because Cleopatra VII herself represents an intersection between worlds^[3] – she symbolizes the border between West and East, the past and the future, even the feminine and the masculine as she manages to centralize power in her identity as a woman at a time when women were relegated to secondary roles in political matters. Her memory, in large part, is immaterial and has been appropriated and used in accordance with the needs of whoever is mobilizing^[4] it precisely because of the wealth of meaning that she contains.

This matter reveals to us two dimensions of Cleopatra. One is historical, based on archaeological remains and texts like those of Plutarch and Suetonius, and the other is essentially fictional, almost independent from the first. It is worth pointing out that films like Cleopatra reimagine not only the queen herself, but also Ptolemaic Egypt, coming from an imagetic repertoire of symbols like hieroglyphics, sarcophagi, sphinxes and pyramids built throughout the centuries, and mobilized in cinema mainly through costumes and scenography.

Fig. 2: Cleopatra. Twentieth Century Fox, 1963 (Screenshot by the author)

In this excerpt, for example, we can see how the art direction department imagined an Egyptian crowning ceremony, but it is important to remember that accuracy was not exactly the focus of their work, the transmission of an idea was. This means that hieroglyphs, crowns, fans and other objects were conceived for symbolic purposes. They convey an idea of luxury, power and decadence to the audience – things commonly associated with the historic figure herself. Everything is highly stylized, the walls are golden and filled with images, there is a throne shaped like a falcon wearing a snake crown, and the wide-angle of the camera shows the considerable size of Cleopatra’s royal court along with the Roman guests. The creative input of artists in the conception of movies like this impacts both the depiction of the queen and audience perception.

Beyond that, it is worth noting that the objects mentioned above are not replicas of archaeological remains that endured through time, but rereadings of them. This practice of referencing symbolic elements of Egyptian antiquity, recontextualizing and ressignifying them, is named Egyptomania. As a cultural phenomenon, it works as a kind of “use of the past”^[5] that is specific to Egypt and is commonly linked to historical events that instigate a wave of curiosity by the western world in regards to Egyptian history, resulting in an explosion of artworks, architectural monuments, publicity works and many other kinds of appropriation outside of Egypt.

Examples of this include events like the Napoleonic expedition in Egypt around 1798 and the discovery of Tutankhamon’s tomb in 1922. In the case of the 1960’s, in which Cleopatra was made, there were rising tensions in the Middle East, related to the polarized new world order brought about by the Cold War. Anti-imperialist movements were spread throughout the region, and Egypt found itself in a prominent position among the countries that faced diplomatic and political hostilities from the United States and Europe.^[6] In this context, the Hollywood propaganda machine was used to maintain control of the narrative regarding these conflicts in the hands of the global north, which was achieved through the appropriation of Egyptian history. We can observe this in 1950’s and early 1960’s cinema, when Hollywood experienced a surge of films named Biblical or Historical Epics^[7] that often depicted Egyptians and Arabs as backward villains while positioning Rome and Greece as civilized counterpoints – the latter were the stand ins for whiteness defending itself from “oriental” barbarism, permanently shaping the public opinion of western audiences about the Middle East in terms of “us” versus “them”.

In summary, we must see the film Cleopatra (1963) through the lens of an Egypt that is imagined by North Americans in a context of political and diplomatic tension, making use of a long literary and imagetic repertoire accumulated throughout centuries, constantly rewritten and reimagined according to the needs of the present. This same repertoire shows us that there was a Cleopatra VII in the 1st century B.C. whose exact physiognomy we are far from accessing, and, beyond her, there were numerous other Cleopatras lived by a diversity of women throughout history, with special emphasis on Elizabeth Taylor. Each one of them exists as a product of their time, and, if analyzed carefully, can reveal an almost mirrored image of their own time.

Notes: 

^[1]BUTLER, Jeremy G. The star system and Hollywood. 1998.

^[2]SCHWAB, Andrea. “Cinematic Portrayals of Ancient Women: Cleopatra VII, Livia.” Classical Journal 91.2 (1996): 113-40.

^[3]ROYSTER, Francesca. Becoming Cleopatra: The shifting image of an icon. Springer, 2016.

^[4]Sobre isso, ler: SHOHAT, Ella. “Des-orientar Cleópatra: um tropo moderno da identidade.” cadernos pagu (2004): 11-54. e Royster, 2016.

^[5]The term “use of the past” is being employed here meaning an interpretation of the past produced with the goal of discussing issues from the work’s current time, not the historical context being portrayed.

^[6] BEINING, Joel. How Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser Changed World Politics. Jacobin, 2021.

^[7] Examples include The 10 Commandments (1956), Ben Hur (1959), King of Kings (1961), among others.

Author: Julia Szoke, BA- History Department/University of São Paulo, Brasil

Featured image:French poster of Cleopatra, by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, source: IMDB)