After losing a chapter I was halfway through writing, I lost all enthusiasm for the peplum film. It has taken me about five weeks to rewrite and finish the new version. It was really hard at first. I had absolutely no passion for the work or the films, and it pained me to have to begin again. Once I hit about 5000 words though I was into the swing of things and enjoyed finishing it, at around 10500 words. I have written about several sword-and-sandal films and feel that I know more about the genre and the industrial conditions that brought it about. I am now trying to make a video essay using clips, music and text, to illustrate some of my findings and archival material. I have the aim of showing it as part of my presentation in Canada, but I'm beginning to wonder if that is not really the done thing.
My thesis word count so far stands at around 75,000, so I really do feel that the end is finally in sight. I'm thinking about proofreading and editing, all the pictures I still need to put in, formatting, all that sort of stuff. I've made a list of things I still need to do, and it's long, and if I'm honest, pretty boring. But I'm so desperate to get my thesis completed by mid-July I'm just going to have to suck it up and do it. I started writing and researching my PhD in the late summer of 2012, so five years of my life has been spent thinking, working and worrying. It will be really good to get it over with!
Of all the peplum films I watched from beginning to end, which admittedly was only five, the best was Samson (Sansone, 1961, Gianfranco Parolini, Italy: Cineproduzioni Associate (Rome)) , starring Brad Harris "The strongest athlete in the world." The acting is better than the others, including Hercules and Hercules Unchained, and the production values are pretty good. The weirdest of all of them was Goliath and the Vampires, a truly odd film with a plot too complicated and convoluted to summarise. It was also one of the only peplum films to be rated 'X' by the BBFC, and that was after some cuts to the gorier moments. About four years ago I picked up some original press books for peplum films at the Westminster film fair. Thanks to a general lack of interest in the genre I got them remarkably cheaply, and they have been sitting waiting patiently for me to use them since. It is a fun genre, and it means that my thesis now has chapters on films for kids, films for teens and films for adults, which seems like a good balance.
If you want to see Sansom it is available on a great Italian DVD with both the Italian and English language tracks. If you speak Italian you can find a poor quality version on YouTube. Here is the trailer. Look carefully and you'll spot none other than Serge Gainsbourg as the villainous Warkalla.
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