Like the legendary peplum heroes of old, I bravely embarked on a noble six-year quest to become a Doctor in Film History. Some scoffed at the thought. Some said it couldn't be done. Some said that I should do something more useful with my time. Actually, I'm not sure if anyone did any of those things. Generally people have been quite supportive. Anyway, to continue... I battled my way through libraries, archives, film fairs, seminars, conferences, and above all my own laziness, to eventually submit a completed thesis, which following a viva last week, has netted me a Doctorate. I was given an unconditional pass, which came as something of a shock after the two hours of suggested changes. It turned out the feedback was so that I could turn it into a book to submit to the BFI. They thought it was a major piece of scholarship which makes an important contribution to film history. Which is nice. I am trying to celebrate this week by relaxing and catching up with TV shows on the Sky box, but I also have 50 essays waiting to be marked, so there's that to bring me back down to Earth. So there you have it. You too could be a doctor in just six years. Easy.
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.
It's been far too long since I last wrote in this blog. As 2017 hit, so did the realisation that I need to finish my PhD this year and find a full-time job, given that my scholarship runs out this summer. So it is fair to say that a certain amount of panic has gripped me for the past four months. I have applied for several jobs so far both around the UK and abroad, currently to no avail. It's difficult not to feel a certain amount of despondency, but I am still remaining optimistic. There is a Film Studies lecturer job out there somewhere with my name on the office door.
Whilst applying for jobs I am also attempting to finish my PhD. I totalled up my word count so far and realised that what I really needed was another chapter. I have gone against the advice of my supervisors, who when I first suggested the idea shot it down, and decided to write about the peplum. Amongst other factors, the knowledge that Hercules Unchained was the most popular film in Britain in 1960 (according to box-office receipts) was one of the pieces of information that piqued my interest in the distribution of international popular cinema in Britain in the first place.
I have been collecting promotional material to do with the peplum film since I started this research, given that people like Compton handled many of these Italian sword-and-sandal films in the early 1960s. It seemed like a shame not to use them, so armed with a handful of original press books and a collection of downloads from rarelust.com and YouTube I began writing a new chapter. I have also picked up a few books including a recent title from Robert Rushing so had plenty of information and research to draw on. It was the easiest, quickest piece of writing I had ever done. In five days I had written 5000 words, which for me is highly productive.
At the end of another successful day of writing I was also trying to multi-task. I have been making DVDs of my Dad's old home videos, and one of them needed compiling and exporting into a new file before I could burn it to DVD. I assembled it on a Premiere Pro timeline and hit export, thinking my Mac could handle working on this in the background whilst I continued writing. When I went to return to my Word file it would not open. It had disappeared. My heart raced and I panicked. What quickly transpired was that Premiere was trying to export this video to the folder I had selected, but as bonus was also writing it to the folder with this chapter in (which was on the same external hard drive) and was writing video metadata information over my chapter. I stopped Premiere exporting, but it was too late. I spent the next two hours trying every type of file recovery possible, including an hour's pointless chat with a Microsoft helpdesk, all to no avail: The file wasn't deleted. It could not be recovered. It had been written over. My chapter so far was gone.
Maciste, aka Goliath (Gordon Scott) in Goliath and the Vampires
I felt like Goliath here, only instead of an uprooted tree I wanted to hurl my Mac out of the window. I had enjoyed a week of unbridled productivity, and it was lost. I had not backed it up anywhere, or emailed a copy to my wife to show off. I learned a painful lesson, scribbled as much down on a piece of paper that I could remember, and immediately backed up all my other writing on Dropbox, where I now save everything.
Goliath's fiance Guja (Leonora Ruffo) in Goliath and the Vampires
I have started again, but I am not enjoying it half as much this time. What I have written is possibly better, but I will never know. Occasionally I remember that something I am trying to write now was worded in a much better way last time, but I don't know what it was. It's frustrating. However, I've had other ideas as I'm writing that I had not put in last time, so overall it will probably be okay. I had a good research trip to London just the day after I lost it all, where I visited the Cinema Museum and the BBFC archives, so I have tons of material. What I have struggled with since is finding the time to sit and write. It has just been the Easter holidays and I also have lots of coursework to mark, so that perfect week where I could just write and write and write has been hard to replicate. However, now the teaching and marking are almost done it will get better. It has to! My goal is to submit a first completed draft of the thesis by the beginning of June. So learn the lesson from me and make sure your work is backed up. Please!
