Representations of Antiquity in Film - From Griffith to Grindhouse - Kevin M. McGeough
Film as History and History as Hyperreality
Representations of Antiquity in Film - From Griffith to Grindhouse - Kevin M. McGeough
Kevin M. McGeough [+]
University of Lethbridge
Kevin M. McGeough is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Geography & Environment at the University of Lethbridge and holds a Board of Governor’s Research
Chair in Archaeological Theory and Reception. Having excavated in Israel, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, and Canada, McGeough is currently co-director of excavations at Busayra in Jordan and Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump UNESCO World Heritage Site in Canada. He has been the editor of The Annual of ASOR and ASOR’s Archaeological Report Series as well as the chair of ASOR’s publications program. Now co-editor of the Alberta Archaeological Review, he is currently researching the reception of Near
Eastern Archaeology in a variety of media, including a three-volume book on archaeological reception in the Victorian era, The Ancient Near East in the Nineteenth
Century (2015) and a 2025 popular book on the interpretation of the Ark of the
Covenant over the past 2,000 years (Readers of the Lost Ark). His 2022 book on
cinema, Representations of Antiquity in Film: From Griffith to Grindhouse is a treatment of how the ancient world is presented in movies.
Description
The first chapter offers a brief survey of thinking on how movies can work as attempts at telling history, focussing on the major debates that have emerged since the 1990s. It introduces debates surrounding the archaeological authenticity of these films (and the rhetorical strategy surrounding “realism”). Another major theme brought up here is how the ancient world is used as a film setting for making arguments about the present. The last two sections address the topics of material culture in film (of particular interest to archaeologists and anthropologists) and the appeal of hyperreal representations to popular audiences.