Le double heureux

In this article on The Son of Spartacus, a sword and sandals movie by the Italian filmmaker Sergio Corbucci, the author focusses on the ambivalence of pepla as both commercial/popular films and “suggestion boxes” – they are intended for entertaining the general public by staging Antiquity in a lavish and ornamental style, but simultaneously, they “make us think” on our present condition by raising essential questions that directly clip on our “problems” with politics, ethics, history, the government of the living, civilization and barbarity, etc.

In The Son of Spartacus, Corbucci insistently deals with what Walter Benjamin call “the tradition of the oppressed”. Sword and sandals films are made of an inextricable entanglement of ornamental effects and “ideas” (Deleuze) – and this is what makes them so exciting.