Construire ses propres modèles : le cas des bandes sonores post-Gladiator

Abstract

Ringing trumpets announcing the arrival of a Roman emperor, an oriental flowing and delicate harp reverberating inside the intimate palace of an Egyptian queen, a rude aulos singing in a bucolic Greek landscape: where are these familiar sound images coming from? Are these creations inspired by archaeological data or built after modern fantasy? The scarcity of ancient musical data necessitated, in fact, to reinvent the films’ soundscape taking place in the Ancient world. It is therefore a question of seeing on which models a peplum’s soundtrack is conceived and what it can reveal on our way of perceiving the ancient and contemporary world. Far from wanting to gauge the historicity of the sound backgrounds offered to the spectator of dark rooms, it is rather a question of seeing the imitation phenomena that can appear from the sound clichés created by the peplum itself and of also deducing from them thought patterns which, contextualized, influence these compositions. This article will focus on post-2000 productions.