Abysses du péplum : stratégies d’écriture et faux-fuyants critiques autour d’un genre sidérant

Abstract

After more than three decades of interruption, the revival of the Hollywood peplum in the 2000s has left French critics in a quandary. Should one take the genre seriously, grant it a sense of irony or consider it frivolous from the outset, despite his cultural baggage? In the wake of Gladiator, the most ambitious biblical-historical vein provokes sarcasm, but also identity-related tensions linked to the preservation of Western culture. After 300, the mythological-fantasy cycle is received more expeditiously as an inherently nanardesque trend, while the evaluation of the films relies increasingly on the genre press. In this sense, the peplum’s reception seems deeply divided. The example of Immortals shows, however, that the ordinary reception of the mythological film on the Internet reiterates and makes explicit certain contradictions specific to the perception of the contemporary peplum: diversity of spectatorial pleasures and criteria of appreciation, an ambivalent relationship to the Greco-Latin heritage and to American control, rhetorical strategies of distinction and avoidance.

Keywords

• genre
• film critic
• Internet
• historical epic
• peplum
• reception studies