poses and gestures
By
Douglas Messerli
Jerzy
Kawalerowicz and Tadeusz Konwicki (screenplay, based on a novel by Bołeslow
Prus), Jerzy Kawalerowicz (director) Faraon
(Pharoah) / 1966, USA 1977
The
plot of Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s magnificent 1966 film, Pharoah, although extremely important to effect of this film, is
actually quite simple, and is almost able to summarized in two or three
sentences. The young heir to the Egyptian throne, Ramses XIII (Jerzy Zelnik),
is impatient to make an impact of Egyptian culture. In some ways, the young
Ramses is conservative, longing for the power of the throne held by his
great-grandfather as opposed to the greatly declined Egypt over which his
father, and soon he will rule. The young Ramses would like a world, like that
represented by Cheop’s magnificent tomb, in which great memorials as the
pyramids did not just represent the pharoahs’ power, but their will. If the
poor and suffering everymen and women of Egypt had to die in the process, it
was because the Pharoah was the figure of power, not the people.

Ramses, however, is doomed because of this
almost single-minded obsession. Unlike his wiser—but also politically ineffective—father,
who practices a kind of realpolitik
in which he grants some powers in his name to the priests, the young Ramses
acts blindly, without the ability to analyze the intentions of his kingdom’s
major enemies—the Phoenicians and the Assyrians—let alone the capability of
perceiving the truly evil machinations of the wealthy priestly caste, perhaps
the most dangerous of all in their determination to keep the benefits their
have acquired.
Finally, the handsome young heir, who
quickly becomes the Pharoah as his father falls ill and, soon after, dies, has
no comprehension of how he will effected by the women he chooses. If his first
love, Sara (Krystyna Mikolajewska), seems to be a loyal supporter, her being
Jewish infuriates Ramses’ mother, Queen Nikotris (Wiesława Mazurkiewicz) and,
given the Egyptian class system, predetermines that his son (Seti/Isaac) will
be born a slave, able only to rule over Israel.
Ramses’ second choice is the Phoenician
princess Kama (Barbara Brylska) who has been schooled in betrayal, and, with
the help of a Greek criminal, Lykon (also played by Jerzy Zelnik), who acts as
a kind of doppelgänger to the young Pharoah, later kills Sara, Ramses’ son,
and, finally, Ramses’ himself.
In his final love affair, with Hebron (Ewa
Krzyżewska), Ramses betrays his best friend and cousin, his most loyal
supporter, Thutmose (Emir Buczacki). In short, Ramses is not only unlucky in
love, but, as he proves himself to be on the battlefield, is absolutely
destructive, revealing himself to be a hot-headed man of action as opposed to
the beloved sage who could lead Egypt out of its indebted bondage.
What this film finally reveals is that,
despite all the apparent enemies Ramses XIII must face, in the end he
destroyed, at least symbolically, by himself—by his own inexperience and
immaturity.



It is this very artificiality and
theatricality, reminding one somewhat of the emblematic scenarios of Sergei
Paradjanov, that transforms what might have been a sword and sandal spectacular
into a stately cinematic masterwork. Just as his hero seeks to rid his citizens
of their slavish adoration of the magic and hokum (including, in this case, a
priestly calculated eclipse), so Kawalerowicz dares his audience to conceive a
world through the lens—probably all it could offer itself within its own time
as well—of poses and gestures. This is a “picture,” the director keeps
reminding us, of a long lost world, a simulation of a small place on our planet
in the 11th century BCE, which had little in common with us except for the
human dilemmas with which it was faced.
*The
original press kit of this film recounts that the production costs of Pharaoh outstripped those of any other
film ever made in Poland. Shootings in the desert of Uzbekistan’s Kisil-Kim
exacted nearly unable conditions of deaily heat, with vipers and venomous insects
springing out at its actors and extras from yards away. The production “team
had to journey the 20 miles which separated the location from the headquarters in
Bokhara. For a period six months the director oversaw 2,000 Soviet soldiers and
hundreds of other extras. “On the average, 10,000 bottles of soft drinks were
needed each day. The properties and equipment were brought from Bokhara in 27
trucks. The wood for the Pharaoh’s palace and the Ptah temple was procured from
the Siberian forests, transported from a distance of over 1,200 miles. The film
itself had to be kept in cold storage to protect it from temperatures that
often reached 176° Fahrenheit.
Los Angeles, June
18, 2014
A beautiful creation . I saw it first time as a school boy on national tv in Armenia 40 years ago .Did not get much of it back then . Now I found the digitally restored version (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh_(film) )on youtube.To my disappointment the restored version is missing a few frames ,that captured camera tracks at the very beginning of the movie .
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