Summary
The text analyzes the historical film The Column (Columna, 1968), directed by Mircea Drăgan, a Franco-Romanian co-production that illustrates the period following the military confrontations between the Dacians and the Romans (the years 87-88 CE and the subsequent wars) and the process of colonization and integration of the new province into the Roman Empire.
Main Highlights of the Plot and Characters:
- The Beginning and Destiny of Decebalus: The film opens with the siege of Sarmizegetusa. King Decebalus (Amza Pellea) is betrayed by Bastos (Gheorghe Dinică)—a pragmatic Dacian who considered collaboration with Rome to be the only rational solution—and is killed by a Roman commander, his death being presented with a spiritualized tone.
- Resistance and Romanization: Following the defeat, the chieftain Gerula (Ilarion Ciobanu) retreats into the mountains to continue the anti-Roman resistance and to educate new generations of children in the spirit of freedom. In parallel, the Roman commander Tiberius (Richard Johnson) coordinates the construction of a castrum and the slow process of urbanization and Latinization, marked by mutual mistrust between the conquerors and the natives.
- The Cast and Cinematic Clichés: The cast includes foreign actors who are somewhat obscure to modern cinephiles and whose voices were dubbed (Richard Johnson, and Italian actress Antonella Lualdi as Andrada), alongside great Romanian actors. The author notes the presence of clichés specific to historical films from the communist era: the old, wise Dacian (Emil Botta) delivering moralizing yet commonplace remarks, and the legionary Sabinus (Florin Piersic), whose relationship with a Dacian woman serves as a cinematic example of what schools referred to as the “ethnogenesis of the Romanian people.”
- Nationalistic Tone and Propaganda: The film utilizes wide shots of mountain landscapes for tourism promotion. Towards the end, the nationalism becomes more nuanced: the free Dacians and the Romans ally to repel a barbarian invasion, suggesting a shared destiny on the same land. The text concludes, on an ironic note, that the film is filled with images of Dacians panning for gold, devouring chunks of meat and cheese, or staring in awe at Roman technological achievements (such as aqueducts).
Review
As it is probably not exactly common knowledge, the first significant military confrontation between the Dacians and the Romans took place in the years 87-88 CE and ended in a draw: the Dacians won the first battle, the next one was won by the Romans, but the Dacians obtained favorable terms, and Decebalus began to believe he could remain outside Rome’s grasp. Not only that, but the Dacian leader bit off more than he could chew—or “stretched further than his blanket allowed,” as the Romanian saying goes—and attacked Roman territories south of the Danube. This could not stand, and the war resumed. The Dacians lost decisively (this much is likely known), their territory would become a Roman province, and the film The Column shows us how that Roman colonization unfolded.
The film begins with the decisive battle of Sarmizegetusa, the capital of the Geto-Dacians, now besieged by the Romans without the Dacians having any chance of victory or being able to find any more tricks like throwing boulders down from the mountains. We see Decebalus himself, played by the same Amza Pellea, armed with a curved Dacian sword called a falx (I played too much Rome: Total War in high school, I know), but he will be betrayed by a character played by Gheorghe Dinică. An ambitious Roman commander catches up with King Decebalus and decides that he does not deserve to be brought to Rome as a prisoner of war, killing him, while the remaining Dacians are scattered and offer no further resistance. Or so we think. A loyal commander named Gerula hides in the mountains—a fairly recurrent cliché in Romanian historical films from the era of state socialism. This Gerula will continue an anti-Roman resistance and will educate new generations of Dacian children to hate Rome and hunger for the freedom of all Dacians of these lands.
But until that dreamed-of liberation of the Dacians, Rome is victorious, and now the conquered territories must be civilized—pardon, I meant to write integrated into the empire. A large part of the film is a cinematic chronicle of the Romanization of the territories north of the Danube conquered by the Romans; in other words, what followed after Decebalus’s defeat. We see the attempts of Tiberius, the Roman commander, to build a castrum for his legionaries, followed by the process of slow urbanization and the penetration of Latin culture into these newly conquered territories. However, Latinization is a slow process; the Dacian subjects do not trust the Romans who conquered them, and the feeling is mutual on the other side, meaning we will see historical tableaus that were likely intended to remain within the collective memory of Romanians.
Also a Franco-Romanian co-production, The Column features a cast of actors who are quite obscure to today’s moviegoers, which was to be expected, since the communist authorities wouldn’t have spent money on famous names anyway. The commander Tiberius is played by Richard Johnson, and an Italian actress, Antonella Lualdi, plays Andrada, Decebalus’s daughter. A low-cost foreign cast, so to speak, with voices that were dubbed. On the other side, Ilarion Ciobanu plays Gerula, the Dacian chieftain and close associate of Decebalus who has not given up the fight. Invented names, obviously. Gheorghe Dinică is once again a traitor, this time in the role of a Dacian named Bastos, who betrays his own people because he believes the Dacian world can only exist alongside Rome (the most well-adapted to the political realities of his world out of all the Dacians, the only rational Dacian, we must admit), so he betrayed Decebalus’s plans to the Romans—but also because he is against Decebalus. The same Romanian actors with fake prop beards glued to their faces. Decebalus dies, and in his final moments of life, he gazes at the horizon with the local mountains, representing a spiritualization of the death of an ancestral hero.
The poet Emil Botta plays a wise old Dacian—the cliché of the grey-bearded, wise Dacian who delivers thoughts intended to be samples of wisdom, but which are actually just platitudes, such as: “Decebalus wanted to defend the country there from the onslaught of the unknowns of the midnight hour,” referring to an imagined fortress that Decebalus wanted to build on a mountaintop which, according to the wise Dacian, would have been unconquerable (it seems even the wise men of the Dacians hadn’t heard of Roman siege engines like the battering ram, the siege tower, or the ballista). Florin Piersic’s character, the Roman legionary Sabinus, witnesses a sort of Dacian female ritual (the socialist equivalent of pre-Christian folk eroticism, probably), and through this character’s relationship with a Dacian woman, we are presented with a cinematic example of what was called in school the “ethnogenesis of the Romanian people.”
All historical films released before 1989 were also a good pretext for tourism promotion through wide shots of landscapes, mountains, forests, and the beauty of the land, and this film does not disappoint either. Regarding that ethnogenesis mentioned by historians—meaning the formation of the Romanian language over a millennium—it is curious that, in the last ten minutes of this film, the free Dacians ally with the Romans to repel an invasion of barbarians attracted by the Roman colony, from which we can understand that nationalism here is in smaller doses, a bit of background noise: Dacians and Romans and their descendants forced to defend the same land, unchanged by the passage of time. If you want to see a film where you will learn that the Dacians’ favorite activity was finding gold and sifting sand in rivers all day long, and to see the same sequences of Dacians devouring chunks of meat, but now with cheese too, The Column from 1968 is the movie for you. Also, when one of the Dacians remarks in astonishment, amidst a group of suspicious Dacians, at the aqueducts built by the Romans, we know we are facing that old question that would later be asked by the Monty Python group: “What did the Romans ever do for us?”
Photo: The Column (Columna, 1968), directed by Mircea Drăgan, starring: Amza Pellea, Gheorghe Dinică, Ilarion Ciobanu, Antonella Lualdi (source: The Column)
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