"Queen Cleopatra" represents a depressing trend in academia where emotion and contemporary biases matter more than facts. This TV series, in fact, is not a documentary, because it violates all the rules of documentary filmmaking. One of the main rules for making a serious documentary is to represent the past in its own terms and not project contemporary perspectives onto the past. Issa Islam breaks this rule most blatantly when saying: "The appeal of Cleopatra is that we imagine her, that everyone can imagine her in their own way. I imagine her to have curly hair like me and similar skin color." This quote captures everything that is wrong with the series. Here, he is basically saying that your view of what Cleopatra VII looked like is dependent not upon the evidence, but what people living in the present imagine her to look like. While I am not unsympathetic to the feelings which motivate someone to hold this view, these perspectives are anachronistic and are not the basis for a serious documentary. We can only reconstruct the past based upon evidence and, if we make speculations, these speculations cannot be based upon the absence of evidence. The interviewees admit that Cleopatra's mother is unknown, but then they make the mistake of claiming that this is evidence that Cleopatra was black. If we accept this logic, then almost anything can be true.
The anachronism permeating the series goes beyond Cleopatra's ethnicity. Key events in Cleopatra's life are presented in such a superficial way that they appear no different from events in the present day. For instance, Rome's civil war is seen by the documentary as a power struggle between men which begs the question of what makes this civil war any different from other power struggles in the 20th and 21st centuries. Maybe the documentary filmmakers think that all power struggles are the same, but I disagree because the evidence does not support this view. Rome's civil wars were the unintended result of the flaws with the republican system and the political climate of the time. Yet the documentary is so poorly researched that we never learn about that context. Similarly, Ancient Egypt's decline is handled so superficially that we do not understand why the kingdom is in such poor shape. There is no mention of major disruptions to commerce in the East Mediterranean, the rottenness built into an administration where Pharaohs ruled as gods and were surrounded by sycophants, or of the mistakes made by the previous Ptolemies. It's almost as though the filmmakers produced this TV series not because they were interested in the history of Cleopatra's Egypt, but to fulfill another contemporary need which has been alluded to in other reviews. Unfortunately, the writing of history does not work like that; it's about reimagining the past however imperfectly based upon the available evidence, not transforming a slice of the past into a marketable commodity that purportedly meets some present-day emotional need.
The documentary also does not work on the level of good story telling. As any academic would admit, the opening few sentences are sometimes the most difficult to write because you are trying to find the best way to introduce a major subject. This pseudo-documentary shows what happens when you get the opening wrong. There are plenty of depictions of Cleopatra as a "strong woman," smart, educated, caring, and knowledgeable about the Egyptian language, but nothing about why she is historically important. Would Ancient Egypt's history have unfolded any differently without Cleopatra VII? The documentary does not say. As we move beyond the opening to the story, we come across movie scenes that seem to paper over the cracks in the narrative rather than advance the narrative. For instance, we learn that eunuchs exercise a nefarious influence over the royal family and then are shown a movie scene of Cleopatra showing disgust for one of the eunuchs who has a surprising low voice for a eunuch. But we do not learn any insights about court politics and intrigue and how they contribute Ancient Egypt's decline or indeed how the eunuchs were able to gain so much influence over the Ptolemies. Similarly, we learn that Ancient Egypt was in crisis and then we have a movie scene showing Cleopatra asking for the granaries to be opened and a temple to be built to give people "hope." But once again, neither the interviewees nor the movie scenes give us much insight into why Ancient Egypt was in decline. After all, there must have been more to the decline than problems with the Nile not flooding enough. The superficial retelling of history is no small thing. It not only distorts the past, but it also means missed opportunities for generating enthusiasm about a rich and genuinely interesting period in Ancient Egyptian history.
All in all, the Cleopatra documentary deserves all the criticism it has been receiving. What encouraged me the most was the number of reviews focussing on the lack of sound scholarship. With the humanities facing a serious decline due to funding cuts and students being treated as customers, it is encouraging that there are people out there who still care about the rigors of the academic profession and presenting the past in its own terms. Many of the people writing reviews for IMDB on Cleopatra are the hope for the future.
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