A Film Canon

The Ten Commandments conflates Jewish exclusivity, Christian inclusivity and American egalitarianism, transforming Moses into the original American, American history into a third testament, and the Ten Commandments into a typological anticipation of the Declaration of Independence. This produces a deeper, more pervasive sense of anachronism than the various factual inaccuracies and inconsistencies, as well as a slightly awkward attempt to summarise the American ethos in terms of the divinely sanctioned liberation of slaves. Not only does this ring poorly with the opening claim to reconcile Josephus, Philo, Eusebius, the Midrash and the Bible, but it doesn't even serve a particularly sophisticated spectacular imperative. Certainly, DeMille succeeds in completely transforming speech into so many enunciatory, rhetorical spectacles ("So it is written. So it shall be done"), as well as nicely updating the breathless gravitas that accompanied the earliest cinematic depictions of biblical material. However, with the exception of the astonishing Red Sea sequence, and the four plagues DeMille chooses to depict, the spectacle is merely quantitative; a sheer proliferation of figures, props and mise-en-scenes that continually gestures towards the infernal ingenuity of Griffith but never quite reaches it - with the possible exception of the penultimate scene, in which the condensation of the film's preoccupation with glittering, multicoloured dervishes (responsible, among other things, for an incongruous depiction of Joseph's coat) around the construction of the Golden Calf presents the heterodox Israelites, rather than the Egyptians, as the film's most compelling vision of evil. In the end, the most enduring moments remain those on-location sequences in which Moses simply wanders through the desert wilderness; a vast, epic silence that prefigures God's presence at Sinai.