The Mystery of Catiline – A Mockumentary
Cicero Denounces Catiline by Cesare Maccari (1840-1919)
The Mystery of Catiline is the creation of four final-year Classics students: Aisling Roth (AR), Ruby McDougal (RM), Nicole Browne (NB), and Claire Morgan-Busher (CMB). Here they each introduce you to their mockumentary and reflect on its making: follow the Youtube link below to watch!
Making the best of a bad situation
Our project was created during a year of online-college. This means that we were very limited by available resources as regards the production of our mockumentary idea. Our sole medium of communication was Zoom. We started out with ambitious ideas of filming a BBC Pride and Prejudice type costume drama, but were quickly brought down to earth.
After two restarted Zoom sessions (Zoom only gives you 40 minutes at a time) we finally landed on our best idea yet: interviews with Sallust and Cicero. The next problem which we faced was how we could pretend to talk to Cicero about Sallust's work - as by the time of publishing Cicero was already dead. The answer, when it finally hit us, was so delightfully simple: let Cicero be dead. Creativity can conjure a dead man back to life. A little bit of white make-up and a scar... voila!
But how would we divide up the different acting parts? Claire not only cast the spell to revive Cicero, she also cast us in our mockumentary roles. Nicole, who, during preliminary discussions, had been breaking into ten-minute speeches about Sallust, was the perfect candidate to play him. And, after diligently recording our minutes in a Google Doc, nobody was better qualified than Ruby to play a careful interviewer. And of course, already looking dead enough to play Cicero, my role was apparent. Ha. Ha. Which meant that Claire, who was brimming with questions for Cicero, would get to interview him.
We have been careful and deliberate in the way we present the universe which we have created. Note how the Sallust interview is serious, mirroring a historic account. Note how Cicero's interview - typically - escalates into the dramatic. And pay close attention to the chosen editor in all this and to the person she plays in the mockumentary! (AR)
Classical Creativity
Creating this project was an incredible experience: Not only were we able to delve into the two differing accounts of the Catiline Conspiracy and to develop our project based on the aspects of the works that interested us most, but we were also given licence to present our research in any manner we chose (the more creative the better!) which gave us freedom to have fun with it. Having agreed upon the mockumentary format, it was left to us to decide who should play what roles. Our final choices were helped by the structure of our module, in which two of us focused predominantly on Cicero’s Catilinarians in Latin, and two of us focused on Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae. Those of us who had studied Sallust’s account naturally played Sallust and his interviewer respectively, while those who has studied Cicero’s works played Cicero and his interviewer. Once we had allotted the various parts, it came time to film our efforts: as if remote learning couldn’t get any stranger, towards the end of term we found ourselves dressing up in bedsheet togae and liberally applying face paint in order to enhance our performance (we needed all the help we could get, filming over Zoom is harder than it looks!). Although, initially, the creative and filming aspects of the mockumentary seemed somewhat daunting, in the end having the ability to design and tailor our project to highlight all that we had learned made it an overall fantastic experience! (NB)
The Medium is the Message
The flexibility and creativity of this project provided us with a wonderful opportunity to look at the assigned text in unconventional ways. In particular, we wanted to explore the nature of narrative and the ways that history is communicated, and how we could use our chosen medium – not just video but dialogue too – to express that, as well as taking advantage of the unique situation the pandemic had put us in in creating a project entirely online. Reading Sallust and Cicero’s accounts, the thing that jumps out is both the ambiguous or empty spaces that exists in the narrative, there is a great deal we just don’t know or is entirely conflicting – and the nature of memory in preserving (or rather, not preserving) a person in history (if people live on through accounts of them and how they are remembered, then what does that mean for the man Catiline, and who exactly is the figure that survives of him?) – and how much both these things encourage the natural urge to “get to the bottom of things” as it were, and yet preclude the idea of one definitive “truth”. Hence – a documentary, and a failed one at that, where not only do the questions not get answered but the entire goal of it is called into doubt, and the interviewers are left questioning their own preconceptions. We had enormous fun going about this. Writing dialogue for historical figures, incorporating the texts we’d translated in analysis and humor in equal measure, creating a dawning sense of the futility of trying to find an objective “truth” in ancient sources, dressing up, and, of course, raising the dead. (RM)
Lights, Camera, Action!
As Aisling, Nicole, and Ruby have covered all the important aspects of this mockumentary idea, I shall fill you in on the behind-the-scenes goss! I was dead nudge nudge chuffed with my idea of creating a “libation” to summon Cicero, complete with my shrine of Robert Harris books… (so academic, I know!) We were kept entertained by Aisling and Nicole’s antics in dress-up, and then, even more so by Aisling’s sister who was roped in to commit small acts of arson for the “aesthetic” (as visuals for the fire imagery in Cicero’s Catilinarians). Honestly, this was a bit of fun, and hopefully something that will not be used to blackmail any of us in future! Enjoy … (CMB)
Watch The Mystery of Catiline here:
Aisling Roth
Sinéad Roth
Ruby McDougal
Nicole Browne
Claire Morgan-Busher