Gladiator: Death and resurrection of narrative cinema in the arena

Some 40 years after the fall of the genre, sandal-film in 2000 had,his glorious comeback with Ridley Scott's Blockbuster "Gladiator" -more violent, more, exciting, more "authentic" in its visual style than ever before. Opposing wide-spread academic critique concerning historical faults and misinterpretations in "Gladiator", the article argues that the demand for "accuracy" misses the point. Films on historical topics should not be conceived as mere representations of historiografic texts, but as elements of the "cinematic text". that shaped popular consciousness of the past in the 20(th) century. Seen from that point of view "Gladiator" turns out not only to reflect "classical (narrative) Hollywood" and its crisis in a caleidoscopic television-environment; while breaking the tradition of grand narratives-by making the protagonists fantasmatic "private" memories the centre of-the film -, Ridley Scotts "Gladiator" paradoxically focusses on the salvation, of story-telling cinema beyond teleology.