John's Other Blog: <h2>The Revolt of the Slaves</h2>

Sunday, July 08, 2007

The Revolt of the Slaves

US one-sheet: "Revolt of the Slaves" (1960)

The first time I saw the poster for the Italian film "The Revolt of the Slaves" (La rivolta degli schiavi) with Rhonda Fleming furiously cracking her whip I thought "this is my life"; it was for sale at a poster show and I grabbed it immediately to put on my own wall.

I was never a slave in the sense of being owned by someone and
forced to work, but I always felt strongly that wage employment and a
40-hour schedule were enough like slavery that they needed rebellion.
My rebellion was violent because of what it did to my social standing
and my own expectations about how my needs should be met. Rebellion against the 40-hour week freed me from committing my time and creativity to someone else, but it did not liberate me from work. I became more enslaved than ever to my own fear of poverty, and also my own desire to live a good life without boss or payroll. Some have said I became a workaholic, but that doesn't apply because I choose to work on things I like and truly want to do. This isn't work. It is constant freedom, fed by desire and its energy. It can be exhausting at times, but it isn't work.

I love to create, but I don't like to be judged because I'm not
talented. Even though I'm not talented, I still need to exercise my
creativity, just as I need to exercise even though I'm not an
athlete. The upside of this is that since my creative work will never
be in demand, I will never be enslaved by my creativity.

What I create is not always art. I try to create solutions to my
problems. Ironically, sometimes the solutions I create do involve
self-enslavement, but it isn't my creativity that enslaves me. I
enslave myself doing menial tasks that will eventually produce a
useful result. One example is data entry. The task of entering data
for 10,000 database records is menial, but the resulting database is
an excellent tool that can be had in no other way.

I don't like life in a group because I don't have social skills and
I don't like competing for resources. Life is bearable for me as it
is. I can tolerate life's hardships and loneliness without any need
for social graces to lighten it or smooth it. That's been true so far
and I hope it will continue.

On this lobby card, Rhonda Fleming (Fabiola) watches as Lang Jeffries (Vibio) is flogged in "Revolt of the Slaves" for the crime of refusing to fight! This is one of the world's most famous cinematic flogging scenes.

The images on the "Revolt of the Slaves" poster symbolized for me the kind of transformation I wanted in my life, but I found out later the movie wasn't really about a slave revolt. "Spartacus" was about a slave revolt, but "Spartacus" was about a slave revolt against the entire the Roman Empire. My rebellion was never like that. My rebellion has been an inner rebellion shown outwardly by a withdrawal from social situations into my own self-sufficient world. I don't want to destroy anything, nor do I want involvement in any campaigns, social, military or religious.

A Belgian poster for "Revolt of the Slaves" with the word "Spartacus" written with red marker in the upper margin

The "Revolt of the Slaves" is really the story of a Christian uprising based on Cardinal Nicholas Weisman's 1854 novel Fabiola, set in a 4th Century Christian community in Rome called the Church of the Catacombs. The novel's heroine is Fabiola, Rhonda Fleming's character in "The Revolt of the Slaves." An earlier movie based on Weisman's novel was the 1949 film "Fabiola," starring Michele Morgan as Fabiola.