I had occasion recently to watch, for maybe the fourth time in my life, Cy Endfield's "Zulu," a terrific 1964 epic about the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879, particuarly the famed Battle of Rorke's Drift, when a contingent of perhaps 150 English soldiers managed, for 30 hours or so, to hold off perhaps 4000 Zulu warriors who had the previous day wiped out an English column of more than 1200 souls.

The film is notable for a number of things: a massive scale, with hundreds of extras waging hand-to-hand (or, more precisely, spear-to-bayonnet) combat; the gorgeous Natal setting; the 70mm photography; the bloody-minded storytelling, almost half of which is battle; the John Barry score; the authentic tribal rituals, music and military tactics on display.

But I was particularly taken by the acting. The film famously provided Michael Caine with his star-making role, some 12 years and 30 parts into his career. Ironically, the archetypical Cockney Caine was universally noted for the first time in his working life for playing an upperclassman, Lt. Gonville Bromhead, an actual historic personage who was raised in comfort and never saw battle before that fateful day. To hear Caine speak in the soft, clipped, exact tones of a posh gent is almost comical -- and, indeed, generations of English comedians have joked about how it might have sounded had Caine played the role in his familiar voice: "'Ere! Quit pointin' those bleedin' spears at me!"

Beside Caine, there are such faces as Stanley Baker (the headline star and producer), Jack Hawkins, Nigel Green, James Booth and, in the only female speaking role, Ulla Jacobsson. And as I watched them, I realized that they were all -- save Caine -- dead. I was moved to look up the status of everyone who had a role of any size in the film and found that virtually every single person whom you might be able to identify the film (which, to be fair, is nearly 50 years old) had passed away. Caine was an exception, as were one or two relatively obscure minor players. And, bizarrely, one of the few survivors turns out to be someone rather famous, albeit not for movie acting: Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the South African tribal leader and political figure who plays his own ancestor, the chieftain Cetewayo who waged battle against the English.

It's a strange thing, if you think about it, to watch a film and feel so much vitality coming from people who are no longer alive. Their speech and facial expressions and movements and human quirks -- sweating and coughing and such -- are captured forever and, at the same time, lost forever. Even given the massive scale of "Zulu" and the fact that it was made during the lifetimes of many people who can remember seeing it on first release, the movie like a time capsule of a bygone era -- a living mausoleum. Before long, more time will have passed since the release of the film than passed between the events it depicts and its making. And by then surely no one who can be recognized in it will still be alive.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon in human culture: the ability to capture lifelike representations of people and experience them anew after the subject's demise. In the contact of a death-soaked movie like "Zulu" this may seem especially poignant, perhaps, but it applies to any old film or TV show or audio recording. Think of someone clearing his or her throat at a concert performance from the 1940s, still audible today decades after the throat-clearer has died. The scores of extras in "Zulu" are no more identifiable than that anonymous soul. And yet they, too, feel strangely immortal for having been captured in a motion picture.

John Keats was onto a similar thought in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," describing figures who would never age or die or, indeed, change their postures. But those were representations of people who may or may not have once lived, of course, not captured images of people who were demonstrably alive and no longer are.

Artists live on through art, yes, but so, too, can the people who happen to be present when artists make their work. It's a scary thought, but comforting, too, and it gives you an appreciation of the miracle of movies that may bring them more vitally alive to you than ever.

Link:
'Zulu' and the ghosts of actors past