CLAS 251 Ancient World in Cinema
This course entails a serious and extensive viewing of a wide variety of films whose engagement with ancient culture, preponderantly Western and Christian, may be obvious from the title (Alexander [2004], Gladiator [2000], Spartacus [1960], Ben-Hur [1959]) or (as is much more frequently the case in the reception of myth) oblique, subtle, and multi-threaded. As regards the latter sort, to cite a few examples: (1) a closer examination of the creative transformation of key story elements and folkloristic motifs in Gone Girl (2014) reveals that film to be, in large part, a devious revisiting of the disastrous passion of Medea for an unfaithful Jason; (2) both Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) and The Adjustment Bureau (2011) recast the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the former by transforming some key elements into a bleak, semi-autobiographical allegory of the director's own Pygmalion-like obsession with beautiful blonde actresses and the latter by superimposing a sketch of the fabled "love story" upon one of Philip Dick's numerous paranoid fantasies.
The student will have the opportunity to survey the history of cinema (key figures, national movements, technological evolution, etc.) as the course considers the manner in which a selection of more or less familiar figures in Greco-Roman myth, Classical civilization, and the Bible as well have been - and continue to be - appropriated in a visual medium that, born in the late 19th century, has emerged, through numerous transformations, from one of the first great flowerings of Greek culture, the Attic stage of the 5th century B.C.(E.). In conjunction with these considerations, certain cultural, scientific, philosophical and theological issues with which film, normally in a clumsy manner exposing the medium's deep roots in propaganda, attempts to engage are also recurrently addressed: e.g., the notion that the human soul is (or soon will be) reducible to a cache of readily down- and uploadable data.
While, by the end of the course, the student's initial vision of the "ancient world in cinema" will have been recognized to be an illusion, an abundance of genuine elements of that world in film (and other digital media) will be obvious. The ability both to appreciate some of the more important of these elements and to grasp something of the nature and dangerous power of the cinematic craft (especially camera work and editing) will help to foster a sense of continuity with antiquity and to allow the student to see beyond the writhing tangle of often tawdry fantasies and hollow spiritualities with which contemporary visual culture is replete.
Films chosen for viewing and discussion vary from semester to semester, and come from a variety of eras, genres, and national backgrounds.