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Assignment for Tuesday, 10.27.20

Dear Cinemythologists,

On Tuesday, October 27, our fourth and final unit, on the Trojan War, officially begins. As is customary, we’ll begin with primary sources: all reading, no viewing.

READING

  • Homer, Iliad 1, 6, 16, 22, and 24

In a perfect world, we would have time to read all of the Iliad, which is the primary text about the Trojan War — though it is hardly all-encompassing. In fact, the poem’s focus is on an argument that rages among the Greek forces for roughly seven weeks in the tenth year of the conflict. You won’t find the abduction of Helen or the Trojan Horse here. What you will find is an epic about honor and the morality of war, about mortals and gods, and about a city not yet beaten down into the dust.

In subsequent classes we’ll consider the larger sweep of the Trojan War and the texts in which that sweep is best represented.

But not today. Today, we’ll let Homer do the talking. These books will not only introduce the poem’s main characters but also the epic scope that would inspire later poets and artists — the lives of human beings set against a great cataclysm.

This optional, bare-bones summary of the Iliad by Prof. David J. Mastronarde (Berkeley) will help fill in the gaps left by our selective reading of the poem.

In class we’ll discuss themes of Homer’s epic as well as its impact on screen texts.

DC

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Assignment for Thursday, 10.22.20

Dear Cinemythologists,

On Thursday, October 15, our unit on Medea and Jason concludes. Please do the following.

VIEWING

  • Medea (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969)

Streaming on YouTube. The link above takes you to a version with English subtitles. This is a challenging film, so be sure to take notes and maybe even jot down some questions.

ANALYSIS

Cullors and Pettit will continue our Analysis series. Their sequence selection is in the comments.

READING

  • Shapiro, Susan O. 2013. “Pasolini’s Medea: A Twentieth-Century Tragedy.” In Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos, ed. Ancient Greek Women in Film, 95–118. Oxford University Press.

This chapter comes from a volume many of you have cited in your bibliographies.

SEQUENCES

  • Davis, Ricci.

Use the comments feature on this post to recommend a sequence to be reviewed and discussed in class.

Recommendations should contain the following:

  • A brief description of the sequence.
  • Precise starting and ending times (hh:mm:ss — hh:mm:ss).
  • A rationale as to why this sequence is worth our time.

DC

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Assignment for Thursday, 10.15.20

Dear Cinemythologists,

On Thursday, October 15, our unit on Medea and Jason continues. Please do the following.

VIEWING

Streaming on Swank Digital Campus. Take notes as you see fit. Here is another opportunity to you to revisit the work of Ray Harryhausen — Harryhausen, at the height of his powers; you, with far more experience in approaching myth on screen.

ANALYSIS

Eiger and Raker will continue our Analysis series. Their sequence selection is in the comments.

READING

  • Blanshard, Alastair J. L. and Kim Shahabudin. 2011. “Myth and the Fantastic: Jason and the Argonauts.” Classics on Screen: Ancient Greece and Rome on Film. Chapter 6, 125–145. Bristol Classical Press.

Blanshard and Shahabudin, as they usually do, provide not only important context for today’s viewing but also its reception in later screen texts.

  • “Speed and Length of the Shot” &”Special Effects.” LAM Chapter 6, pp. 223–230.

These sections from Looking at Movies have not a little bearing on Jason and the Argonauts, which is both nearly 60 years old and an FX extravaganza.

SEQUENCES

  • Gross, Padala.

Use the comments feature on this post to recommend a sequence to be reviewed and discussed in class.

Recommendations should contain the following:

  • A brief description of the sequence.
  • Precise starting and ending times (hh:mm:ss — hh:mm:ss).
  • A rationale as to why this sequence is worth our time.

DC

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Assignment for Tuesday, 10.13.20

Dear Cinemythologists,

On Tuesday, October 13, our third unit, on Medea & Jason, officially begins. As is customary, we’ll begin with primary sources: all reading, no viewing.

READING

  • “Apollodorus” on Jason, the Argonautic expedition, and Medea.

Another excerpt from “Apollodorus”‘s Bibliotheca or Library of Greek myth, that ancient encyclopedia dedicated to cataloguing and sorting out the vast body of legends and lore associated with the Greco-Roman world.

Here you have a generous outline of the entire Argonautic legend, from the launch of the Argo to the ill-fated residency of Medea in Athens. In our third unit, we’ll expand this outline with other primary texts, starting with the very next reading.

  • Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica (selections):

    BOOK ONE: Mustering the Argonauts (pp. 3–33) / The Lemnian Women (pp. 51–77) / Heracles & Hylas (pp. 97–113)

    BOOK TWO: Polydeuces v. Amycus, Phineus & the Harpies (pp. 115–141) / The Clashing Rocks (pp. 157–161) / Meeting the Colchians (pp. 199–215)

    BOOK THREE: Goddesses conspire (pp. 217–225) / Audience with Aeetes (pp. 233–249) / Medea’s torment (pp. 275–283) / Medea & Jason (291–305) / Sowing the teeth (315–327)

    BOOK FOUR: Taking the Fleece (pp. 339–347)

These are the highlights from the Argonautica, a 3rd-century BCE epic composed by Apollonius, a poet and scholar of Egyptian Alexandria. An extremely learned poem, stuffed full with references to Homer and other epic and mythological works, the Argonautica owes its extremely expansive worldview to its era — the time after the death of Alexander the Great, who had united much of Europe and Asia.

These excerpts comprise the episodes typical in representations of the Argonauts’ voyage to retrieve the Golden Fleece. Between this text and the summary of Apollonius, you’ll have a very full view of the Medea and Jason legend.

NOTE: The e-book is from the Loeb Classical Library, which publishes Greek and Roman authors in their original languages and in English: the original is at left, the translation at right. As you come to grips with the page numbers above, remember that the total should be halved; and they are small pages at that.

In class we’ll discuss these versions of the Medea and Jason legend, and then consider two screen texts that represent the legend’s bifurcated reception: rollicking adventure versus heart-wrenching tragedy.

DC

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Assignment for Thursday, 10.08.20

Dear Cinemythologists,

On Thursday, October 8, our unit on Heracles/Hercules comes to an end. Please do the following.

VIEWING

Streaming on Swank Digital Campus. Take notes as you see fit.

And I do mean optional. This is a video version of a lecture/paper I’ve been working on for a while now. Some of you saw a version of it at a Classics banquet last year. Here I’m trying to draw comparisons between animation and the ancient epic convention of ekphrasis. If nothing else, let it illustrate some possibilities for developing a paper topic.

READING

  • Blanshard, Alastair J. L. and Kim Shahabudin. 2011. “The Disney Version: Hercules.” Classics on Screen: Ancient Greece and Rome on Film. Chapter 9, 194–215. Bristol Classical Press.

Blanshard and Shahabudin situate Disney’s animated romp against the peplum traditions established decades earlier.

  • “The Musical” &”Evolution and Transformation of Genre.” LAM Chapter 3, pp. 100–5.

It’s time to check in again with Looking at Movies, since in today’s screen text we have not only a mythological film set in the ancient world but also a musical, per Disney practice. This reading will help us think about genre conventions as well as ways of transcending genre.

SEQUENCES

  • Graubart, Huntley, Raker.

Use the comments feature on this post to recommend a sequence to be reviewed and discussed in class.

Recommendations should contain the following:

  • A brief description of the sequence.
  • Precise starting and ending times (hh:mm:ss — hh:mm:ss).
  • A rationale as to why this sequence is worth our time.

DC

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Assignment for Thursday, 10.01.20

Dear Cinemythologists,

On Thursday, October 1, our unit on Heracles/Hercules continues. In the second half of the class, we’ll take a close look at another tragic text about the hero. In the first half, we’ll consider the meaning of muscle in visual media writ large.

READING

  • Euripides, Heracles.

Of the major Athenian playwrights, Euripides was the least popular in his own lifetime. But after his death his reputation grew, to the point where the number of his surviving works exceeds that of Sophocles and Aeschylus combined.

That said, the Heracles is among his lesser known plays. But it is well worth considering as a literary text that takes great liberties with the hero’s legend. What those liberties are and how they resonate in modern screen texts will be our focus.

VIEWING

Last spring, Gregory Spinner (Religious Studies) and I curated a Tang Museum exhibiton called FLEX, which took a hard look at muscled bodies from antiquity to modernity.

Of the videos linked above, the first introduces some of the aims and goals of the exhibition, even as it kicks off the exhibition’s permanent residency in cyberspace. The second video was part of the exhibition itself, a 20-minute montage covering 100+ years of muscle in screen media.

Watch both and take notes on anything that interests you. In the first hour of our class we’ll be joined by Professor Spinner on a virtual tour of some of the objects from the exhibition, especially those that intersect with the notions of heroism and legend in our current unit.

DC

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Assignment for Tuesday, 09.29.20

Dear Cinemythologists,

On Tuesday, September 29, our unit on Heracles/Hercules continues. Please do the following.

VIEWING

Streaming on Swank Digital Campus. Take notes as you see fit. This is one of two Hercules films from 2014, and we’ll want to see how the peplum traditions established in the mid-20th century carry over into the 21st.

ANALYSIS

Huntley and Savage will continue our Analysis series. Their sequence selection is in the comments.

READING

  • O’Brien, Daniel. 2014. “Hercules Rebooted.” Classical Masculinity and the Spectacular Body on Film: The Mighty Sons of Hercules. Chapter 4, 95–99. Palgrave-Macmillan.

O’Brien updates us on Hercules screen texts at the end of the old milennium and into the new, stopping with today’s viewing.

The reading is brief to allow time for you to work on milestone 1 (Thesis) of the Semester Project.

SEQUENCES

  • Gross, Raker.

Use the comments feature on this post to recommend a sequence to be reviewed and discussed in class.

Recommendations should contain the following:

  • A brief description of the sequence.
  • Precise starting and ending times (hh:mm:ss — hh:mm:ss).
  • A rationale as to why this sequence is worth our time.

DC

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Assignment for Thursday, 09.24.20

Dear Cinemythologists,

On Thursday, September 24, our unit on Heracles/Hercules continues. Please do the following.

VIEWING

  • Hercules (Le fatiche di Ercole) (Pietro Francisci, 1958)

Streaming on Amazon Prime. Take notes as you see fit. The film is dubbed from the Italian, so there will be a disconnect between the characters’ mouths and their voices. (And that is not the voice of Steve Reeves under any circumstances.)

As you will have learned from our introduction to peplum, this film is epoch-making in many ways — difficult as it might be to appreciate them in the 21st century.

ANALYSIS

Speaking of epoch-making, our Analysis enterprise gets underway today with Graubart and Ricci presenting their video on a sequence from Hercules.

READING

  • Blanshard, Alastair J. L. and Kim Shahabudin. 2011. “Peplum Traditions: Hercules.” Classics on Screen: Ancient Greece and Rome on Film. Chapter 3, 58–76. Bristol Classical Press.

Blanshard and Shahabudin take our ongoing discussion on peplum a step further by focusing on the place of Hercules in the cinematic tradition.

SEQUENCES

  • Jefferson, Pettit.

Use the comments feature on this post to recommend a sequence to be reviewed and discussed in class.

Recommendations should contain the following:

  • A brief description of the sequence.
  • Precise starting and ending times (hh:mm:ss — hh:mm:ss).
  • A rationale as to why this sequence is worth our time.

DC

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Assignment for Tuesday, 09.22.20

Dear Cinemythologists,

On Tuesday, September 22, our second unit, on Heracles/Hercules, officially begins. As is customary, we’ll begin with some primary sources: all reading, no viewing (apart from some optional videos in our Classical World series).

READING

  • “Apollodorus” on Heracles.

This is an excerpt from the Bibliotheca or Library of Greek myth, an ancient encyclopedia dedicated to cataloguing and sorting out the vast body of legends and lore associated with the Greco-Roman world. The author was thought to have been the famous scholar, Apollodorus of Athens (2nd century BCE), but the work is now thought to date to the 2nd century CE — hence “Apollodorus” in scare quotes.

Although you won’t need to know every last detail about Heracles’ life and career, you should try to appreciate the sheer quantity of his exploits, and what that quantity might mean. In class we’ll use “Apollodorus” as the basis for generating a rough outline of the hero’s legend, as we did for Perseus.

Sophocles, the premier playwright of Athens in the 5th-century BCE, presents a tragic episode from late in Heracles’ life. If you’ve never read a Greek play before, the dynamic between the speeches of the actors and the songs of the Chorus (which you should not ignore) will likely seem odd and artificial.

Nevertheless, this tragedy affords us an excellent point of comparison with the all-inclusive, encyclopedic approach of “Apollodorus.” In particular, consider the genre itself. What should a tragedy about Heracles focus on? Also pay attention to how Sophocles navigates the vast trajectory of Heracles’ career. What does he place in the past? In the future?

NOTE: You can read the translation in your browser, or download a PDF.

If you are new to Athenian tragedy, these videos (part of our flipped classroom in CC 200: The Classical World) will provide some orientation into the performative and civic context of the genre. Of course, entries in the the Oxford Reference database would do just as well.

In class we’ll discuss these versions of the Heracles legend, and then take a tour of how the hero appears on screen.

DC

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