Dear Cinemythologists,
On Tuesday, October 6, our unit on Heracles/Hercules comes to its penultimate film. Please do the following.
VIEWING
- Hercules (Brett Ratner, 2014)
Streaming on Swank Digital Campus. Take notes as you see fit. This is the second of two Hercules films from 2014, and the difference is stark in just about every respect. Even as we consider the persistence of 20th-century peplum traditions, let us also think about how this film defines heroism.
ANALYSIS
Rosenblum and Whatley will continue our Analysis series. Their sequence selection is in the comments.
READING
- Curley, Dan. 2018. “The Hero in a Thousand Pieces: Antiheros in Recent Classical Cinema.” In Augoustakis, Antony and Stacie Raucci, ed. Epic Heroes on Screen, 173–190. University of Edinburgh Press.
- Chiu, Angeline. 2018. “Heroes and Companions in Hercules (2014).” In Augoustakis and Raucci, ed., 60–73.
I know, another reading by me. But see if it can’t help you think through the dynamics of heroism in some of the screen texts we’ve paired together — not only in this unit, but in our Perseus unit, too. Chiu, meanwhile, addresses the Very Millennial Notion of teamwork in today’s viewing.
SEQUENCES
- Davis, Eiger.
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
