Dear Cinemythologists,
On Tuesday, November 10, we continue our unit on the Trojan War, and with an emphasis on the so-called small screen. Please do the following.
VIEWING
- Troy: Fall of a City (BBC-Netflix, 2018): Episode 1, “Black Blood” & Episode 4, “Spoils of War.”
Streaming on Netflix. Take notes as you see fit, perhaps on what becomes possible when the Trojan Saga is turned into serial television, versus a movie. We can’t watch it all, so here we’ll focus on events precipitating the Trojan War and on events on the periphery of the Iliad.
!!CONTENT ADVISORY!! Depictions of sexuality (throughout) and rape (in Ep. 4).
READING
We’ve alluded to the Epic Cycle, a massive collocation of epic hexameter poetry. whose origins lie in the Bronze Age, and which were given textual shape in the 8th century and onwards. Here’s an article (via Oxford Reference) that describes all of the poems in the Cycle. Of these, the Cypria has the most bearing on Episode 1 of TFOAC.
TFOAC‘s casting of Black actors to play Zeus and Achilles (Hakeem Kae-Kazim and David Gyasi, respectively) raised some hackles. This piece describes the controversy and offers commentary by prominent classicists, who break down the historical whitewashing of the Classics.
SEQUENCES
- Jefferson, Knepper.
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
