Dear Cinemythologists,
On Thursday, November 12, our unit on the Trojan War continues. Please do the following.
VIEWING
- Iphigenia (Michael Cacoyannis, 1977)
Streaming on Swank Digital Campus. Take notes as you see fit. This film is a close adaptation of a tragedy by Euripides — so much so that he should have been credited for the screenplay. In class, we’ll review selections from the play, but I won’t ask you to read it in advance.
ANALYSIS
Bernstein and Padala will conclude our Analysis series. Their sequence selection is in the comments.
READING
- McDonald, Marianne. 2001. “Eye of the Camera, Eye of the Victim: Iphigenia by Euripides and Cacoyannis.” In Winkler, Martin M. Classical Myth & Culture in the Cinema, 72–101. Oxford University Press.
McDonald discusses the use of the camera as a means of enacting Iphigenia’s victimhood.
SEQUENCES
- Graubart, Savage.
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
Bernstein and Padala will be analyzing the sequence from 2:03:10 until about 2:05:20, which deals with Iphigenia’s ascension up the hill before the final shots of the film.
The sequence I have chosen runs from 01:51:24-01:53:25. In this scene, Iphigenia has come to terms with her imminent sacrifice, and takes control of the situation. Most interestingly, she brings together the chief values of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra (as shown in an earlier scene), being the nation and the family respectively as she decides what her death will mean for her and Greece. She also says that her death will bring glory, which was very important to Greek soldiers.
-Logan
I choose the scene in which Agamemnon and his men accidentally kill the sacred deer, starting at about 00:06:30-00:08:50. This scene is really what kicks off the plot and purpose of the movie, and I think it’s really interesting to look at and analyze the ways in which the gods are essentially omnipresent and represented, even if they are not physically present in the moment. It also shows a lot of the ways in which the gods and religion permeated everyday life, including a desperate hunt to feed an angry army, and extending further to the requirement to sacrifice Agamemnon’s own daughter. This does a lot to show the severity of religion in ancient Greece and the dire importance that it held over the people.