After a two week hiatus--the first week as scheduled for Spring Break, the second needed as my University, like most others, reconfigured for online teaching--I'm back in virtual 'classrooms' with my students. In general, it's a pleasure: like a lot of teachers, I'm an extroverted introvert who relies on the regular, structured interactions with a class for energy, and amidst disruptions from social distancing, I've been deeply missing that.
That's especially--strangely and specifically--true for my course on "Ancient Worlds in Film & Television." We're studying how stories from, mostly, Greek and Roman antiquity have been put on screen: direct translations or stagings, more transformative adaptations with changed settings, and versions at farther removes, including films that draw inspiration from ancient themes. You can see examples in the poster I made to advertise the course:
How is this subject-matter, ancient stories on modern screens, of the moment? As I sit here, distracted, struggling to settle into preparing for class this afternoon, I'm thinking of two or three ways. One way is thematic: as it happens, many of the stories, the plots, have to do with people in crisis, individuals faced with impossible decisions, societies under pressure and therefore social structures in flux. Tragedy and epic are tuned into that.
A second, to me more significant, way the course's subject speaks to the present moment is in how both have much to do with--again--translation, 'carrying something across a boundary,' and adaptation, 'fitting something to another thing.' The stories aside, one of the course's central questions is, What changes when something changes? In particular, what differences are made by a change in medium?
Here's a single, small example: two depictions that are both--visibly, obviously--similar and--ditto--very different. Left: Zeus hurls lightning at Ares on a painting by Raffy Ochoa in Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman (2017). Right: Achilles is set to spear the Amazonian warrior Penthesilea on a 6th-century BCE black-figure vase (British Museum). They show 'the same thing' but very differently--and the difference depends on the mediums.
The vase depicts a scene from a longer story, the Trojan War, which is told in archaic Greek literature in several long poems comprising an 'Epic Cycle.' In this scene, Penthesilea, who has been fighting for Troy, is killed by Achilles, who--grudgingly--fights on the opposite side. All of that is evoked by the depiction, but _only_ evoked: the image is vivid (it has enargeia, 'sharpness'), but on its own it can't narrate (there is no ekphrasis, 'speaking forth').
By contrast, the still from Wonder Woman is from a painting that is first shown as part of a scene and then, amazingly, starts to move, taking over the scene
The animated painting becomes the diegesis: the movie's 'ordinary' stuff of depiction--characters in lighted spaces captured on film--is replaced by stuff that is visually different. The effect here is amazing (you can learn a bit about how the sfx team did it), but such a replacement is a recurrent gesture (a trope) of superheroic stories; e.g., Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows (Yates 2010) and Thor: Ragnarok (Waititi 2017).
(Incidentally, T:R gets bonus ancient-adaptation points for staging the climactic moment of the final battle--when Thor embraces his power as 'god of thunder' (i.e., lightning)--in a way that visually parallels WW's theomachia and, so, recalls the ancient vase ...
... even if, as my students have heard me rant about, the editing is odd: why doesn't the first climax of the song--the berserker melisma--align with lightning-meteor Thor exploding into the enemy troop? Instead, it fizzles on a shot of him ... standing up straighter?! Wat.)
That recurrent type of scene or trope illustrates what my students and I have discussed as the most important difference of film as a medium: since it's intrinsically visual, film can literalize the merely figurative depictions of ancient literature. In other words, adaptation of ancient stories into film isn't (only) ordinary translation, between languages. It's also, always, between mediums. The consequences for art criticism are profound ...
... and thinking about those differences due to mediums, for me at least, has been a way of thinking through some aspects of the changed present moment. Watching ancient stories on screen is already a profoundly different experience than, say, reading them on pages (in turn also already different for most people, reading in translations). Multiply that by changes in cultural traditions of 'watching,' and things get even weirder, more disorienting.
As part of teaching film, I've held screenings ... a lot of screenings. Over the previous nine semesters, around 150 of them: every Thursday evening at 7pm, some dozen of us or more would gather to spend between two and three hours watching that week's movie. On the left is an example, last fall's Film Club Halloween Party, when we watched The Mummy (Sommers 1999) and gave out prizes for--the incredible!--costumes.
Knowing however that not every student could make the screenings, with help from the University's library every semester we'd also have the movies on a Trinity-specific streaming service. Of course that also made it convenient to show clips in class, etc.. On the right is a screenshot from the platform, showing some of this semester's films (and one of this week's viewings, Star Trek: the Original Series "Bread and Circuses" [Senensky 1968]).
... and now, for the foreseeable future, that's all we've got.
No more in-person screenings, and no more big-screen screenings. Now, in-person costume parties we can get by without (maybe; sadly).
But watching movies without ever 'going to see a movie'? That's a major change; in genre tragedy, it would be the 'reversal of fortune' (peripeteia). The last few years of increased at-home movie-watching notwithstanding, for it suddenly to be impossible to go see movies is a profound difference whose effects will take time to experience and understand.
Smarter people than I, who know more about movies and have thought more extensively about movie-going, have been writing about this with wisdom and feeling. (For example, here's Mahnola Dargis, plangently, for the New York Times; and click through the photo here for a supercut of characters in movies watching movies: it brought me to tears.)
(That's Hugo [Scorsese 2011], with classical receptions--Promethean themes--of its own.)
But I think my students of ancient-world films and I have a certain perspective: for the switch from possible in-person movie-going to only isolated streaming is a problem of adaptation, of translation between mediums. As I argued earlier, that's the very stuff, the core, of studying 'ancient worlds in film & television.'
In our first virtual class-session, earlier this week, we talked about that possibility and some of its implications. We're trying to think about what it means--what it can mean--to 'watch movies' at a time when, again, there is no 'going to see a movie' ... and in an era when, for similar reasons, it seems that not a lot of movies will get made.
If, for a while, there aren't a lot of new movies, does that mean that film studies is now mainly the study of film history?
With ancient-world movies and 'the ancient world' in mind, we can ask the same question slightly differently: If all we have as evidence are pieces from an older, defunct culture, does that mean that film history is now, in a real way, 'film archaeology'?
Some twenty years ago, Dr. Vivian Sobchack (UCLA) wrote an article on the question, "What is Film History?" Happily, my students were already slated to read it this week, as a way of revitalizing our theories by looking closely at how historical-epic film imagines 'history.' Sobchack's article seems even more relevant now:
At the outset, Sobchack notes that, in "context of mass-mediated and high-tech culture," answers to the question, "What is Film History?", "are much more complex than they once were." More generally, when media-culture has changed, so too must ways of looking at the history of mediums. Thus "[t]oday ... the question of film history is much more vexed."
How much more so these twenty years on--and at least for those of us in academia, twenty or so days into reconfiguring for remote learning. I think of colleagues in the arts and sciences, theatre and chemistry, physics and dance ... Everybody is faced with similar problems of intermedial translation, studying their 'movies' from radio transcripts alone.
It's a hard problem to 'solve,' if indeed there is a 'solution'; and the emotional or psychological difficulties are also real. So with my students I'll be thinking more about what it means to do film history as a kind of (medium-crossing) 'archaeology': what it means to love movies when, in a real way, there aren't 'movies,' right now.
We'll be drawing on our existing tools for analyzing films and experimenting with new approaches. Tonight I'll try with students something I've only ever done with cinephile friends: a 'livetweet'-style text chat while we're all simulwatching the same material (two episodes of Star Trek). "The funnier the better," I've suggested, "and the faster, the funnier."
I think we'll need--I know I'll need--that kind of translated or adapted interaction, not just 'still' but 'even more' as what look to be weeks and months of social distancing go on. I imagine that some, at least, of the students will value it too, even if they've already grown weary of my own attempts at funny.
... example: observing that Cleopatra [Mankiewicz 1963]'s production was interrupted when a litter of cats was discovered to be living inside a bedroom set, costing an enormous sum, I concluded that:
And so here's to, call it, 'hyper-modern ways of watching ancient movies together.' The profound changes in progress form part of an ancient history of 'moving image': for what is 'movie' but a truncation of that phrase, a translation of the ancient Greek kínema?
For reference only, my workspace and, via virtual backgrounds, classroom:
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