This past semester I had the great pleasure of teaching, for the first time, a course I'd long imagined on "Ancient Worlds in Film & TV." I've loved movies forever, and I've run a weekly classical-receptions film series the past ten semesters, linking the selections to materials in other courses like my "Afterlives of Antiquity" and "Classical Traditions in Science Fiction" as well as to Trinity's first-year seminar on Greek and Roman literature (FYE HUMA).
[Classical receptions film series schedule, spring 2020.]
And finally, in spring 2020, a full-fledged course on how ancient stories are transmitted and transmuted in film, television, and other related media. Since dozens of ancient stories are relevant, and since there are hundreds or even thousands of modern examples, to limit the scope I took a theory-based approach and organized the materials by ancient genre, with each unit capped off by a discussion of what else could have been included.
[Excerpt from syllabus for CLAS 3311 - Ancient Worlds in Film & TV, spring 2020.]
With examples from epic, drama (tragedy and comedy), historiography, and philosophy, we explored the possibility that film is linked to ancient arts in ways that run deeper than shared stories alone. In particular, we considered how film and related media are only the most recent--if prominent--shapes taken by a much older, much broader 'artform of moving image' ...
... the 'cinema,' from the ancient Greek word κίνημα (kī́nēma). From this perspective, 'cinema' or 'art of moving image' isn't limited to film and television. 'Cinema' also includes other visual arts as well as, marvelously, not-visual arts like poetry, which anciently sought to use vividness (enargeia) in description (ekphrasis) to evoke 'images in the mind's eye' (phantasia). And after all, the images in film, too, are stills that only seem to move ...
[Zoetrope, gif from the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter.]
And what a moving experience the course was! The class developed a chemistry such as I'd rarely seen, with the result that the midterm exam featured some of the, frankly, loudest shouting I'd heard in a classroom--and at least two repeated declarations of friendships ended? For the students were asked to classify our materials to that point using the Dungeons & Dragons alignment system ...
... really, the kind of 'creative' approach to 'critical' work that the course seemed to require: since what were our objects of study, really, the films themselves, if not 'creative' approaches to older materials? And so we lived in a kind of intellectual borderland, between academic and artistic approaches, between ancient and modern materials, between mastery of material and productive confusion or aporia.
It was a good thing we did, too, for when the semester was suddenly reconfigured for remote learning, we had some tools and theory ready. We had been focusing on 'adaptation between media,' and then we found ourselves having to adapt from in-person experience to working at a distance on screen. I won't rehearse all the details here; I've written in more detail about "Hyper-modern ways of watching movies together" in an earlier post.
But now that the semester is over, I'll say that it's hard to imagine having managed that transition with a different group of students. They struggled with the change but were honest about it with me, and that honesty kept our time together meaningful. I let them know that I was struggling, too: like many a teacher, many an extroverted introvert, I missed our regular structured interactions about art, beauty, history, truth ...
And so, as that selfie taken just after our final session shows, our meetings were filled with meaning and emotion. So too was the work itself, and in their final presentations especially the students shined. I'll share some of the more 'academic' pieces in due time.
For now, I want to share the 'creative' work they did: as a way of making the most of what we had, I asked them to recreate iconic moments of their choosing from anything we'd studied, using only whatever materials they had on hand. The results speak for themselves.
Here is a video with a ten-minute introduction to the theory of the course, followed by the students' photographic recreations of iconic moments from our films. Only you can decide if these remakes, all new histories of ancient cinema, 'ruin your childhood.'
And here are three of my own vocal recreations of such moments, which according to the students stand a greater chance of ruination: they are "ASMR, but the A now stands for Anxiety": O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Matrix, and Star Wars.
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