Film Classics: The Greeks on the Silver Screen

This course examines the adaptation of classical Greek themes and figures in world cinema. Proceeding from classical texts (that will include The Odyssey, The Iliad, Oedipus Rex, Medea, The Oresteia), analysis of films focuses on the ways such texts are recast to comment upon very different cultural, socioeconomic, and political circumstances. How do such films aspire to be “classic” in their own right? What genres or modes follow such films’ epic, or anti-epic, cycles? Considers Hollywood blockbusters (Ulysses, Jason and the Argonauts, Troy, 300) as well as arthouse fare by Godard, Pasolini, Camus, Merchant, Cacoyannis, Dassin, the Coen brothers, Angelopoulos.