Bakogianni, A. 2017 - The Ancient World is Part of Us: Classical Tragedy in Modern Film and Television
Introduction
The reception of ancient Greece and Rome on screen has become a test case for thinking about classical reception in general and the place of Greco‐Roman antiquity in the modern world.
The reception of Greek tragedy on film is an interesting case because its elitist associations clash with the popularity of the modern media of cinema and television. - is the form of Kaos as a TV show discrediting it as a form of reception due to academic elitism, who decides what counts as reception? Surely TV and film is the ultimate example of Classical reception when we consider its origins in Greek theatre?
my discussion in this chapter focuses on more “indirect” adaptations that either disguise their debt to Greek tragedy and/or take greater liberties with their source texts to the point where the precise nature of this connection becomes highly unstable.
This category greatly enlarges the scope of our enquiry, but also problematizes what it is we seek. Who has the authority to proclaim that these films are receptions of Greek tragedy? Is it the director, film critics, classical scholars and/or their audiences? And does it even matter how this connection to an ancient dramatic source was established?
From the point of view of pedagogy can we effectively debate such “masked” receptions in the classroom? - Is the argument of reception and being indebted to the source material moot considering we cannot validate that many of the extant texts we have are actually the originals? - debate also on our creation of a classical canon (intersection of classical tradition and reception)
Indirect receptions undermine simplistic hierarchical relationships in which the Greek “original” (and I use the term ironically here given the inherent textual instability of our surviving Greek tragic corpus and the impossibility of returning to an “original” text) is self‐evidently superior to a later reception “text.”
Theoretical Concerns: “Borrowing” from Adaption Studies
Adaptation studies came to prominence in the twentieth century, which is perhaps not surprising given the increasing regularity and prominence of adaptations in our post‐modern society. But the field is characterized by a lack of theoretical and methodological consensus and there is fierce debate over its boundaries, vocabulary and, more basically, agreement on how to define the concept of “adaptation.”
But rather than seeing the fierce debates that scholars working in this area engage in as a drawback we can take advantage of its open‐endedness (Leitch 2013: 103) to join the debate and to consider how it can benefit classical reception studies.
As classicists we tend to prioritize the value of our source texts and we always return to the question of fidelity as a means of drawing attention to the importance of ancient antiquity, its literature, art and culture.
But as long as we refuse to accept that translation and adaptation inevitably leads to infidelity (Cutchins 2014: 52) we will always view them as inferior rather than as creative new works of art.
It is a well‐known fact among classicists that the Greek tragedians were themselves the receivers/adaptors of earlier epic, lyric and mythological narratives, which they transformed for performance on the Athenian stage in the exciting new medium of theatre.
Greek tragedy’s canonical status as “great literature” has, however, meant that all its receptions in the modern period have generally tended to be seen as inferior - as mentioned earlier - our idea of the 'starting point' is an arbitrary choice we have made as classicists dependent on it being the first SURVIVING texts we have, yet this idea of classical tradition and canon forgets the idea that these playwrights themselves understood myth as something to be RECEIVED and adapted to their current sociological environment
surely it is time to let go of our obsession with fidelity and to examine receptions on their own merits and in terms of what is “added” rather than what is “lost” during the process of adaptation.
Admittedly, I am guilty of subscribing to the view that film cannot be as complex as literature (Whelehan 1999: 6).
In addition to film’s democratizing effect, however, the new “meanings” it brings into play are themselves worthy of analysis, particularly as examples of how classical “travelling concepts” can be traced across disciplines (Elliott 2013: 36).
To label something an adaptation is an interpretative choice (Hutcheon 2006: 6). Drawing attention to a potential connection between a source and another work of art that is perceived to be its reception activates a relationship between the two (Schober 2013: 98).
Such connections are, however, fluid and subject to change as they depend upon particular ways of understanding the “meaning” of texts and these are in constant negotiation and subject to modification and alteration over time.
This model of connectivity emphasizes the “intertextuality” of all texts, the fact that they form part of complex networks of texts, with which they are in constant dynamic interaction (Schober 2013: 103–105; Cutchins 2014: 44).
Biological evolution offers us a useful model with which to think about how certain ideas perpetuate themselves in our culture. These “memes, micro‐units of cultural knowledge and practice” (Leitch 2013: 167) can cross from brain to brain in the same way that genes do in the gene pool.
Fertile memes are like virulent viruses that are particularly effective in colonizing the brain and more generally our culture (Blackmore 1999; Distin 2005).
Linda Costanzo Cahir (2006: 14) argues that the process of adaptation involves altering (sometimes radically) “the structure or function of an entity so that it is better fitted to survive and multiply in its new environment.” (note Umachandran and Ward 2024 criticism that ‘biologising’ reception removes the responsibility of choice and can lead to racial amnesia)
That is why it is so important to think of adaptation as a two‐way process that brings a text into a dialogic interrelationship with all its successors (Bruhn 2013: 70).
They in turn impact our understanding of our source text and irrevocably alter it. It might be impossible to unpick all the threads of this complex conversation between texts, but we must nevertheless make the attempt.
Looking for Electra
Our modern fascination with stories of revenge is only matched by societal anxiety when it is a woman desiring said revenge and worse actively enacting it. The idea of a man pursuing lex talionis, the “eye for an eye” principle that dictates that a crime should be punished by inflicting precisely the same injury that the victim received, can be portrayed sympathetically in the arts.
One of world theater’s most famous and often‐performed tragedies, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is a play about a son seeking to avenge his father’s death. Recent examples on screen featuring a man seeking to avenge the death of a family member(s) include the very violent Law Abiding Citizen (2009), and John Wick (2014).
But when it is a daughter seeking to avenge her father’s murder, as Electra famously does in Greek tragedy, this is often seen as less acceptable. Women avengers, however, continue to exert a fascination over modern viewers, especially film audiences.
Hollywood’s notorious “Production Code”7 contains an interesting passage with regards to the depiction of revenge in motion pictures:
Revenge in modern times shall not be justified. In lands and ages of less developed civilization and moral principles, revenge may sometimes be presented. This would be the case especially in places where no law exists to cover the crime because of which revenge is committed. (Association of Motion Picture Producers 1934: 16)
This injunction against the portrayal of revenge on screen proceeds out of one of the code’s fundamental principles that “the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrong‐doing, evil or sin” (1934: 2).
The code’s paternalistic attitude towards mass audiences unmasks its authors’ fear of the seductive power of cinema. Lower‐class members of the audience were deemed incapable of distinguishing between reality and the world of film, and it was feared that they would easily fall prey to the allure of sins like revenge, if they were portrayed on film.
Electra’s reception on the silver screen and in television in a sense justifies all the censors’ worst fears because it is precisely her desire for vengeance that seems to continue to captivate filmmakers and audiences alike.
Szerelmem, Elektra (1974) by the Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó (1921–2014) offers us a revolutionary Electra who fights against the tyranny of Aegisthus (József Madaras) (see MacKinnon 1986: 117–123; Michelakis 2013: Chapter 7 and 220–222).
Jancsó’s film belongs to a larger movement within theatre and cinema that utilized Greek tragedy as a weapon in the fight against oppression.
Szerelmem, Elektra differs from other offerings, however, in that it does not reject violence outright; rather, it seeks to establish the existence of an endless cycle of oppression followed by revolution
Jancsó’s film is in fact not an adaptation of a Greek tragedy, but of a 1968 play of the same name by László Gyurkó (1930–2007).
The key themes of perpetual revolution and the portrayal of Electra as the personification of this principle have their roots in Gyurkó’s source text.
Both play and film are steeped in Hungarian history and politics. The brutal suppression of the 1956 Revolution in Hungary, when Soviet troops put a violent end to a spontaneous national uprising, is one of the key contexts against which the film’s questioning of the revolutionary principle should be examined.
The notes of doubt that are openly acknowledged in the finale undercut the celebratory mood of the final scenes.
The didactic message of the film, which on first viewing appears to wholeheartedly endorse the value of revolution, is further undermined by the choice of an ancient story about a family that destroys itself from within
One of the most striking elements of the film is its use of communal ritual. A large crowd of people is never far from the protagonists, highlighting the importance of the wider community. The audience directly witnesses how changes in government affect the people.
This large cast of extras becomes the chorus of the story; an internal audience that is invested in the siblings’ plans to overthrow Aegisthus’s tyranny. In Jancsó’s film this becomes their primary goal overshadowing more personal concerns.
This internal chorus, divided among several distinctive groups, is used to perform ritualistic gestures that act as visual signs reinforcing the film’s main narrative
The modern Greek director Theo Angelopoulos (1935–2012) referenced a number of ancient Greek myths in his cinematic oeuvre (Pomeroy 2008: 82–92). In his O Thiasos (1975), he created a distinctive modern Greek Electra (Michelakis 2013: Chapter 7). But Angelopoulos did not set out to create a cinematic version of any of the three ancient tragedians’ dramas.
Instead his film follows a troupe of actors, the thiasos of the title. Their personal lives are interrupted and shaped by the historical events that shook the modern state of Greece in the years between 1939 and 1952, which included the outbreak of the Second World War, the Nazi occupation of Greece (1941–1944), the liberation (1944), the Civil War (1946–1949), and the political and economic struggles that followed
Angelopoulos, however, mainly connected with the classical past at the level of myth rather than with specific dramatic texts. In Thiasos classical myth is used as narrative bedrock, but its ultimate function is to underscore historical reality.
Angelopoulos argued that the veneration of the past is counterproductive and even dangerous: “The Greeks grew up caressing tombs. I tried to bring myth down to the level of the people” (Angelopoulos 2000: 84).
In ancient Greek theatre violence generally took place offstage, but in Angelopoulos’s Thiasos we watch Orestes shoot and kill both his mother (Aliki Georgouli) and her lover (Vangelis Kazan) to the wild applause of the audience who mistakenly believe that the murders are part of the action of the play.
The audience’s inappropriate response draws attention to the deliberate blurring of fiction and reality in the film. They are applauding a real murder, not realizing that what they are witnessing is in fact “real,” but of course the internal audience’s misreading of the situation only serves to highlight the presence of the external audience (the film’s viewers) watching a movie, another type of performance.
This blurring of the boundaries breaks through the fourth wall and connects the space and time of the events depicted in the film to the present realities of the audience.
Reality and meta‐theatricality are thus tightly interwoven in Thiasos. Moreover, the audience is deliberately unsettled by being made uncomfortably aware of their voyeuristic gaze and their complicity in the violence they are watching on screen
Electra’s love for her brother shines through in Angelopoulos’s film. She never betrays him, even when she is interrogated while being raped by a group of right‐wing secret policemen, who all wear masks to hide their identities. Only Electra who is being held down and slapped is recognizable in this scene.
Any empathy that the audience might feel for her, however, is immediately dispelled by the commencement of her soliloquy in which she addresses the viewer directly
This device that Angelopoulos uses at two more key moments in his film embeds the personal dramas of the actors within the wider historical and political modern Greek context.
Facing the camera, Electra recounts the events that led to the battle of Athens in December of 1944 when demonstrators clashed with British forces on the streets of the capital. The left‐wing resistance group ELAS responded by counter‐attacking the allied forces. This dark event in modern Greek history overshadows Electra’s personal ordeal. This scene is an example of Angelopoulos’s deliberate distancing of the viewer.
Electra’s monologue, which cuts into the scene of her rape, undermines any feelings of empathy that the audience might have felt. Angelopoulos’s protagonists resemble symbolic archetypes caught up in the turbulent undercurrents of history, rather than fully embodied characters.
An admirer of Bertold Brecht, Angelopoulos believed in the value of the Verfremdungseffect (the deliberate alienation of the audience).
The scene is a visual reminder to the viewer of the artificiality of the medium of film and of the importance of our role as spectators in creating meaning. Angelopoulos deliberately distances the viewer from the action.
His Thiasos does not offer its audience a realistic, linear narrative, but rather a surrealistic chronological puzzle that the viewer has to assemble in order to interpret the action and to form an opinion about the “meaning” of the film.
Shades of Electra
Charles Martindale has repeatedly cautioned classicists against including films and other popular culture receptions in their curricula because “many of the films about antiquity… are neither important works of art nor complexly interesting” (2013: 176 and 2006: 11 for his earlier reservations)
By contrast, Deborah Cartmell, working in adaptation studies, argues that video games, comic books and popular cinema “are all deserving objects of consideration and they can be approached from a variety of perspectives” (2012: 4)
Handled correctly it can also be a means of turning students into self‐aware receivers of classical culture by using examples that are familiar to them in media that they regularly interact with. In today’s visual culture and multimedia global world engaging closely with film and other popular receptions can be a way to turn passive consumers of information into more active and engaged viewers/readers, a key transferable skill, but also an important life skill.
Reflecting on my own agenda I have to pose the following questions. Am I simply seeing Electra everywhere because of my own research interest in the tragic heroine? Thinking more generally, how do personal frameworks shape and to a large degree determine an individual’s reception process? And finally can unintended connections to a classical meme prove germane in the classroom?
To address these questions I utilize “fuzzy” examples of the reception of Electra in popular culture (Hardwick 2011, 56–57), specifically Marvel’s Elektra, as portrayed in the mainstream films Daredevil (2003)11 and Elektra (2005), and Emily Thorne, the female avenger in the popular American series Revenge (2011–2015).
As Hardwick argues, hazy, imprecise connections derive their power from “triggering readers’ affective responses and shaping their constructions of meaning” (2011: 57).
Daredevil’s and Elektra’s heroine (played in both films by Jennifer Garner) is based on Frank Miller’s comics from the 1980s,so it is a cinematic adaptation of another type of source text.
In terms of my chosen case studies, this popular culture character arguably bears a closer resemblance to the ancient Electra than the example I selected from the medium of television. Obviously Elektra’s name itself is suggestive to anyone even vaguely familiar with the ancient story.
There is even a knowing in‐joke in Elektra about the heroine’s connection to Greek tragedy. Upon hearing her name, the male lead Matt Miller (Goran Visnjic) asks “Elektra, like the tragedy”?
The use of the Greek alphabet in the opening titles for the movie has already visually established the character’s origins, as has the fact that she speaks (modern) Greek in Daredevil. These foreignizing elements highlight Elektra’s difference, her otherness from mainstream American culture.
In terms of her narrative arc in Daredevil Elektra watches her father Nicholas (Erick Avari) be murdered and swears vengeance. At her father’s Greek Orthodox funeral, she tells Matt Murdock, the man behind Daredevil’s mask (Ben Affleck), “I want revenge.” She refuses his offer of consolation and sets in motion a series of events that culminates in her own death.
Her self‐destructive course nearly costs Matt his life because she mistakenly thinks that he is her father’s killer. She wounds him in a duel and takes off his mask, which conceals his identity from the world, with the words “I want to look into the eyes of my father’s killer as he dies!”
Elektra’s obsession with revenge is portrayed as dangerous and nearly derails the hero’s journey to a better understanding of his heroic mission.
In spite of her warrior skills Elektra thus serves to reaffirm gender stereotypes. Her inability to control her emotions, contrasts sharply with Matt’s male restraint.
If Elektra embodies revenge, then Matt’s decision not to kill the Kingpin (Michael Clarke Duncan), who was responsible for his own father’s murder, demonstrates that, ultimately, he is more concerned with justice than retaliatory vengeance.
Elektra’s love interest, rather than her brother, is the rightful avenger in this story arc.
Interestingly, writer/director Mark Steven Johnson thought that the revenge story of “Who got my girlfriend?” in the version of Daredevil that was shown in cinemas ended up derailing the movie. In other words Elektra’s storyline diverted attention from the focus on the male hero.
But the cinematic Elektra is not quite as dark and vengeful as her counterpart in comics, perhaps because studios thought that modern audiences would not be able to sympathize with the character otherwise: in spite of the principles outlined in the Production Code, mainstream movies have tended to prefer that audiences sympathize with the protagonists even when they pursue vengeance.
For all her fighting ability the cinematic Elektra is a much softer version of her counterpart in comics and in Greek tragedy. As female avengers go, The Bride (Uma Thurman) in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003–2004) was a more potent vengeful force and a darker creation than Elektra, especially in Volume 1, released in 2003.