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Spring term, Week 1: Recap

Week 1
1. Recap

“That beggar-faced philosopher shouldn’t be stuffing your luscious little head with such nonsense.”— ‘Marcus Vinicius’, Quo Vadis (1951)

Previously on Ancient World in Film:

  • Classical Hollywood / Hollywood and the ‘Classic’
  • Hollywood’s Roman epics
  • Hollywood’s Rome: ‘projecting the past’
  • Receptions of receptions: epic as remake and digest
  • Receptions all the way down: epic, historiography, kitsch
  • spectacle, sexuality, and the cinematic gaze
  • Egypt, Orientalism and the ‘Other’

And now, on Ancient World in Film:

Main films this term:

  1. Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)
  2. Fellini Satyricon (1969)
  3. Alexander the Great (1955)

Additional ‘Easter Eggs’:

  1. ‘Ancient world’ websites
  2. Receptions of Greece and Rome in other media

Some key themes:

  • The decline and fall of Hollywood’s Roman epics
  • …and rise? New and restored cinematic Romes
  • Alternatives to the Roman epic:
    1. different approaches: Fellini
    2. different materials: Ancient Greece
  • Greece and Rome outside film: TV, science fiction, comics
  • Greece and Rome online: subcultures, micronations, extremists