Browsing by Author "Bakogianni A"

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    Euripides’ Iphigenia: Ancient Victim, Modern Greek Heroine?
    (31/12/2019) Bakogianni A
    In his Poetics Aristotle dismisses Iphigenia’s characterisation as inconsistent. Why does the eponymous heroine of 'Iphigenia at Aulis' change her mind and decide to die willingly? This central question has preoccupied not only classical scholars, but receiving artists, too. How Iphigenia’s change of heart in portrayed on stage and screen affects the audience’s response to the character. Is Iphigenia a victim or a heroine (or a mixture of both)? The Greek-Cypriot filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis believed he enjoyed a special relationship with Euripides, but his interpretation was shaped by political events in Modern Greece and Cyprus in the 1960s and 70s. In his film Iphigenia (1977) the ancient tragic heroine was recast as a young girl who sacrifices herself for Greece. In Cacoyannis’ anti-war interpretation of Iphigenia’s choice she is both heroic, and the victim of male power games and irredentist ambition. Cacoyannis’ Iphigenia is a heroine of her time, as much as she is a refraction of her ancient predecessor.
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    Introduction: Ancient Greek and Roman Multi-Sensory Spectacles of Grief
    (Historisches Institut, Professur Geschichte des Altertums, Universität Potsdam, 15/12/2019) Bakogianni A; Bakogianni, A
    Is grief for the death of a loved one a universal, trans-historical emotion? What role does the historical, political and socio-cultural context play in how grief is understood, processed, performed, written about and represented in art? This special issue of thersites seeks to address these questions with reference to the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. Drawing on a wide range of both textual and material culture evidence, the six papers that make up this issue investigate how the ancient Greeks and Romans reacted to the death of relatives, friends and members of their wider community, and how it affected their lives, societies and sense of identity. The first half of the issue is devoted to the portrayal of grief in the Homeric epics and Greek tragedy, while the second examines a rich variety of Roman evidence from inscriptions to art, literature and philosophy. Our work intersects with wider debates in the cross-disciplinary field of the History of Emotions, but some of the papers also reference recent scholarship on the senses in antiquity.
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    Performing Grief: Mourning Does Indeed Become Electra
    (Historisches Institut, Professur Geschichte des Altertums, Universität Potsdam, 7/12/2019) Bakogianni A; Bakogianni, A
    Electra is Greek tragedy’s mourner par excellence. In Sophocles’ dramatic version she is portrayed as stuck in a state of never-ending grief that fuels her desire for vengeance. On the modern stage she captures audiences’ imagination with her powerful, multi-sensory spectacle of mourning. Electra is a transgressive character precisely because she mourns too intensely and for too long. She is trapped in a liminal space where both her mind and body are adversely affected by her excessive mourning. But so enthralling is the portrayal of her grief that it has become the most prominent strand of the tragic heroine’s reception. This paper investigates two examples of Sophocles’ Electra in performance at the end of the last millennium, as a means of unpicking two very different approaches to the portrayal of ‘tragic’ grief on the modern Greek stage. At the end of the 1990s, the country’s premier theatrical company, The National Theatre of Greece, staged Sophocles’ Electra twice; in 1996 Lydia Koniordou highlighted female ritual, while Dimitris Maurikios’ 1998 production featured an Electra that was labelled ‘hysterical’ by theatre critics. This paper examines how modern Greece’s claim to a ‘special relationship’ with classical Greece has affected the performance of Electra’s grief.
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    Recalibrating ‘Heroes and Villains’: Ancient Greek Literature through the Camera Lens
    (Ergon Verlag, 2023) Bakogianni A; Lindner M; Steffensen N
    Audiences’ expectations of how a hero should behave are shaped by how they measure up against characters coded as villainous. This chapter examines the interdependence of these two concepts with reference to two screen case studies with direct and indirect connections to the Trojan War as an archetype for all wars. Juxtaposing William Scofield, the accidental hero of the World War One movie 1917 (DreamWorks Pictures, 2019) with the villainous Ajax in Troy: Fall of a City (BBC/Netflix, 2018) allows us to reflect on how radically the labels of hero and villain have been recalibrated in the second decade of the new millennium. What has, however, not changed, is the ongoing role that ancient Greek literature, characters, and themes play in such conversations in our popular culture.