Greek Tragedy into Film

Kenneth MacKinnon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317806868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

If Greek tragedy is sometimes regarded as a form long dead and buried, both theatre producers and film directors seem slow to accept its interment. Originally published in 1986, this book reflects the renewed interest in questions of staging the Greek plays, to give a comprehensive account and critical analysis of all the important versions of Greek tragedy made on film. From the 1927 footage of the re-enactment of Aeschylus' Prometheus in Chains at the Delphi Festival organised by Angelos Sikelianos to Pasolini's Notes for an African Oresteia, the study encompasses the version of Oedipus by Tyrone Guthrie, Tzavellas's Antigone (with Irene Papas), Michael Cacoyannis's series which included Electra, The Trojan Women, and Iphigeneia, Pasolini's Oedipus and Medea (with Maria Callas), Miklos Jancso's Elektreia, Dassim's Phaedra and others.

Many interesting questions are raised by the transference of a highly stylised form such as Greek tragedy to what is often claimed to be the 'realistic' medium of film. What becomes clear is that the heroic myths retain with ease the power to move the audiences in very different milieux through often strikingly different means.

The book may be read as an adjunct to viewing of the films, but enough synopsis is given to make its arguments accessible to those familiar only with the classical texts, or with neither version.

1 INTRODUCTION

 

 

 

Film-makers attempting to render ancient Greek tragedy are faced with a number of obvious problems, especially theoretical objections to the filming of works conceived for theatrical performance, and the intensification of these objections in the context of Greek theatre. Then, too, there is the problem of translating highly formalised works conceived within a particular set of conventions into a medium which has traditionally privileged ‘realism’. Nevertheless, a number of world-famous directors — Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michael Cacoyannis, Miklós Jancsó, Liliana Cavani and Jules Dassin in particular — as well as less celebrated film-makers, have devoted themselves to the task of filming Greek tragedy, especially in the 1960s and 1970s.

Greek tragedy has been filmed. The question whether it ought to be, expressed in the wake of the fear that there may be something about Greek tragedy and/or cinema which makes them incompatible, may be less interesting than how it has been. Existence seems to precede essence here. The variety of approaches to the filming of Greek tragedy illustrates the range of tactics by which ancient culture is translated into modern culture, but especially the problems presented in filming what was once popular art, but what is now considered as ‘high art’.

Few of the films have been screened outside the art-house circuit, or even the ‘artier’ channels and off-peak viewing hours of British television, in English-speaking countries: a notable exception is Jules Dassin’s Phaedra (1961). That such international stars as Melina Mercouri, Anthony Perkins and Raf Vallone are in the film seems less an explanation of its commercial success than a consequence of the conception of the film. Phaedra demonstrates more clearly than any other film of Greek tragedy that, in order for such films to become ‘popular’, there must be a generic shift towards, for example, the highly popular cinematic genre of melodrama, as here.

Before analysing the individual films, before consideration of the problems allegedly inherent in the filming of Greek theatre, it is interesting to note that certain Greek tragedies are particularly popular with film-makers. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is, predictably, a frequent choice. Apart from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s much studied version, made in 1967, there are those by Tyrone Guthrie (Oedipus Rex, 1956) and Philip Saville (Oedipus the King, 1967). The Electra story has also figured several times, perhaps because there are no fewer than four ancient Greek plays relevant to it — Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers (the second play in his Oresteia trilogy), Sophocles’ Electra, and Euripides’ Electra and Orestes.¹ No fewer than four films claim, by title alone, a relation with one or other of these plays.

The omissions are surprising. Among the most obvious is Euripides’ The Bacchae, the obvious appeal of which to Western culture of the late 1960s suggests that it might even have been a popular success, under certain conditions. Another is Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which Pasolini did propose filming. His preparatory research and statements about the planned execution of the film are preserved in Notes for an African Oresteia (1970).

Of the three celebrated Greek tragedians of whose work a small but significant portion survives, Aeschylus is least often filmed. This would suggest that drama which is ‘anti-realist’ in its ritualism and the importance of the Choral element, or drama which is too obviously embedded in fifth-century BC Athenian concerns is less likely to find favour with modern film-makers. The greater popularity of Euripides may well raise questions about his status as a tragedian in relation both to his own times and to modern society. Is it possible that he is the most attractive to film-makers because, according to one recent study,² he is deemed today to be the most ‘anti-’ or ‘post-tragic’?

This book does not demand a specialist knowledge of the classics or of film studies, although it is hoped that both disciplines will benefit in some measure from it. Familiarity with the original plays is not assumed. For those who are uncertain of even the plots, Appendix B (pp. 174–9) provides short synopses of the tragedies relevant to the analyses of films in Chapters 3 to 7. The extended debates by classical scholars about interpretation of each play are seldom explored here, since the purpose of the book is to clarify the consequences of decisions of interpretation, rather than to validate or otherwise a particular interpretation. Inevitably, there must be some wrestling with the ‘meaning’ of the original, especially in relation to the discussion of Michael Cacoyannis (Chapter 5), where it will be argued that his film versions of Euripidean tragedies are paradoxically more ‘tragic’ than Euripides’ originals.

The first films analysed individually (Chapter 4) are what sometimes seem like relatively transparent filmed records of theatrical productions. But they are not what they seem in that every choice of cut or camera angle mediates reception of the original production. It is the films which attempt to render Greek tragedy in less overtly theatrical fashion, however, that have proved more commercially viable and therefore — though only marginally in some cases — more popular with cinema audiences. It is from these that we can learn the strategies by which film-makers have attempted to release the originally-conceived theatrical works from the conditions of the theatre, and that we can arrive at some sort of estimation of the possibility, let alone of the virtues, of fidelity to the original plays. These films are discussed in Chapters 5–7.

Notes

1. Vassilis Fotopoulos’ film, Orestes (1971), mentioned in Mel Schuster, The Contemporary Greek Cinema (Scarecrow, 1979), p. 304, seems to be impossible to trace.

2. Ekbert Faas, Tragedy and After: Euripides, Shakespeare, Goethe (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984).

2 THE GENERAL PROBLEM: THEATRE INTO FILM

From the earliest days of cinema, there has been a close relationship between cinema and theatre. True, there was a tendency from the beginning to regard cinema as, par excellence, a realist medium. Lumière’s short films of, say, a train entering the station at La Ciotat startled audiences into recognising the then unique power of cinema, which surpassed theatre in its ability not merely to represent but to record, and which surpassed photography by the addition of time, space and movement. Yet, at the same time as Lumière was photographing apparently unstaged events, another Frenchman, Méliès, saw cinema’s potential as that of augmenting the marvels of theatre, or more particularly of the music hall. His aim was to outstrip the music-hall conjuror with the trompe-l’oeil trickery opened up by such cinematic techniques as editing. Rather than photographing everyday events, he would film his actors on such then fantastic exploits as a trip by rocket to the moon. Film studies, thanks to André Bazin, however, are inclined to question whether the seeming dichotomy between these kinds of cinema is valid. In Bazin’s view, there is an essential realism in the medium of cinema which is as important in audience reception of the fantasy film as of the documentary. While Bazin’s conception of cinema’s essence has been repeatedly attacked by semioticians, for example, his questioning of the traditional Lumière/Méliès dichotomy remains valuable. If Méliès should be identified with what might loosely be termed a theatrical tendency in cinema, even Bazin’s essentialism does not prevent the accommodation of both the theatrical and documentary tendencies under the heading of ‘true’ (for Bazin, realist) cinema. Moreover, it has been argued by Vardac¹, for example, that nineteenth-century drama and staging were marked by a striving towards a union of romanticism and realism, by which the glamorous or spectacular-ideas of playwrights were to be rendered credible in performance. If this is so, cinema in its beginnings can be discerned as the fulfilment and extension of romantic — realist stage practice. Not only need there be no unbridgeable gulf between theatre and cinema, but Méliès’ sort of cinema is thus born from the dreams and needs of dramatists and stage directors.

While this conception of cinema’s genesis could be thought partial and tendentious, there is no doubt that traffic between theatre and cinema has been common and at times heavy, ever since the last decade of the nineteenth century. Chaplin and many other comic giants of the silent cinema came from the music hall and imported to slapstick movies music-hall techniques. The advent of sound to cinema delighted some dramatists at the same time as it panicked others. We know, for example, that Pagnol in France and Shaw in Britain believed that the ‘talkie’ had the ability to record theatre plays and thus to introduce them to a much wider public than before.² Although as early as the 1930s it became normal practice to adapt stage originals considerably for filming, at least the initial practice of the ‘talkie’, when dealing with a stage original, can be described as producing ‘filmed theatre’.³ The relationship between screen comedy and theatre — particularly vaudeville in the United States — was continued in the sound era in the movies of the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields and Mae West. Movies vitally influenced stage practice, too. Practitioners of drama — as well as artists and novelists — introduced elements of the cinema into their own medium. It could be argued that, if cinema represented the fulfilment of the popular theatre’s romantic-realist tendency of the nineteenth century, dominant cinema practice in the twentieth century, by its romantic-realist near monopoly, forced theatre to turn in other directions, just as post-Cézanne painting eschewed representational art after the invention of photography.

Because theatre plays have been filmed so often, and because directors and actors and others move from theatre to cinema and sometimes back again (Olivier is one of the few who have worked in both capacities in both media), the question of the relationship between theatre and cinema is a vital and practical one, which has to be faced in some form every time a transition of this sort is made.

Hostility to cinematic adaptations of material conceived originally for the stage, if theorised, is based on notions of theatrical and/or cinematic specificity. Purists, so-called, must argue from the position that there is such a thing as cinema or theatre pure and unalloyed, an essence, and that therefore one medium cannot adapt itself to the other without betraying that essence. The dominant opinion,⁴ up to 1940 at least, among those who gave thought to the relation of theatre and cinema was that they were ‘separate but equal’, provided that each maintained its purity by ‘exploiting its “unique” artistic potentialities and developing within its “proper” stylistic and thematic domain’. ⁵ To judge by Pennethorne Hughes, writing in 1933, ⁶ this purist position seems so securely established that further debate is tiresome: ‘that dead dog, the absolute independence of true cinema ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The General Problem: Theatre into Film
• 3 Specific Problems
• 4 Films in the Theatrical Mode
• 5 Films in the Realistic Mode
• 6 Films in the Filmic Mode
• 7 Meta-Tragedy
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix A Ancient Greek Comedy into Film
• Appendix B Brief Synopses of Ancient Plays on Which Films Have Been Based1
• Appendix C Credits of Films of Greek Drama
• Selected Bibliography
• Index