Greek Tragedy on Screen by Pantelis Michelakis

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS Greek Tragedy on Screen. By Pantelis Michelakis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. Pp. xii, 267. Pantelis Michelakis's Greek Tragedy on Screen expands the roster of Oxford’s “Classical Presences” series, whose central concern is to assess “the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present” by “trac[ing] the avowal and disavowal of values and identities” that contribute to the “use, and abuse, of the classical past.” Michelakis is well equipped for this task, given his extensive archival research and body of scholarship on the reception both of Greek tragedy on the modern stage and of the ancient world on screen. In the first English-language monograph on the subject since Kenneth MacKinnon’s Greek Tragedy into Film (Rutherford 1986), Michelakis aims to integrate these two streams of reception studies and thereby to illuminate “how narrative and adaptation practices associated with the screen might be used as a vehicle for thinking about the shifting images of Greek tragedy in the modern world” and “how Greek tragedy can be viewed as a site of conflicted but interconnected discourses about film practice, history, and criticism” (6). Using such a “shot/reverse shot” construction to initiate a sophisticated discussion is a signature of Michelakis’s style throughout the volume, the density of which testifies to his ambition and learnedness and to the challenging nature of his investigation. A primary issue for cross-disciplinary inquiry is how to facilitate the movement of specialists from one field into another: here, from classics into media studies. MacKinnon , for example, provides a survey of critiques concerning the translation of theater generally into the medium of film, followed by an examination of concerns specific to the adaptation of Greek tragedy. He adopts from Jack J. Jorgens (Shakespeare on Film [Bloomington 1977]) three modes of engagement with Greek tragedy in film—the theatrical, the realistic, and the filmic—and features as case studies films that exemplify each mode. For newcomers to media studies, MacKinnon’s book is still useful as a prelude to Michelakis’s, which eschews introductory survey chapters in favor of integrating such material passim into an introduction followed by nine chapters, each built around one concept: Chapter One, “Spectatorship”; Chapter Two, “Canonicity”; Chapter Three, “Adaptation”; Chapter Four, “Word and Image”; Chapter Five, “Media”; Chapter Six, “Genre”; Chapter Seven, “History”; Chapter Eight, “Time”; and Chapter Nine, “Space” (followed by an afterword). Each chapter begins by outlining a complex of theoretical issues associated with the given concept, then proceeds to analysis, primarily through close readings, of how those issues manifest in discrete elements of a variety of films that engage overtly with “what has come to be understood as ‘classical’ or ‘Greek’ tragedy” (5). These thematic chapters act as spokes connecting that hub to the larger wheel of Michelakis’s interest in “the workings and politics of different modes of cinematic narrative and technique across cultural and stylistic divides” (5). This organizational scheme allows him to de-emphasize familiar modes of film analysis, notably, historicism and auteurism. Although each chapter is basically self-contained, save some clearly marked crossreferencing , several of Michelakis’s concerns thread through multiple chapters: for example , the importance of shifting focus away from products and onto processes. In Chapter One, “Spectatorship,” he renounces the sociological analysis of audience memPHOENIX , VOL. 68 (2014) 3–4. 359 360 PHOENIX bers as products of their class or gender in favor of understanding how the very act of spectating is historically and technologically conditioned, a phenomenon that he demonstrates through close readings of the remains of a now-lost French silent film, La Légende d’Oedipe (1912). In Chapter Two, “Canonicity,” he critiques the formation process of a cinematic canon per se, and especially for films of Greek tragedy, by offering optimistic and pessimistic perspectives on the accessibility and valuation of such films as Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite (1995) and Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (2009). In Chapter Three, “Adaptation,” he surveys the broad spectrum of ways in which the creative process is figured in Jules Dassin’s A Dream of Passion/Krauge¯ Gunaiko ¯n (1978) by looking beyond the film’s...