Iphigeneia Breathes: A Filmic Musing on the Winds, Breathing, Life, and the Imagination

Abstract

Artistic inspiration drawn from scholarly and experiential research has led me to incorporate a personal approach to classical reception into my art films: in voiceovers and intertitles, I imagine new endings for ancient stories. Imagination becomes a powerfully direct element in my films, when combined with my own experience of Greece, and scholarly research into aspects of Greek myths, plays, and language. This paper traces the evolution of my approach in three of short art films: from an anonymous, but often subjective narrator, implying my authorship; the clearly subjective perspective of the filmmaker inviting viewers to imagine; to my most recent film, a combination of an omniscient, almost neutral narrator with a first-person narrator who also invites imagination. While working on Iphigeneia Breathes, its breathing theme became unexpectedly entwined with contemporary events: George Floyd, saying he could not breathe, was murdered; the pandemic stole breath from millions of people; and gatherings of loud, close-packed, chanting crowds as precursors or loci of death became terrifying realities. My process, research, approach to reception and imagination ultimately brought personal and communal contemporary experience into interaction with ancient narrative.