Classical Studies

Is the reception of what we call “Classical Antiquity” a passive exercise of memory and inheritance? Or can it be a truly creative action, a kind of reclaiming, even subversion of inherently exclusionary ideas and media? What happens when we try to actively take part in this dialogue with a past that was transmitted to us as important, foundational, original, and authoritative? This course attempts to address such questions both in theory and practice. It starts with a seminar, devoted to the analysis and discussion of primary sources from the ancient Mediterranean and their afterlives in modern media. It then turns into a workshop that is both scholarly and creative.

This year, the topic of our seminar will be Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinematic rewriting of Greek tragedies: Medea, Oedipus Rex, and Oresteia, shot in Morocco, Turkey, Italy, Uganda, Tanzania, and Syria. Pasolini was a queer (but Catholic), communist (but conservative), poet (but mostly famous film maker) who scandalized bourgeois audiences in Postwar Europe. Trained as a philologist, art historian, and linguist, he looked at Greek literature from a (post)colonial, Marxist point of view, and played with its different traditions. We will read the texts that he read, we will watch his films, and we will discuss them as if they were creative essays by an unruly classicist. Then, we will collaborate to make our own visual experiments based on the tragedies and on Pasolini’s cinematic and poetic techniques.