Epics - Tumblr Posts
ALEXANDER THE GREAT (Dir: Robert Rossen, 1956).
Richard Burton heads the cast in a historical drama chronicling the life and accomplishments of Alexander III of Macedonia. Part of the trend to entice audiences away from television, the lavish production was shot in glorious Technicolor and utilised the widescreen CinemaScope format.
Read the full review on my blog JINGLE BONES MOVIE TIME. Link below.
obsessed with the way epic manhood is defined as being remembered– doing great deeds that will be the stuff of song for generations to come, dying in glory and being memorialized by tombs that inscribe greatness on the physical landscape– and epic womanhood is defined as keeping memory alive– helen weaving the images of men about to die, penelope weaving laertes’s glory into his shroud, cassandra raising the cry and andromache the lament for hector–
something about manhood as passive and womanhood as active in relation to memory is just… such an incredible way of framing things
fun little thing i enjoy doing is just imagining that odysseus and aeneas are constantly, increasingly, sopping wet the entire time of their Journeys even when they’re not. even when they’re on dry land they are Covered In Water and Dripping Everywhere they Cannot Escape The Sea
i'm in the homeric temporality time loop and i guess it seems so obvious but when someone refuses to accept death, like when achilles refuses to accept patroclus' death or when demeter refuses to accept persephone's death, it takes the form of them refusing life. achilles refuses food and drink and does not bathe and cannot sleep. demeter renders the earth hostile to life and makes it stop producing food to sustain anything living.
Reading the Illiad for the first time, and I don't have any organize thoughts on this, but there's something about perceptions of time and youth. Like, all the references to how heroes of the past were stronger/the past was a better time to live in, and then all the older heroes lamenting the passage of time and loss of strength because of it, and THEN how epics like the Illiad are revered because of how they've survived the passage of time and (in some circles) the past was a better time because "men were real men" and point to ancient Greece/Rome as an example.
This is something I would have highlighted as a potential paper topic and researched on jstor for if I was still in college. Like I said, no solid thoughts, just like a vibe. A hunch.
(If someone knows a paper like this, please let me know so I can read it)
Just saw kbc came to know about vikarna you go dude, way ahead of your time, my man (I'm hoping he didn't do bad stuff) edit: this dude is THE DUDE
- calls out the injustice on draupadi even though elders like bhishma and dronacharya are silent
- even bheem respects him and tells him to step aside during the wars because he's a good and lawful guy
- he knew the kauravas would be defeated (krishna, a literal god was on the pandavas side duh) BUT still didn't turn his back to his brothers
- bheem cried after killing him
-is a character usually slept on
-was a kaurava and this good despite their general reputation in mahabharat
Mythic stories fall into several categories. There are sagas, epics, and fantasy stories called "märchen." These stories depend on something difficult for us to conceive these days: Simplicity or the "Logic of the Fairy Tale." In other words: things are just what they are, because that’s just the way they are.
These stories frequently examine or teach a moral lesson, exalting it or exposing a particular flaw. If the story is a parable or doctrinal, one of its goals is to delineate the characters as "types" in order to illustrate this basic lesson, characters which make the story whole and who are also contained by it. The lives of these "types" can and must have links with the past and the future but their role ends with the story.
In a magic story, the flow is more important than the logic. Man invented monsters to explain the entire universe (Norse and Greek mythology, for example). Once man began to live in an organized way, with a "social contract," an abyss was opened up between his instincts and his thoughts, and monsters started to REPRESENT another universe altogether: man's inner universe. The pagan prefigures the social and offers us a glimpse of the deepest reaches of man's soul, articulating a primordial, savage universe, populated by elves, fauns, ogres, faeries, trolls, and demons.