It was with much excitement and a little nervousness that I went to the cinema on 3 June to watch the new Wonder Woman film, directed by Patty Jenkins and … Read More
Amanda Potter: Wonder Woman – An “Awesome” Ancient Hero for the Modern World
Christopher McDonough: Forgetting and Remembering Jules Dassin’s Phaedra
Last month, I was at the Classical Association meeting in Canterbury and, having heard many fine papers on film reception, was finishing up my meal at the Friday night banquet … Read More
Ben Greet: Classics in Star Trek
Star Trek exists as what Daniel Bernardi calls a ‘mega-text’, a group of televisual, filmic, literary, auditory, and other ‘texts’ that all share a relatively cohesive fictional universe. The amount … Read More
Introducing the ‘Classical World New Zealand’ Project
by Anastasia Bakogianni, Lecturer in Classical Studies, Massey University (Auckland campus) How have New Zealanders received the classical world? How have they adapted and transformed it for use in their own … Read More
Anastasia Bakogianni: Between Tradition and Creativity – Modern Greek Cinematic Receptions of the Classical World
How can ancient tragedy be transplanted into the modern medium of film? What are some of the obstacles filmmakers have to overcome when they attempt to transform an ancient theatrical … Read More
Kim Shahabudin: Simply the best? Or not so simply…
A recent post on a Facebook Group asked what the “best” film versions of the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid were. BIG QUESTION, was my immediate reaction. After all, how do … Read More
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: The Epic World of Norma Desmond – An Alternative Guide to Watching Hollywood Epics – Part 2
As I showed in Part 1 of this post, Sunset Boulevard is a film saturated in allusions to an earlier age of filmmaking, but it is in the film’s extraordinary … Read More
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: The Epic World of Norma Desmond – An Alternative Guide to Watching Hollywood Epics – Part 1
At the moment I’m writing a book. It is called Designs on the Past: How Hollywood Created the Ancient World. It is all about movie-making in Hollywood and movie-watching in … Read More
Sasha-Mae Eccleston: Doing the Right Thing in Chi-Raq (2015)
Like the iconic song solicited for it, Spike Lee’s film Do The Right Thing (1989)(hereafter, DRT), highlights the competing voices and values underlying the banal term ‘community’. Using a heat-wave … Read More
Amanda Potter: Putting Audience Reception Centre Stage in Classical Reception Studies
From a very young age I was fascinated by all things ancient Roman and Greek, fuelled by my consumption of films made before I was born like Ben Hur (1959) … Read More