1. Somehow I had managed to miss that PJ Harvey's Let England Shake (2011) is at least half a concept album of World War I, with three songs about Gallipoli and elsewhere allusions to packing up troubles and no man's land, the big guns and hanging on the wire. It's also excellent. I think it would be great if she actually became an official war song correspondent.
2. Alejandro Amenábar's Agora (2009) is not any kind of film to watch if you want to cheer up, but I thought it was very good: it is almost an anti-sword-and-sandal, in that it is an epic of the late Roman Empire, but the swords solve nothing and neither does the Bible; there are the familiar moments of conversion, illumination, defiance, but they are almost all reversed or recast from troubling angles, and it may be the only film I've ever seen with a reasonable depiction of slavery in antiquity. (Hypatia is not signaled to be a good person by an anachronistic belief in human equality: she doesn't think about it. Slaves are ubiquitous, moveable furniture; she may be fond of some and rely on others, but she can in one moment praise a slave's intelligence in front of her students and the next reproach two of them with a comment about brawls being "for slaves and riff-raff." None of the characters think about it: except the characters who are slaves, who can never afford not to.) I would like to have seen its fifth-century Alexandria on a big screen; its statues are painted and its streets are full of heat-shimmer and dust. The Christians are the villains of the piece by virtue of history—Hypatia wasmartyred bludgeoned to death by huge fucking rocks by a Christian mob in 415 CE—which does not mean that all the pagan characters are plaster saints. This is even a film that remembers there were Jews in the ancient world when the Passion wasn't going on.
What I may appreciate most of all is that Amenábar did not write a romance for Hypatia, as it is almost de rigueur for biographies of scientific figures to "humanize" them—I invoke the scare quotes of extreme sarcasm—by reassuring the audience that while conic sections or general relativity are all very fine, it's really who you want to bonk that makes history. Somewhere in the alternate history of film is Agora as it was made in the 1960's, the big-budget Christian-pagan love story with the beautiful Neoplatonist torn between the two men who represent the conflicting philosophies of her world. There are several characters in this movie who would like to be in that one, but none of them are Rachel Weisz's Hypatia. She's not presented as asexual; she has no problems with affection. But she will never love another human being as she loves her mathematics and the mysteries of the universe she reaches for with falling weights and circles drawn in the sand, and the beauty of the scene in which she wonders aloud whether she might have been happier with a more conventional life is how simply it is demonstrated that the question proceeds from false premises: a glance up into the night sky and she's forgotten it. There's her life's love, the old problem of wanderers and epicycles. That's what she lights up for. Comparison is not even in it.
The script's not flawless. There is the inevitable line of dialogue that goes clunk and lies there. It could use an intermission as badly as any film since Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and I would really have appreciated a greater exploration of the politics surrounding the Diocese of Egypt in the second half of the story—the surtitles mention the final split between Western and Eastern Empires that followed on the death of Theodosius I in 395, but if this is meant to have contributed to the already unstable factionalism in Alexandria, we never do learn how. The real-life Synesius of Cyrene was quirkier and more science-minded than he is here depicted, which I find I am sorry about; I am also not convinced about the riots that lead to the destruction of the Serapeum, although I might just not have read the right sources. (I don't seem to care as much about Cyril of Alexandria, partly because contemporary sources do agree on his responsibility for Hypatia's death.) I wouldn't have minded as much time devoted to Neoplatonism as to the theories of Aristarchos of Samos. I'm sure I'd have even more historical arguments if I brushed up on my late antiquity. But it's still one of the better epics I've seen in some time, and one of the better onscreen realizations of a classical world, and there are just not enough movies with astronomer-heroines and no romance; I'm quite glad to have seen it. Just don't watch it to cheer up. The burning of the Library will guarantee against that for weeks.
3. This is the weirdest article I've seen all week. Why do people bother inventing alternate histories for World War II? The one we've got really is just crack.
4. Actually, this: "On 12 November 1916, a bizarre outbreak of mass hysteria produced 800 simultaneous sightings of Chaplin across America." That is, I think, weirder than 3-D Nazi bratwurst. And you shouldn't be able to say that about anything.
2. Alejandro Amenábar's Agora (2009) is not any kind of film to watch if you want to cheer up, but I thought it was very good: it is almost an anti-sword-and-sandal, in that it is an epic of the late Roman Empire, but the swords solve nothing and neither does the Bible; there are the familiar moments of conversion, illumination, defiance, but they are almost all reversed or recast from troubling angles, and it may be the only film I've ever seen with a reasonable depiction of slavery in antiquity. (Hypatia is not signaled to be a good person by an anachronistic belief in human equality: she doesn't think about it. Slaves are ubiquitous, moveable furniture; she may be fond of some and rely on others, but she can in one moment praise a slave's intelligence in front of her students and the next reproach two of them with a comment about brawls being "for slaves and riff-raff." None of the characters think about it: except the characters who are slaves, who can never afford not to.) I would like to have seen its fifth-century Alexandria on a big screen; its statues are painted and its streets are full of heat-shimmer and dust. The Christians are the villains of the piece by virtue of history—Hypatia was
What I may appreciate most of all is that Amenábar did not write a romance for Hypatia, as it is almost de rigueur for biographies of scientific figures to "humanize" them—I invoke the scare quotes of extreme sarcasm—by reassuring the audience that while conic sections or general relativity are all very fine, it's really who you want to bonk that makes history. Somewhere in the alternate history of film is Agora as it was made in the 1960's, the big-budget Christian-pagan love story with the beautiful Neoplatonist torn between the two men who represent the conflicting philosophies of her world. There are several characters in this movie who would like to be in that one, but none of them are Rachel Weisz's Hypatia. She's not presented as asexual; she has no problems with affection. But she will never love another human being as she loves her mathematics and the mysteries of the universe she reaches for with falling weights and circles drawn in the sand, and the beauty of the scene in which she wonders aloud whether she might have been happier with a more conventional life is how simply it is demonstrated that the question proceeds from false premises: a glance up into the night sky and she's forgotten it. There's her life's love, the old problem of wanderers and epicycles. That's what she lights up for. Comparison is not even in it.
The script's not flawless. There is the inevitable line of dialogue that goes clunk and lies there. It could use an intermission as badly as any film since Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and I would really have appreciated a greater exploration of the politics surrounding the Diocese of Egypt in the second half of the story—the surtitles mention the final split between Western and Eastern Empires that followed on the death of Theodosius I in 395, but if this is meant to have contributed to the already unstable factionalism in Alexandria, we never do learn how. The real-life Synesius of Cyrene was quirkier and more science-minded than he is here depicted, which I find I am sorry about; I am also not convinced about the riots that lead to the destruction of the Serapeum, although I might just not have read the right sources. (I don't seem to care as much about Cyril of Alexandria, partly because contemporary sources do agree on his responsibility for Hypatia's death.) I wouldn't have minded as much time devoted to Neoplatonism as to the theories of Aristarchos of Samos. I'm sure I'd have even more historical arguments if I brushed up on my late antiquity. But it's still one of the better epics I've seen in some time, and one of the better onscreen realizations of a classical world, and there are just not enough movies with astronomer-heroines and no romance; I'm quite glad to have seen it. Just don't watch it to cheer up. The burning of the Library will guarantee against that for weeks.
3. This is the weirdest article I've seen all week. Why do people bother inventing alternate histories for World War II? The one we've got really is just crack.
4. Actually, this: "On 12 November 1916, a bizarre outbreak of mass hysteria produced 800 simultaneous sightings of Chaplin across America." That is, I think, weirder than 3-D Nazi bratwurst. And you shouldn't be able to say that about anything.
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