Review: Agora
Nov. 24th, 2010 02:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofelevenA decent film, rather disappointed that it’s not getting a proper release anywhere. Hypatia’s story is one that deserves to be repeated, and the collapse of Alexandria’s intellectual culture in the face of fanatical uncompromising religion is one that still resonates today.
On the most shallow level, the visuals are gorgeous; if anything, it’s disappointing that the film rarely slows down long enough to give us a good look at the streets of Alexandria, and one feels the growing sense of loss as the pagan temples and statues are torn down as the Christians gain more power in the city.
Story wise, the film manages to avoid a lot of clichés that would otherwise have sunk it – the ‘love triangle’ established early on end up serving the plot rather than derailing it; her student and later prefect Orestes continues to have feelings for her but accepts they will not be returned, while her slave Davus is, partially through his frustration at her inability to notice her, drawn deeper into the growing Christian movement.
On that note – one satisfying detail is this is one of the few stories I’ve seen in the classical world where the protagonist has an appropriate attitude towards slavery. It is an inescapable element of her society, and she is portrayed as no more enlightened in that area than anyone else.
Related to that, the film does make an effort to be even-handed and to demonstrate some of the positive elements of the Christians, who would otherwise be nothing more than an amorphous blob of black-clad thugs; it is clear that the Christians are the only group that will accept slaves as equals, and they are show giving food to the poor. It is completely understandable why Davus would be drawn to the group; at the same time no excuses are made for the destructive fanaticism of the Christians, and once they have attained power, their humanitarian goals are forgotten and replaced with an obsessive desire to impose their own inflexible morality.
As for Hypatia; while she is portrayed largely as the martyr for science and reason that has been her role in most secular narratives, the film does not shy away from the political nature of her death – indeed, part of the tragedy is that the Christians don’t care either way about her teachings or philosophy, she’s merely an easy way to hurt the Roman prefect Orestes, who they see as insufficiently Christian.
More enjoyable is the scenes dealing with her enthusiasm for science and mathematics; it’s hard to get across things like that in a film, but it does an excellent job of portraying a woman driven by the desire to learn taking joy in the discoveries and knowledge that surrounds her. Nicely handled was the way Greek science was presented; at no point does the film feel like it is mocking Hypatia or her students for holding to geo-centric models of the solar system; it is shown that the Ptolemaic model fits the evidence better than early helio-centric models, and is presented as the result of legitimate scientific inquiry. I do raise my eyebrow somewhat at the presentation of Hypatia making discoveries about the movement of the planets that would not be made historically for centuries – on the other hand, it works as a symbol of the potential discoveries lost in the destruction of Alexandria’s intellectual culture.
Of course, the film isn’t flawless – some of the dialogue is a bit creaky, there’s a rather awkward transitional sequence in the middle of the film when the narrative jumps forward several years, and Hypatia really isn’t given much to do in the first half of the film. It also bothered me how few women were on screen – one would be forgiven for believing the Christians targeted Hypatia primarily because she was the only woman in Alexandria…
And there is one giant flaw which I feel weakens the movie immensely, and which I cannot see any justification for. The film changes the details of Hypatia’s death.
At the end of the film, Hypatia’s former slave, Davus, now a Christian, tries to warn her of the mob coming to kill her. Unable to reach her in time, he is, however, able to kill her by asphyxiation while the other Christians are gathering rocks to stone her with.
I cannot see any justification for this change, and it annoys me immensely to see Hypatia’s death reduced in such a way. Historically, Hypatia did not die in such a relatively peaceful fashion. There was no good Christian who offered her any such mercy. Based on accounts of her death, the best one can say is that it’s possible she drowned in her own blood after having her teeth kicked in long before the mob had finished flaying the skin from her body.
Now, granted, I’m not sure how such a thing could be portrayed on screen. I certainly would not want to watch the scene. However, it felt uncomfortably like the film makers had chickened out at the end; that they felt the inherent brutality and cruelty of her death needed to be tempered somehow, that there needed to be at least one sympathetic Christian in the story at the end.
As I said, I was otherwise impressed at how well the film portrayed the nature of Christianity. But Hypatia’s murder was and is a black mark on the history of Christianity, and this felt like an attempt at white-washing that was unnecessary and which the film otherwise avoided.
Indeed, one area where I was pleased was the lack of any attempt to portray the Christian leaders as anything but sincere – there was no implication that the bishop Cyrus or the mob leader Ammonius aren’t ‘real Christians’, and if anything, it’s Orestes, who tries to reconcile his Christianity with his respect for Hypatia who is portrayed as intellectually inconsistent.
Of course, I can understand the desire not to turn the end of the film into a gore-fest – but if you’re tackling Hypatia, you really can’t gloss over it. I can also understand that, perhaps, the film makers wanted to focus on Hypatia’s life rather than her death – and, for that matter, I can understand to some degree the desire to give Hypatia a more merciful death than history gave her. And yes, of course, this is hardly the only historical inconsistency in the film*. On the other hand, this is the end of the film, the end of Hypatia’s life, the end, in many ways, of Alexandria as a city of learning and tolerance – if there is one moment where accuracy should be insisted upon, this is it.
(I don’t know why this bothers me so much – death is death, and the how doesn’t matter as much as the why. On the other hand, I’m still haunted by the description of Hypatia’s death in Jane Montgomery’s Razing Hypatia and it was disappointing to see the details completely ignored.)
Unfortunately, this film apparently had extreme difficulties getting distribution – only a handful of cinemas in Melbourne are showing it. Despite the flaws, well worth watching if you get the chance.
* Personal pet peeve – at one point, in the background of the scene there’s what’s presumably meant to be a replica of the famous She-Wolf of Rome statue… complete with the figures of Romulus and Remus that were only added in the middle ages…
On the most shallow level, the visuals are gorgeous; if anything, it’s disappointing that the film rarely slows down long enough to give us a good look at the streets of Alexandria, and one feels the growing sense of loss as the pagan temples and statues are torn down as the Christians gain more power in the city.
Story wise, the film manages to avoid a lot of clichés that would otherwise have sunk it – the ‘love triangle’ established early on end up serving the plot rather than derailing it; her student and later prefect Orestes continues to have feelings for her but accepts they will not be returned, while her slave Davus is, partially through his frustration at her inability to notice her, drawn deeper into the growing Christian movement.
On that note – one satisfying detail is this is one of the few stories I’ve seen in the classical world where the protagonist has an appropriate attitude towards slavery. It is an inescapable element of her society, and she is portrayed as no more enlightened in that area than anyone else.
Related to that, the film does make an effort to be even-handed and to demonstrate some of the positive elements of the Christians, who would otherwise be nothing more than an amorphous blob of black-clad thugs; it is clear that the Christians are the only group that will accept slaves as equals, and they are show giving food to the poor. It is completely understandable why Davus would be drawn to the group; at the same time no excuses are made for the destructive fanaticism of the Christians, and once they have attained power, their humanitarian goals are forgotten and replaced with an obsessive desire to impose their own inflexible morality.
As for Hypatia; while she is portrayed largely as the martyr for science and reason that has been her role in most secular narratives, the film does not shy away from the political nature of her death – indeed, part of the tragedy is that the Christians don’t care either way about her teachings or philosophy, she’s merely an easy way to hurt the Roman prefect Orestes, who they see as insufficiently Christian.
More enjoyable is the scenes dealing with her enthusiasm for science and mathematics; it’s hard to get across things like that in a film, but it does an excellent job of portraying a woman driven by the desire to learn taking joy in the discoveries and knowledge that surrounds her. Nicely handled was the way Greek science was presented; at no point does the film feel like it is mocking Hypatia or her students for holding to geo-centric models of the solar system; it is shown that the Ptolemaic model fits the evidence better than early helio-centric models, and is presented as the result of legitimate scientific inquiry. I do raise my eyebrow somewhat at the presentation of Hypatia making discoveries about the movement of the planets that would not be made historically for centuries – on the other hand, it works as a symbol of the potential discoveries lost in the destruction of Alexandria’s intellectual culture.
Of course, the film isn’t flawless – some of the dialogue is a bit creaky, there’s a rather awkward transitional sequence in the middle of the film when the narrative jumps forward several years, and Hypatia really isn’t given much to do in the first half of the film. It also bothered me how few women were on screen – one would be forgiven for believing the Christians targeted Hypatia primarily because she was the only woman in Alexandria…
And there is one giant flaw which I feel weakens the movie immensely, and which I cannot see any justification for. The film changes the details of Hypatia’s death.
At the end of the film, Hypatia’s former slave, Davus, now a Christian, tries to warn her of the mob coming to kill her. Unable to reach her in time, he is, however, able to kill her by asphyxiation while the other Christians are gathering rocks to stone her with.
I cannot see any justification for this change, and it annoys me immensely to see Hypatia’s death reduced in such a way. Historically, Hypatia did not die in such a relatively peaceful fashion. There was no good Christian who offered her any such mercy. Based on accounts of her death, the best one can say is that it’s possible she drowned in her own blood after having her teeth kicked in long before the mob had finished flaying the skin from her body.
Now, granted, I’m not sure how such a thing could be portrayed on screen. I certainly would not want to watch the scene. However, it felt uncomfortably like the film makers had chickened out at the end; that they felt the inherent brutality and cruelty of her death needed to be tempered somehow, that there needed to be at least one sympathetic Christian in the story at the end.
As I said, I was otherwise impressed at how well the film portrayed the nature of Christianity. But Hypatia’s murder was and is a black mark on the history of Christianity, and this felt like an attempt at white-washing that was unnecessary and which the film otherwise avoided.
Indeed, one area where I was pleased was the lack of any attempt to portray the Christian leaders as anything but sincere – there was no implication that the bishop Cyrus or the mob leader Ammonius aren’t ‘real Christians’, and if anything, it’s Orestes, who tries to reconcile his Christianity with his respect for Hypatia who is portrayed as intellectually inconsistent.
Of course, I can understand the desire not to turn the end of the film into a gore-fest – but if you’re tackling Hypatia, you really can’t gloss over it. I can also understand that, perhaps, the film makers wanted to focus on Hypatia’s life rather than her death – and, for that matter, I can understand to some degree the desire to give Hypatia a more merciful death than history gave her. And yes, of course, this is hardly the only historical inconsistency in the film*. On the other hand, this is the end of the film, the end of Hypatia’s life, the end, in many ways, of Alexandria as a city of learning and tolerance – if there is one moment where accuracy should be insisted upon, this is it.
(I don’t know why this bothers me so much – death is death, and the how doesn’t matter as much as the why. On the other hand, I’m still haunted by the description of Hypatia’s death in Jane Montgomery’s Razing Hypatia and it was disappointing to see the details completely ignored.)
Unfortunately, this film apparently had extreme difficulties getting distribution – only a handful of cinemas in Melbourne are showing it. Despite the flaws, well worth watching if you get the chance.
* Personal pet peeve – at one point, in the background of the scene there’s what’s presumably meant to be a replica of the famous She-Wolf of Rome statue… complete with the figures of Romulus and Remus that were only added in the middle ages…