Week 1
1. Recap

“That beggar-faced philosopher shouldn’t be stuffing your luscious little head with such nonsense.”— ‘Marcus Vinicius’, Quo Vadis (1951)

Previously on Ancient World in Film:

• Classical Hollywood / Hollywood and the ‘Classic’
• Hollywood’s Roman epics
• Hollywood’s Rome: ‘projecting the past’
• Receptions of receptions: epic as remake and digest
• Receptions all the way down: epic, historiography, kitsch
• spectacle, sexuality, and the cinematic gaze
• Egypt, Orientalism and the ‘Other’

And now, on Ancient World in Film:

Main films this term:

1. Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)
2. Fellini Satyricon (1969)
3. Alexander the Great (1955)

Additional ‘Easter Eggs’:

1. ‘Ancient world’ websites
2. Receptions of Greece and Rome in other media

Some key themes:

• The decline and fall of Hollywood’s Roman epics
• …and rise? New and restored cinematic Romes
• Alternatives to the Roman epic:
  1. different approaches: Fellini
  2. different materials: Ancient Greece
• Greece and Rome outside film: TV, science fiction, comics
• Greece and Rome online: subcultures, micronations, extremists