The success of the IU Cinema
Let me begin by welcoming all of you to what will I am sure be another outstanding season of film at the wonderful IU Cinema. When I announced in my 2007 inauguration speech that we would be establishing this cinema it was our hope that it would grow in stature and quality to become one of the bedrocks of arts and culture at Indiana University, comparable with the Musical Arts Center, the Eskenazi Museum of Art, and the Lilly Library, while at the same time being recognized as one of the finest art house cinemas in the country.
Now, 15 years later and just over 10 years since it was opened, it is overwhelmingly clear that it has achieved this, frankly way beyond what we thought was possible. It has been visited by numerous legends of film like the late Peter Bogdanovich who have attested to its excellence in glowing terms.
For this enormous success we should first thank the Cinema's inaugural director, John Vickers, and his staff, especially Brittany Friesner. But let me also thank all of you for the enthusiastic support you, and thousands like you at IU and elsewhere, have given the Cinema that has in turn guaranteed its success. And finally let me welcome Alicia Kozma, the new director of the IU Cinema, who I am sure will uphold and build further on the outstanding reputation the Cinema now has.
The President's Choice Series
It is a great pleasure to once again have the privilege of introducing the President's Choice Film Series, which was endowed in my name by a group of faculty and staff in 2017. This was a great honor for which I was deeply grateful, and I wish to most sincerely thank once again those faculty and staff who made this possible. I must say it has been very rewarding for the last 10 years to choose for this series, each year, two sets of films with some unifying theme. It has given me a chance to indulge my highly eclectic tastes in film, as tonight will once again demonstrate, but I hope my choices have proved of interest.
The great Greek tragedies
The Greek world in the fifth century B.C., and some of the years before and after it, saw possibly the greatest explosion of intellectual genius in such a short period in human history until maybe recent times. It saw the founding of the sciences by the pre-Socratics, the founding of modern philosophy by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and great works of sculpture and architecture that have influenced the world to this day. And it saw in Friedrich Nietzsche's words, the birth of tragedy out of the spirit of music.[1] According to Aristotle in his "Poetics,"[2] its development from musical performances of various kinds to tragic plays of the kind we recognize today, was accomplished by three men of almost unrivalled creativity—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Each of them wrote around a hundred or more plays over their long lives, of which sadly only seven, seven, and 19, respectively, survive.
What is so important about these plays, though, is that they represent the first articulation on stage of the greatest themes of human life, of war and peace, of love and death, of duty and friendship, and of loyalty and betrayal. And in all of them, and most centrally, the conflict that can arise between these themes among the best of people for the best of reasons. There is a quote attributed to Hegel that captures this beautifully—"Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights." [3]
And then there is the raw elemental power of these plays, plays that reflect an art form developing before our eyes out of less expressive, less sophisticated activities. Throughout they are unencumbered by centuries of complex civilizations with all the strictures on the arts and culture that this can imply. In essence all that had gone before was Homer and the Homeric myths, and these formed much of the framework for many of these plays. But then Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides take them far beyond a simple re-telling of these stories to instead portray the anguishing moral and ethical dilemmas faced by the protagonists in the plays, all mediated by the unrelenting march of fate. These, though, are not just dilemmas faced by people 25 centuries ago. They are as real and consequential today as they were then, which is part of why, in spite of their antiquity, they seem to still speak to us so clearly.
The Euripides trilogy of Michael Cacoyannis
So it is a mystery to me why so few of these great plays have been adapted to the screen. There are only a handful that have been turned into films, certainly only a handful of any quality. But in this handful the works of the great Greek Cypriot director Michael Cacoyannis are the finest. He stands almost alone in taking the texts and themes of the great tragedies seriously and trying to create films that reflect this.
Cacoyannis was born in what was then Greek Cyprus, worked for some time at the beginning of his career in the United Kingdom, but then returned to Greece where most of his movies were directed or set. He is most famous for his 1966 classic "Zorba the Greek." But he also adapted to film three of the plays of Euripides—"Electra" in 1962, "The Trojan Women" in 1971, and "Iphigenia at Aulis" in 1977. This is the order in which Euripides is believed to have written them. All three recount incidents and phases of the Trojan War. However, according to the Homeric chronology, "Iphigenia at Aulis" takes place just before the war starts, "The Trojan Women" immediately after the sack of Troy, and "Electra" sometime later in the aftermath. And this is the order in which the IU Cinema is showing them.
Iphigenia
Tonight we will see "Iphigenia." The Greek fleet and army under the command of Agamemnon is on the way to Troy but it has been becalmed at Aulis by the goddess Artemis whose temple has been defiled by the Greeks. The sacrifice of his eldest daughter, Iphigenia, is required to enable the winds to blow again. Agamemnon summons Iphigenia on the pretext of marrying her to Achilles but then relents, but by which time it is too late as the Greek army now knows and demands this sacrifice. The anguish of all involved, including Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon, who are caught in the vice of duty and piety versus love for a child, now dominates the rest of the play.
"Iphigenia" was a widely honored film when it was released. It was nominated for an Oscar for the best foreign language film and for the Palme d'Or. Tatiania Papamoschou, who was 13 at the time, also received the Best Leading Actress Award at the Thessalonika Film Festival for her role as Iphigenia. The legendary Greek actress Irene Pappas plays Clytemnestra, and incidentally, she appears in both the other movies in this trilogy. All three movies are dominated by very strong women characters, as are many of the Greek tragedies, and actresses of the power of Pappas and in "The Trojan Women" in particular, such legendary actresses as Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave and Geneviève Bujold, do true justice to these great plays by Euripides. The music was composed by another legendary Greek artist, Mikis Theodorakis, who also composed the music for the other two movies. Both the other movies in this trilogy were also widely honored when they were released.
Finally, let me note again how surprising it is that so few of the great tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides have been adapted to film. In these days when there seems no limit to the amount of money that Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney, and others are prepared to spend on providing new content, maybe some of them will discover that there is material of the highest quality in these tragedies that is almost untouched. Thankfully IU's excellent Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance, has never lost sight of these great works and has regularly staged performances of them. This was, by the way, one of the ways we hoped IU's wonderful Conrad Prebys Amphitheater would be used.
And with that, please enjoy, Michael Cacoyannis' "Iphigenia."
Source notes
[1] This was the original title of Nietzsche's first book that in later editions was just titled (in English) "The Birth of Tragedy."
[2] See the discussion in section IV of Aristotle's "Poetics."
[3] This quote is often attributed to Hegel but no source for it seems to exist.