CURRENTTIME — broadcast
20260806 160000 UTC
343 transcript segments
Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API (Chirp) + Gemini 2.5 Flash Non-Thinking
Data courtesy of The GDELT Project (https://www.gdeltproject.org/), from the Internet Archive TV News Archive.
Machine transcription. Treat it as a searchable index of what was broadcast, not a verbatim quotation record.

[00:00:30] Good afternoon, this is Radio Svoboda, showing the Current Time TV channel, on
[00:00:34] air is the Archeology program, in the studio Sergey
[00:00:36] Medvedev. The people's war,
[00:00:49] breaking and helmets are cracking not only under the walls of ancient
[00:00:53] Ilion Troy, but in social
[00:00:55] networks. I don't recall any film recently
[00:00:59] that...
[00:01:30] disputes. The film is breaking box office records, but it is discussed no
[00:01:34] less than it is watched. The main reason for discussions is not
[00:01:37] special effects and not the plot, but an attempt to re-think
[00:01:39] one of the main texts of world culture in a new
[00:01:43] way. Critics argue how permissible it is to transfer an ancient
[00:01:46] myth into a modern cultural context. Some believe that
[00:01:50] classics should remain true to their historical era. Others
[00:01:53] remind us that ancient plots are always
[00:01:56] re-interpreted with each new generation. Special disputes.
[00:02:00] In social networks, they discuss whether Helen of Troy, who became
[00:02:04] a symbol of ancient beauty, can look different from how she was
[00:02:07] depicted for centuries? The dispute around Odyssey has long gone beyond
[00:02:11] cinema, for some, the film has become another example of cultural
[00:02:14] wars around representation and historical authenticity. For
[00:02:18] others, it is proof that classical works
[00:02:22] continue to live because each generation asks them new
[00:02:25] questions. Why is Nolan's new film so fiercely
[00:02:29] discussed today? And to whom do myths belong, to the past or
[00:02:32] to the present?
[00:02:36] That was a story by Anton Sergeyenko, film critic Anton Dolin joins us via Zoom.
[00:02:48] why there is such, well, not a scandal,
[00:02:51] but such a fierce discussion? Honestly,
[00:02:54] I don't recall, in decades, at least, people discussing it so much.
[00:02:58] Especially since the film is about events
[00:03:02] 2800 years ago, an ancient myth. Was such a discussion
[00:03:05] programmed by Nolan, or did it just accidentally hit
[00:03:09] some nerve? I will never believe that it was
[00:03:13] programmed, generally I would confidently classify any theories
[00:03:16] about hype, as they call
[00:03:20] it, being produced by the film's authors
[00:03:24] themselves, the studio that produced it, as conspiratorial.
[00:03:27] They throw out some legends in order for
[00:03:31] people to talk more about it and thereby
[00:03:34] attract attention to the film, that is, from my
[00:03:37] point of view, this is pure conspiracy theory and nonsense. And
[00:03:41] Nolan, especially, well, he is a very popular
[00:03:44] director, very loved by audiences all over the world, but
[00:03:48] you probably remember his previous career, in these 30
[00:03:51] years he has never made a film that
[00:03:55] would cause such a sharp reaction.
[00:03:59] rating, not rating, but like a database
[00:04:30] of movies, and people just vote for their favorite
[00:04:33] movies, and this voting changes all the time, new users
[00:04:37] appear and vote again, so in 200 in
[00:04:41] 250 - top positions,
[00:04:44] Nolan has a record number, I think eight of his films made it there,
[00:04:48] more than Spielberg, more than Cameron, more than Hitchcock,
[00:04:52] more than anyone, more than Tarkovsky, more than Kurosawa,
[00:04:55] who are also represented there, what does
[00:04:59] that mean? Nolan is already loved, Nolan
[00:05:03] is already awaited,
[00:05:05] neither he nor his producers needed to
[00:05:09] specifically invent a scandal, everyone who
[00:05:12] says that misunderstands
[00:05:15] the functioning of public opinion mechanisms. After all, if
[00:05:19] someone decides to cancel a film outright,
[00:05:22] well, I don't know, if it becomes known that
[00:05:25] the author of this film did something bad or an actor did something
[00:05:29] bad or the film itself, I don't know, justifies what public
[00:05:32] opinion considers evil, in this situation the film loses viewers, not
[00:05:36] gains them, that is, the opinion that bad publicity is better
[00:05:40] than no publicity, well, maybe it's better than none.
[00:05:42] But Nolan had a lot of good publicity, plus a very
[00:05:46] good reputation, to which adding
[00:05:49] some dirty theories about his
[00:05:51] reputation and spreading them was unnecessary for anyone. So,
[00:05:55] yes, let's discard that theory, but then the question still remains:
[00:05:59] what was it that caught so much attention, what caused such an explosion, why exactly
[00:06:03] did the Odyssey become the center of the current cultural
[00:06:05] wars? Well, I
[00:06:08] have a simple, root
[00:06:11] explanation, I won't go into...
[00:07:12] about what happened later, but Nolan's
[00:07:15] film is about the taking of Troy, which, by the way, is not
[00:07:19] described in the Iliad, it is described in Virgil's
[00:07:23] Aeneid. Virgil owns
[00:07:26] probably the most famous reinterpretation
[00:07:29] of Homer in ancient Roman literature, the most famous
[00:07:33] reinterpretation of Homer, his epics, they go back
[00:07:37] to ancient Greece to Aeschylus
[00:07:40] and Sophocles, they were
[00:07:43] already doing it, and Euripides, and
[00:07:46] then to Virgil. As
[00:07:49] is known, the Iliad is a story
[00:07:52] about how the Achaeans still defeated the
[00:07:56] Trojans, but this is only an episode of the war, but it ends with
[00:07:59] Achilles, the most powerful warrior
[00:08:02] of the Achaeans, killing Hector, the commander
[00:08:05] of the Trojans, forgive me for the spoiler, probably for many,
[00:08:09] for many this is all new, but Virgil
[00:08:11] described it from the side of the Trojans,
[00:08:15] and his Odysseus, that is, the wanderer,
[00:08:18] he is a Trojan, Aeneas,
[00:08:22] and through the eyes of Aeneas,
[00:08:25] it is also described as a flashback, just as
[00:08:29] Odysseus remembers his wanderings, Aeneas remembers the taking
[00:08:32] of Troy, how Troy fell, the story of the Trojan horse
[00:08:34] is told by Virgil, but nevertheless, this is the same myth, the myth
[00:08:38] of the taking of the fortress, let's forget Homer, this myth is retold
[00:08:42] both before and after Homer. And the myth of the hero returning home
[00:08:46] are two of the four foundational
[00:08:49] myths. If we transfer them to our days
[00:08:52] in a completely simplified form, it's the myth
[00:08:56] of eternal war, where there are no right and wrong, everyone suffers.
[00:08:59] And it is the myth of homelessness,
[00:09:03] wanderings, of a person without a home, who
[00:09:06] dreams and cannot return home. Now,
[00:09:09] humanity, I guess I can allow myself to say the word
[00:09:12] humanity, and not name some specific nation,
[00:09:16] is again experiencing such a powerful collective
[00:09:19] re-traumatization, these two
[00:09:22] myths, and
[00:09:25] Nolan takes the most popular, once again, in history,
[00:09:28] modern director, the most, this is statistically
[00:09:32] confirmed, the most beloved director by the public,
[00:09:35] two main myths out of all four existing ones, and
[00:09:39] combines them into one film:
[00:09:50] It's understandable, yes, it's relatable to people, indeed, the most popular director and
[00:09:54] the two main myths out of the four listed by Borges, but I
[00:09:57] think that what's very interesting here is that
[00:10:01] the myth of war is reinterpreted, and we,
[00:10:04] instead of such a glorification of war,
[00:10:07] which we, well, or let's say, such a beautiful
[00:10:10] graphical description of war, as we...
[00:10:25] a childish reading of the Iliad and
[00:10:27] the Odyssey, suddenly we have, as it were,
[00:10:31] an Odyssey for a post-, you already said, post-traumatic
[00:10:34] society, a reflecting Odyssey, a suffering,
[00:10:38] traumatized Odyssey, and it seems
[00:10:59] people defend, when they fight Nolan's
[00:11:02] Odyssey, this is the main Trojan War now, they
[00:11:06] defend their own stereotypes, they
[00:11:09] are not fighting for Homer or Virgil, mm-hmm,
[00:11:13] I have been looking forward to this film for a long time, and
[00:11:17] for a long time I've been thinking about how the Trojan War applies to our
[00:11:20] reality. The main American film of last year, "Battle by Battle," but that is
[00:11:24] 100% the same myth of the Trojan War, there you can even
[00:11:28] identify this Troy, the fortress, who is Hector,
[00:11:31] who is Achilles, who is Helen of Troy, all of that is
[00:11:35] there, the foundations of this myth are already there, well, there it's just
[00:11:38] for example, it's the main film of last year, for which not a few spears
[00:11:42] were broken, just to show that it's not just about Nolan, not
[00:11:45] just about this film,
[00:11:48] and people
[00:11:50] fight defending what
[00:11:53] they... this is war, war is when you defend something of your own
[00:11:57] from attack, right? There's also war around the film.
[00:12:01] Different people defend different things. Over the
[00:12:04] last 2 weeks of these especially intensified wars
[00:12:07] on the internet, I, as a defender of the film, on the contrary,
[00:12:11] first a defender of Nolan's right to express himself,
[00:12:15] a defender of Nolan's right not to be attacked before
[00:12:30] initially clear, so there are
[00:12:33] those who attack this film, well,
[00:12:37] for their formal
[00:12:40] triggers, their main trigger is that Hollywood
[00:12:44] defends left-wing ideas and so-called
[00:12:48] wokeism, I don't know if it's an imaginary or real
[00:12:51] concept, it's hard for me to say, and that the entire film
[00:12:54] is made to... instill in people's minds that Helen was
[00:12:57] black, not white, and also, that there was a fighter, at first
[00:13:01] they thought it would be Achilles, although Achilles is not in the Odyssey,
[00:13:04] so, it's
[00:13:06] a transgender person, we're talking about, now,
[00:13:09] yes, actually the character Sinon, a completely different character,
[00:13:13] they just managed to scoff from all sides, here he
[00:13:17] is, a mighty Greek warrior, look at him,
[00:13:20] a meter and a half tall, absolutely disgusting, wokeism, I would
[00:13:24] say. Until it turned out that the entire plot proposed by Nolan
[00:13:27] is precisely about this flimsy little man,
[00:13:31] unsuited for war, who was partially
[00:13:34] mobilized like that, that's exactly what it's about,
[00:13:37] therefore this actor, this is
[00:13:41] one, one type of war, others started
[00:13:44] defending history, that everything is not historical, this is already
[00:13:48] another line of defense, that the film is too
[00:13:51] ahistorical, well, of course one can...
[00:14:55] tells us that Helen was not the cause of the Trojan War, in
[00:14:58] his version, it was a political act, like any war,
[00:15:02] it's one state seizing another, and
[00:15:05] the fact that Helen is just a pretext, an invented pretext, well, it's like
[00:15:09] the assassination of Ferdinand, we won't seriously argue with each other
[00:15:12] how significant a historical figure he was, it doesn't matter,
[00:15:16] it never did, but from the shot that killed him, the First World
[00:15:19] War began, here it is like that, before our dear
[00:15:23] viewers and listeners get indignant about this, I want
[00:15:27] to clarify for them, perhaps not all of them know this, that the first version that
[00:15:31] Helen was a pretext was put forward by Herodotus, Christopher
[00:15:34] Nolan didn't invent it, in the film itself.
[00:15:38] Yes, in the film they even say that the Trojan War
[00:15:42] actually started because of the trade routes that Troy controlled,
[00:15:46] of course, this is what is said in the film, and this is Herodotus's version,
[00:15:49] finally, the third line of defense, completely separate from
[00:15:52] this, these are people, mostly highly
[00:15:55] intellectual and well-read, who are not
[00:15:59] guarding so-called traditional
[00:16:02] values, who do not insist on
[00:16:05] historicity, but say that Nolan... they don't say that Nolan is not
[00:16:08] faithful to Homer's ideas, in my opinion,
[00:16:12] they are also taking a lot on themselves, firstly, because Nolan
[00:16:15] never declared that he would be faithful to these ideas, well, just as
[00:16:18] Racine was not faithful to Homer's ideas
[00:16:22] or Euripides or Sophocles, when he retold in
[00:16:26] the 17th century in his tragedies those tragedies,
[00:16:29] and Jean Anouilh or Sartre were also not faithful to ancient
[00:16:33] ideas, when, that is, endlessly in different
[00:16:35] times. Or Joyce, who wrote his
[00:16:39] Ulysses, all of this was always reborn with new
[00:16:41] ideas, no one was offended by this until now, I don't understand why
[00:16:45] they are offended now, so I want to say, as
[00:16:48] a person who has just, in the last few months, reread at least
[00:16:51] the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid,
[00:16:54] that my ideas, generally standard
[00:16:58] ideas about these texts, as
[00:17:01] glorifying, praising, for example,
[00:17:04] war and the valor of Odysseus himself, are completely...
[00:17:37] and for the author, by choice of epithets, and by how
[00:17:41] it is done, it describes it directly as a bloody slaughter,
[00:17:44] what guts they pull out, how mercilessly both Hector
[00:17:48] and then Achilles behave, how everyone around them hopes for their mercy and
[00:17:51] nobility, they show neither mercy
[00:17:55] nor nobility, so the idea
[00:17:58] that these great epics about a great war or its consequences
[00:18:02] glorified this war, and now Nolan has done something
[00:18:05] completely revolutionary, on the contrary, he has branded
[00:18:09] war, this is also, at the very least, not entirely true, the
[00:18:12] Trojan War in the Aeneid is shown as
[00:18:16] a terrible natural disaster, and
[00:18:19] although Aeneas, having arrived in those places where the state of Italy would later be founded,
[00:18:23] and before that the Roman Empire, he himself
[00:18:27] starts a war and is, as it were, a positive hero, but also a positive
[00:18:30] hero who abandoned the woman he loved, who committed suicide, it's also
[00:18:34] not all that simple with Odysseus, this...
[00:18:37] very far from any unambiguous glorification, these are not
[00:18:40] medieval knights, although there
[00:18:49] that Nolan, of course, offered his absolutely
[00:18:52] modern version of the myth, but at the same
[00:18:56] time, in many ways, he follows simply step by step
[00:18:59] these myths and
[00:19:02] to completely not appreciate and not see this, it seems to me, would be
[00:19:50] there was originally some kind of cultural war, the audience
[00:19:54] eagerly seeks for wokeism, that's how
[00:19:57] I'd put it, they jumped
[00:20:00] on it, it could have been anyone but Nolan, Nolan just happened to be in the
[00:20:04] way, the Odyssey happened to be in the way, basically the main thing was the search for wokeism on...
[00:20:37] who raised these Nolanesque
[00:20:41] things as a banner, when we talk about
[00:20:44] how everyone attacked Nolan's Odyssey, we need to put it
[00:20:48] in context. And...
[00:21:20] it beats the fact that the hero returns and does not forgive his
[00:21:23] enemies who, yes, occupied his house and wanted
[00:21:26] to kill his son, but they did not kill his son and did not occupy his house,
[00:21:30] that is, this ending is akin to the ending of Dogville, Trier's,
[00:21:34] although Dogville is akin, of course, to Odyssey and Homer,
[00:21:37] the hero stages a bloody bath, and this is
[00:21:40] a story not about a hero or an anti-hero, it is a story about how you
[00:21:44] react to this bloody bath, as someone quite wittily
[00:21:47] wrote in the comments: that this is, of course,
[00:21:51] a SVO veteran who returned home,
[00:21:53] looks around his wife has some, other men are swarming
[00:21:57] around, but he takes his faithful collage
[00:22:00] or dagger, whatever he has, a bow, yes,
[00:22:04] he shoots, he's better than all of them, he's used to this business, he killed
[00:22:07] so many people, well, it all started, so it's
[00:22:11] also very modern for that reason, so all these
[00:22:14] wars are an attempt by people to deny
[00:22:16] the obvious, that Nolan, with all his
[00:22:20] strange, it would seem, decisions,
[00:22:50] many intuitive choices, he intuitively sought a way
[00:22:54] of narration where every decision, musical,
[00:22:57] casting, and so on, would affect his very large
[00:23:01] audience, and that's what he did, everyone is annoyed
[00:23:04] now, at first they were annoyed by these woke things, it's very
[00:23:08] funny, he's not woke at all, but
[00:23:12] feminists have always hated him for not being able,
[00:23:14] which is pure truth, in most films he cannot, he cannot
[00:23:18] create female characters.
[00:23:32] generally speaking, precisely in his work, I'm not
[00:23:36] talking about his personal choices, whether he votes for Democrats or
[00:23:39] for conservatives, I have no idea, so this is all
[00:23:43] made up again, even if you consider that
[00:23:45] Odyssey is his most left-wing film, but everything is
[00:24:50] dances, and they will definitely lose, they
[00:24:53] stand in this narrow, well,
[00:24:56] opening, like we won't give up, we'll say until the end that this film is
[00:25:00] useless, the army fighting
[00:25:03] them has already bypassed this, it has already long captured
[00:25:07] that Greece that they are still trying to defend, well, yes, some
[00:25:10] imaginary Greece, that same cardboard Reichstag, that same
[00:25:13] imaginary Troy, which they don't like, indeed, yes, I
[00:25:16] agree, this is another translation of Homer.
[00:25:20] Humanity has been translating Homer for almost 3000 years,
[00:25:24] rereading and inventing an Odyssey for each
[00:25:27] era, now for our
[00:25:45] our discussion of Christopher Nolan's film Odyssey,
[00:25:48] which caused absolutely unprecedented discussions
[00:25:52] in social networks, in public opinion. Did
[00:25:55] Christopher Nolan manage to make a new translation of the Odyssey
[00:25:59] into modern language? Culturologist Jan Levchik reflects.
[00:26:06] Well, strange as it may sound,
[00:26:09] any translation of Homer is adequate, simply because
[00:26:12] of the fact that um, well, let's say, there is only
[00:26:16] one visual tradition that we can
[00:26:20] refer to, that is the so-called classical
[00:26:23] painting of old masters, relatively old, because
[00:26:27] they
[00:26:29] also belong to modern times.
[00:28:32] The gods decreed to love whites and decreed not
[00:28:36] to love blacks, right? What does
[00:28:38] that mean? Gasan writes that
[00:28:41] there are different versions, he gives different
[00:28:44] comments, that is, it's a complex moment, most likely
[00:28:48] related to the implicit
[00:28:51] racism of the Stalin era, despite
[00:28:54] the broadcasting of universal internationalism
[00:28:58] and the famous ridiculous utopia
[00:29:01] expressed in the aria from
[00:29:04] the film Circus, right, so, with a dark-skinned
[00:29:08] boy in the arms of representatives of different Soviet
[00:29:11] nationalities, that is, it means
[00:29:14] that what a simple Soviet post-Soviet
[00:29:17] person is confident in, they recently
[00:29:20] climbed out of a tree, this is broadcast
[00:29:24] at the highest level, therefore it is erased
[00:29:27] from the Russian translation
[00:29:30] of Homer.
[00:29:35] That was culturologist Jan Levchenko in the story of our correspondent Anton
[00:29:38] Sergienko. And joining us via Zoom is the very authoritative
[00:29:41] philologist-classicist, Gasan Guseynov. Gasan,
[00:29:53] also, in recent decades, in the Russian language,
[00:29:56] has acquired completely strange
[00:29:59] overtones. I want to make a small correction to Jan Levchenko's words, the fact is that I
[00:30:48] was quoting a poem,
[00:30:52] an inscription, a Pompeian inscription,
[00:30:55] translated from Latin by Fyodor Alexandrovich Petrovsky.
[00:30:58] Фёдором Александровичем Петровским.