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00:00:30Good afternoon, this is Radio Svoboda, showing the Current Time TV channel, on
00:00:34air is the Archeology program, in the studio Sergey
00:00:36Medvedev. The people's war,
00:00:49breaking and helmets are cracking not only under the walls of ancient
00:00:53Ilion Troy, but in social
00:00:55networks. I don't recall any film recently
00:00:59that...
00:01:30disputes. The film is breaking box office records, but it is discussed no
00:01:34less than it is watched. The main reason for discussions is not
00:01:37special effects and not the plot, but an attempt to re-think
00:01:39one of the main texts of world culture in a new
00:01:43way. Critics argue how permissible it is to transfer an ancient
00:01:46myth into a modern cultural context. Some believe that
00:01:50classics should remain true to their historical era. Others
00:01:53remind us that ancient plots are always
00:01:56re-interpreted with each new generation. Special disputes.
00:02:00In social networks, they discuss whether Helen of Troy, who became
00:02:04a symbol of ancient beauty, can look different from how she was
00:02:07depicted for centuries? The dispute around Odyssey has long gone beyond
00:02:11cinema, for some, the film has become another example of cultural
00:02:14wars around representation and historical authenticity. For
00:02:18others, it is proof that classical works
00:02:22continue to live because each generation asks them new
00:02:25questions. Why is Nolan's new film so fiercely
00:02:29discussed today? And to whom do myths belong, to the past or
00:02:32to the present?
00:02:36That was a story by Anton Sergeyenko, film critic Anton Dolin joins us via Zoom.
00:02:48why there is such, well, not a scandal,
00:02:51but such a fierce discussion? Honestly,
00:02:54I don't recall, in decades, at least, people discussing it so much.
00:02:58Especially since the film is about events
00:03:022800 years ago, an ancient myth. Was such a discussion
00:03:05programmed by Nolan, or did it just accidentally hit
00:03:09some nerve? I will never believe that it was
00:03:13programmed, generally I would confidently classify any theories
00:03:16about hype, as they call
00:03:20it, being produced by the film's authors
00:03:24themselves, the studio that produced it, as conspiratorial.
00:03:27They throw out some legends in order for
00:03:31people to talk more about it and thereby
00:03:34attract attention to the film, that is, from my
00:03:37point of view, this is pure conspiracy theory and nonsense. And
00:03:41Nolan, especially, well, he is a very popular
00:03:44director, very loved by audiences all over the world, but
00:03:48you probably remember his previous career, in these 30
00:03:51years he has never made a film that
00:03:55would cause such a sharp reaction.
00:03:59rating, not rating, but like a database
00:04:30of movies, and people just vote for their favorite
00:04:33movies, and this voting changes all the time, new users
00:04:37appear and vote again, so in 200 in
00:04:41250 - top positions,
00:04:44Nolan has a record number, I think eight of his films made it there,
00:04:48more than Spielberg, more than Cameron, more than Hitchcock,
00:04:52more than anyone, more than Tarkovsky, more than Kurosawa,
00:04:55who are also represented there, what does
00:04:59that mean? Nolan is already loved, Nolan
00:05:03is already awaited,
00:05:05neither he nor his producers needed to
00:05:09specifically invent a scandal, everyone who
00:05:12says that misunderstands
00:05:15the functioning of public opinion mechanisms. After all, if
00:05:19someone decides to cancel a film outright,
00:05:22well, I don't know, if it becomes known that
00:05:25the author of this film did something bad or an actor did something
00:05:29bad or the film itself, I don't know, justifies what public
00:05:32opinion considers evil, in this situation the film loses viewers, not
00:05:36gains them, that is, the opinion that bad publicity is better
00:05:40than no publicity, well, maybe it's better than none.
00:05:42But Nolan had a lot of good publicity, plus a very
00:05:46good reputation, to which adding
00:05:49some dirty theories about his
00:05:51reputation and spreading them was unnecessary for anyone. So,
00:05:55yes, let's discard that theory, but then the question still remains:
00:05:59what was it that caught so much attention, what caused such an explosion, why exactly
00:06:03did the Odyssey become the center of the current cultural
00:06:05wars? Well, I
00:06:08have a simple, root
00:06:11explanation, I won't go into...
00:07:12about what happened later, but Nolan's
00:07:15film is about the taking of Troy, which, by the way, is not
00:07:19described in the Iliad, it is described in Virgil's
00:07:23Aeneid. Virgil owns
00:07:26probably the most famous reinterpretation
00:07:29of Homer in ancient Roman literature, the most famous
00:07:33reinterpretation of Homer, his epics, they go back
00:07:37to ancient Greece to Aeschylus
00:07:40and Sophocles, they were
00:07:43already doing it, and Euripides, and
00:07:46then to Virgil. As
00:07:49is known, the Iliad is a story
00:07:52about how the Achaeans still defeated the
00:07:56Trojans, but this is only an episode of the war, but it ends with
00:07:59Achilles, the most powerful warrior
00:08:02of the Achaeans, killing Hector, the commander
00:08:05of the Trojans, forgive me for the spoiler, probably for many,
00:08:09for many this is all new, but Virgil
00:08:11described it from the side of the Trojans,
00:08:15and his Odysseus, that is, the wanderer,
00:08:18he is a Trojan, Aeneas,
00:08:22and through the eyes of Aeneas,
00:08:25it is also described as a flashback, just as
00:08:29Odysseus remembers his wanderings, Aeneas remembers the taking
00:08:32of Troy, how Troy fell, the story of the Trojan horse
00:08:34is told by Virgil, but nevertheless, this is the same myth, the myth
00:08:38of the taking of the fortress, let's forget Homer, this myth is retold
00:08:42both before and after Homer. And the myth of the hero returning home
00:08:46are two of the four foundational
00:08:49myths. If we transfer them to our days
00:08:52in a completely simplified form, it's the myth
00:08:56of eternal war, where there are no right and wrong, everyone suffers.
00:08:59And it is the myth of homelessness,
00:09:03wanderings, of a person without a home, who
00:09:06dreams and cannot return home. Now,
00:09:09humanity, I guess I can allow myself to say the word
00:09:12humanity, and not name some specific nation,
00:09:16is again experiencing such a powerful collective
00:09:19re-traumatization, these two
00:09:22myths, and
00:09:25Nolan takes the most popular, once again, in history,
00:09:28modern director, the most, this is statistically
00:09:32confirmed, the most beloved director by the public,
00:09:35two main myths out of all four existing ones, and
00:09:39combines them into one film:
00:09:50It's understandable, yes, it's relatable to people, indeed, the most popular director and
00:09:54the two main myths out of the four listed by Borges, but I
00:09:57think that what's very interesting here is that
00:10:01the myth of war is reinterpreted, and we,
00:10:04instead of such a glorification of war,
00:10:07which we, well, or let's say, such a beautiful
00:10:10graphical description of war, as we...
00:10:25a childish reading of the Iliad and
00:10:27the Odyssey, suddenly we have, as it were,
00:10:31an Odyssey for a post-, you already said, post-traumatic
00:10:34society, a reflecting Odyssey, a suffering,
00:10:38traumatized Odyssey, and it seems
00:10:59people defend, when they fight Nolan's
00:11:02Odyssey, this is the main Trojan War now, they
00:11:06defend their own stereotypes, they
00:11:09are not fighting for Homer or Virgil, mm-hmm,
00:11:13I have been looking forward to this film for a long time, and
00:11:17for a long time I've been thinking about how the Trojan War applies to our
00:11:20reality. The main American film of last year, "Battle by Battle," but that is
00:11:24100% the same myth of the Trojan War, there you can even
00:11:28identify this Troy, the fortress, who is Hector,
00:11:31who is Achilles, who is Helen of Troy, all of that is
00:11:35there, the foundations of this myth are already there, well, there it's just
00:11:38for example, it's the main film of last year, for which not a few spears
00:11:42were broken, just to show that it's not just about Nolan, not
00:11:45just about this film,
00:11:48and people
00:11:50fight defending what
00:11:53they... this is war, war is when you defend something of your own
00:11:57from attack, right? There's also war around the film.
00:12:01Different people defend different things. Over the
00:12:04last 2 weeks of these especially intensified wars
00:12:07on the internet, I, as a defender of the film, on the contrary,
00:12:11first a defender of Nolan's right to express himself,
00:12:15a defender of Nolan's right not to be attacked before
00:12:30initially clear, so there are
00:12:33those who attack this film, well,
00:12:37for their formal
00:12:40triggers, their main trigger is that Hollywood
00:12:44defends left-wing ideas and so-called
00:12:48wokeism, I don't know if it's an imaginary or real
00:12:51concept, it's hard for me to say, and that the entire film
00:12:54is made to... instill in people's minds that Helen was
00:12:57black, not white, and also, that there was a fighter, at first
00:13:01they thought it would be Achilles, although Achilles is not in the Odyssey,
00:13:04so, it's
00:13:06a transgender person, we're talking about, now,
00:13:09yes, actually the character Sinon, a completely different character,
00:13:13they just managed to scoff from all sides, here he
00:13:17is, a mighty Greek warrior, look at him,
00:13:20a meter and a half tall, absolutely disgusting, wokeism, I would
00:13:24say. Until it turned out that the entire plot proposed by Nolan
00:13:27is precisely about this flimsy little man,
00:13:31unsuited for war, who was partially
00:13:34mobilized like that, that's exactly what it's about,
00:13:37therefore this actor, this is
00:13:41one, one type of war, others started
00:13:44defending history, that everything is not historical, this is already
00:13:48another line of defense, that the film is too
00:13:51ahistorical, well, of course one can...
00:14:55tells us that Helen was not the cause of the Trojan War, in
00:14:58his version, it was a political act, like any war,
00:15:02it's one state seizing another, and
00:15:05the fact that Helen is just a pretext, an invented pretext, well, it's like
00:15:09the assassination of Ferdinand, we won't seriously argue with each other
00:15:12how significant a historical figure he was, it doesn't matter,
00:15:16it never did, but from the shot that killed him, the First World
00:15:19War began, here it is like that, before our dear
00:15:23viewers and listeners get indignant about this, I want
00:15:27to clarify for them, perhaps not all of them know this, that the first version that
00:15:31Helen was a pretext was put forward by Herodotus, Christopher
00:15:34Nolan didn't invent it, in the film itself.
00:15:38Yes, in the film they even say that the Trojan War
00:15:42actually started because of the trade routes that Troy controlled,
00:15:46of course, this is what is said in the film, and this is Herodotus's version,
00:15:49finally, the third line of defense, completely separate from
00:15:52this, these are people, mostly highly
00:15:55intellectual and well-read, who are not
00:15:59guarding so-called traditional
00:16:02values, who do not insist on
00:16:05historicity, but say that Nolan... they don't say that Nolan is not
00:16:08faithful to Homer's ideas, in my opinion,
00:16:12they are also taking a lot on themselves, firstly, because Nolan
00:16:15never declared that he would be faithful to these ideas, well, just as
00:16:18Racine was not faithful to Homer's ideas
00:16:22or Euripides or Sophocles, when he retold in
00:16:26the 17th century in his tragedies those tragedies,
00:16:29and Jean Anouilh or Sartre were also not faithful to ancient
00:16:33ideas, when, that is, endlessly in different
00:16:35times. Or Joyce, who wrote his
00:16:39Ulysses, all of this was always reborn with new
00:16:41ideas, no one was offended by this until now, I don't understand why
00:16:45they are offended now, so I want to say, as
00:16:48a person who has just, in the last few months, reread at least
00:16:51the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid,
00:16:54that my ideas, generally standard
00:16:58ideas about these texts, as
00:17:01glorifying, praising, for example,
00:17:04war and the valor of Odysseus himself, are completely...
00:17:37and for the author, by choice of epithets, and by how
00:17:41it is done, it describes it directly as a bloody slaughter,
00:17:44what guts they pull out, how mercilessly both Hector
00:17:48and then Achilles behave, how everyone around them hopes for their mercy and
00:17:51nobility, they show neither mercy
00:17:55nor nobility, so the idea
00:17:58that these great epics about a great war or its consequences
00:18:02glorified this war, and now Nolan has done something
00:18:05completely revolutionary, on the contrary, he has branded
00:18:09war, this is also, at the very least, not entirely true, the
00:18:12Trojan War in the Aeneid is shown as
00:18:16a terrible natural disaster, and
00:18:19although Aeneas, having arrived in those places where the state of Italy would later be founded,
00:18:23and before that the Roman Empire, he himself
00:18:27starts a war and is, as it were, a positive hero, but also a positive
00:18:30hero who abandoned the woman he loved, who committed suicide, it's also
00:18:34not all that simple with Odysseus, this...
00:18:37very far from any unambiguous glorification, these are not
00:18:40medieval knights, although there
00:18:49that Nolan, of course, offered his absolutely
00:18:52modern version of the myth, but at the same
00:18:56time, in many ways, he follows simply step by step
00:18:59these myths and
00:19:02to completely not appreciate and not see this, it seems to me, would be
00:19:50there was originally some kind of cultural war, the audience
00:19:54eagerly seeks for wokeism, that's how
00:19:57I'd put it, they jumped
00:20:00on it, it could have been anyone but Nolan, Nolan just happened to be in the
00:20:04way, the Odyssey happened to be in the way, basically the main thing was the search for wokeism on...
00:20:37who raised these Nolanesque
00:20:41things as a banner, when we talk about
00:20:44how everyone attacked Nolan's Odyssey, we need to put it
00:20:48in context. And...
00:21:20it beats the fact that the hero returns and does not forgive his
00:21:23enemies who, yes, occupied his house and wanted
00:21:26to kill his son, but they did not kill his son and did not occupy his house,
00:21:30that is, this ending is akin to the ending of Dogville, Trier's,
00:21:34although Dogville is akin, of course, to Odyssey and Homer,
00:21:37the hero stages a bloody bath, and this is
00:21:40a story not about a hero or an anti-hero, it is a story about how you
00:21:44react to this bloody bath, as someone quite wittily
00:21:47wrote in the comments: that this is, of course,
00:21:51a SVO veteran who returned home,
00:21:53looks around his wife has some, other men are swarming
00:21:57around, but he takes his faithful collage
00:22:00or dagger, whatever he has, a bow, yes,
00:22:04he shoots, he's better than all of them, he's used to this business, he killed
00:22:07so many people, well, it all started, so it's
00:22:11also very modern for that reason, so all these
00:22:14wars are an attempt by people to deny
00:22:16the obvious, that Nolan, with all his
00:22:20strange, it would seem, decisions,
00:22:50many intuitive choices, he intuitively sought a way
00:22:54of narration where every decision, musical,
00:22:57casting, and so on, would affect his very large
00:23:01audience, and that's what he did, everyone is annoyed
00:23:04now, at first they were annoyed by these woke things, it's very
00:23:08funny, he's not woke at all, but
00:23:12feminists have always hated him for not being able,
00:23:14which is pure truth, in most films he cannot, he cannot
00:23:18create female characters.
00:23:32generally speaking, precisely in his work, I'm not
00:23:36talking about his personal choices, whether he votes for Democrats or
00:23:39for conservatives, I have no idea, so this is all
00:23:43made up again, even if you consider that
00:23:45Odyssey is his most left-wing film, but everything is
00:24:50dances, and they will definitely lose, they
00:24:53stand in this narrow, well,
00:24:56opening, like we won't give up, we'll say until the end that this film is
00:25:00useless, the army fighting
00:25:03them has already bypassed this, it has already long captured
00:25:07that Greece that they are still trying to defend, well, yes, some
00:25:10imaginary Greece, that same cardboard Reichstag, that same
00:25:13imaginary Troy, which they don't like, indeed, yes, I
00:25:16agree, this is another translation of Homer.
00:25:20Humanity has been translating Homer for almost 3000 years,
00:25:24rereading and inventing an Odyssey for each
00:25:27era, now for our
00:25:45our discussion of Christopher Nolan's film Odyssey,
00:25:48which caused absolutely unprecedented discussions
00:25:52in social networks, in public opinion. Did
00:25:55Christopher Nolan manage to make a new translation of the Odyssey
00:25:59into modern language? Culturologist Jan Levchik reflects.
00:26:06Well, strange as it may sound,
00:26:09any translation of Homer is adequate, simply because
00:26:12of the fact that um, well, let's say, there is only
00:26:16one visual tradition that we can
00:26:20refer to, that is the so-called classical
00:26:23painting of old masters, relatively old, because
00:26:27they
00:26:29also belong to modern times.
00:28:32The gods decreed to love whites and decreed not
00:28:36to love blacks, right? What does
00:28:38that mean? Gasan writes that
00:28:41there are different versions, he gives different
00:28:44comments, that is, it's a complex moment, most likely
00:28:48related to the implicit
00:28:51racism of the Stalin era, despite
00:28:54the broadcasting of universal internationalism
00:28:58and the famous ridiculous utopia
00:29:01expressed in the aria from
00:29:04the film Circus, right, so, with a dark-skinned
00:29:08boy in the arms of representatives of different Soviet
00:29:11nationalities, that is, it means
00:29:14that what a simple Soviet post-Soviet
00:29:17person is confident in, they recently
00:29:20climbed out of a tree, this is broadcast
00:29:24at the highest level, therefore it is erased
00:29:27from the Russian translation
00:29:30of Homer.
00:29:35That was culturologist Jan Levchenko in the story of our correspondent Anton
00:29:38Sergienko. And joining us via Zoom is the very authoritative
00:29:41philologist-classicist, Gasan Guseynov. Gasan,
00:29:53also, in recent decades, in the Russian language,
00:29:56has acquired completely strange
00:29:59overtones. I want to make a small correction to Jan Levchenko's words, the fact is that I
00:30:48was quoting a poem,
00:30:52an inscription, a Pompeian inscription,
00:30:55translated from Latin by Fyodor Alexandrovich Petrovsky.
00:30:58Фёдором Александровичем Петровским.