Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes
“The wake of our dreams is Greek” --George Steiner
This episode sets the tone for the rest of the series, introducing the fundamental idea Marker and his participants explore: For centuries, we’ve used Greek civilization as a touchstone, but as John Winkler—classics scholar, queer historian, and one-time monk—says, looking at ancient Greece is like trying to determine what lies beneath a face covered in many layers of makeup.
The concept of the individual, calls to moderation, the value of knowing one’s self: classical Greek politics and culture have often been represented as models of rationality and order. But, as this episode makes clear, this is not because Greeks were particularly enlightened. On the contrary, order is the prize in a hard-fought battle against humanity’s dark, incestuous, and violent sides—as embodied in the story of Oedipus. Rather than embracing simple binaries, ancient Greece—like Oedipus standing at the spot where three roads meet, killing the man he will later learn is his father—embraced broader choices, including those that lead to the mysterious and unknown.
Up Next in Season 1
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The Owl's Legacy: Olympics, or Imagin...
Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes
“Every European era has formed its own image of Greece made up from its own imagination. There is so much self-projection and misinterpretation.” -- Cornelius Castoriades
We begin with the personal. In interviews, classicists Manuela Sm...
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The Owl's Legacy: Democracy, or City ...
Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes
“Modern and ancient democracy have no genetic relationship” -- Mihalis Sakellariou
An in-depth—but not overly dense—exploration of how Athenian democracy worked, and the key ways it differs from modern states using the word. Ancient Gre...
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The Owl's Legacy: Nostalgia, or The I...
Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes
“It’s the most Greek word I know. In a sense, it defines Greece.” --Vassilis Vassilikos
Nostalgia is there right at the start of the Greek literary tradition. Odysseus, after a decade of fighting the Trojan War, must wander another deca...
