Alejandro Amenabar’s Agora: a gift for classicists (updated)
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Classicists are going to have a field day with Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora, which premiered yesterday at the Cannes film festival. Starring Rachel Weisz as Hypatia, the 4th- to 5th-century Alexandrian astronomer, philosopher and mathematician, who was brutally killed by an angry Christian mob, it avoids some of the pitfalls of movies set in the ancient world. The characters behave naturally and speak normally, without either jolting archaisms or ridiculous anachronisms, and the world that has been created to stand in for Alexandria – a huge set on Malta – works well, with minimum CGI nastiness and an obvious attention to historical detail. The costumes and the “look” of the characters was based on Romano-Egyptian mummy portraits, said Amenábar at his press conference, and that was deftly done.
Not a whole lot is known about Hypatia. She is the first woman philosopher-mathematician known to history, and was the daughter of Theon, the director of the Mouseion in Alexandria. According to the Suda, the Byzantine encyclopedia, she was supposed to have edited the work of Apollonius (geometry) and Diophantus (arithmetic). Her pupil Synesius of Cyrene – a character in the film – leaves traces of her neoplatonic philosophy. One colourful anecdote told about her in antiquity was that she presented a besotted pupil with a bloody sanitary towel – an episode deftly woven into Amenábar’s script. Then there was her death. “Hypatia was torn from her chariot,” wrote Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the reader (alias Peter the Lector) and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.” Let it be noted that Amenábar’s Hypatia gets off much more lightly than that.
Socrates Scholasticus’ account, c450, goes like this:
“There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not infrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in coming to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more. Yet even she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes [the Roman prefect] it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop [Cyril]. Some of them therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles [oyster shells]. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.
Within these historical confines, Amenábar’s story is cleverly done. Orestes the Roman prefect, Cyril, Peter, Synesius: all feature in the film, with a major invention in Davus, Hypatia’s slave, played by Max Minghella. Hypatia has symbolised much in her after-life, but for Amenábar she is chiefly an anti-clerical heroine; an Enlightenment martyr. She stands in the film as a calm centre around which religious fanatics whirl violently, inhumanly and cruelly. Amenábar was perfectly upfront on Sunday about how the material gave him “the chance to make a film about today”. It could easily be seen as an anti-Christian film – they certainly top the brutality league table, followed in short order by the Jews and then the pagans.
August 31, 2009 at 3:51 PM
Sounds great — Hypatia makes an extensive appearance-by-reference in Umberto Eco’s novel “Baudolino” as well…
May 28, 2010 at 8:23 AM
May 28, 2010
Love Amid the Togas and the Intolerant
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: May 28, 2010
At first glance “Agora,” a rousing, finger-pointing drama from the Chilean-born director Alejandro Amenábar (“The Others,” “The Sea Inside”) is a bit of a puzzle. This is a good thing, since most movies plop down in easily recognizable categories and stay there, troubling neither their own intellectual inertia nor that of the audience.
“Agora,” bristling with ideas and topical provocations, unfolds in a world of togas, sandals and high-flown language, a setting that might lead you to expect camp, classicism or “Gladiator.” What you get, at least in the early scenes, is the story of three young men with a crush on their science teacher. Her name is Hypatia, she is a noblewoman in the Egyptian city of Alexandria — it’s the fourth century A.D., by the way — and since she is played by Rachel Weisz, you can hardly blame them. Hypatia, who is based on a historical figure, pursues the mysteries of the cosmos with dogged dialectical skill and is regarded throughout the city with admiration and awe. One of her slaves, Davus (Max Minghella), visibly pines for her, as does a shy pupil named Synesius (Rupert Evans), and one much less shy named Orestes (Oscar Isaac), who propositions her in the famous library of Alexandria, which she directs. Later he makes a public declaration of his love, and she responds by presenting him with a handkerchief stained with her menstrual blood, a rejection much more blunt than any text message.
But I’m ahead of the story, which is only partly about the lovelorn students and their lovely instructor. Hypatia, doted on by her father, Theon (Michael Lonsdale), is not only indifferent to male desire but to the consequences of the crisis that is threatening the peace of her city. Alexandria’s pagan aristocracy, to which Hypatia belongs, is challenged by a rebellious and increasingly militant Christian population, with the city’s Jews caught in the middle and its class divisions exacerbated by religious tension. In the midst of intense sectarian conflict Hypatia persists in trying, centuries before Kepler and Galileo, to understand the laws that govern the motions of the planets.
Mr. Amenábar, working from an insightful script that he wrote with Mateo Gil, focuses on two moments when the ancient culture war reached a fever pitch and shows that no group is entirely innocent of violence and intolerance. Whoever is in power tries to preserve it by fair means or foul, and whoever wants power uses brutality to acquire it. So in the first half of the film the insurgent Christian mob draws pagan blood, and the beleaguered pagan elite, including Theon and Orestes, meets the threat with savagery.
Later, when the Christians are in the ascendancy, and many of the pagans have converted, the Christians and the Jews start killing one another. Orestes, now a Christian, serves the Roman Empire in a position of authority, while Synesius has become a bishop, and Davus, radicalized by earlier bloodshed, has become a member of a black-robed Christian militia called the Parabolani, led by a former street preacher named Ammonius (Ashraf Barhom), who enforce their uncompromising notions of morality with clubs, knives and stones.
Hypatia, a humanist and an intellectual, finds herself threatened from all sides. And though her predicament is sometimes laid out in heavy thematic speeches, it is also very moving. This is partly because Ms. Weisz is such a sympathetic presence and adept at showing how her character’s combination of wisdom and unworldliness makes her vulnerable to the guile, cowardice and opportunism of others. But it is also because Mr. Amenábar and Mr. Gil do not stack the odds in her favor. Films about ideological strife in the past frequently reassure modern audiences with a vision of progress in which ignorance is at least partly vanquished and enlightenment is allowed to prevail.
I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say that “Agora” treats this kind of wishful thinking with a skepticism that makes the film not only sad but also chilling. It is entirely — not dogmatically but stubbornly — on the side of reason, science and liberalism, values opposed by superstition, fundamentalism and political expediency. The world of Alexandria in the later years of the Roman Empire is one in which the forces of intolerance, whatever deity they profess, always seem to have the upper hand, and in which even ostensibly rational, compassionate rulers collaborate with the faith-based holy warriors.
The parallels between then and now are hardly subtle. The warning bell that “Agora” sounds may be loud and at times a little grating, but what’s wrong with that? The skeptical and the secular also need stories of martyrdom and rousing acts of cinematic preaching.
May 28, 2010 at 10:22 AM
Didn’t realize this was out, must check it out…
May 28, 2010 at 11:29 AM
released just today..