Comments on the Pearl Fishers of Georges Bizet
2018.09.22 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. One of the most popular songs in the vast history of opera is a two-man aria sung by a tenor and a baritone in Les pêcheurs de perles, or The Pearl Fishers, by Georges Bizet, with libretto by Eugène Cormon and Michel Carré. The formal title of this aria, commonly known in English as “The Pearl Fishers Duet,” is “Au fond du temple saint”, which I translate as “In the inner sanctum of the holy temple.” The première of Pearl Fishers took place on 30 September 1863 in Paris. Bizet had not yet even reached the age of 25. Only ten years later, there will be Carmen. And it will be only even later that the popularity of the “Duet” eventually takes hold. Nowadays, in any case, this aria is universally celebrated for its singular beauty as a self-standing piece of music. I focus here on one special feature of the musicality that is built into the “Duet”: the music of this aria, words and all, compresses the entire story of the opera into a single song. What I find most remarkable about such compression is an artistic effect that I will describe here as lyrical. And the lyric compression of this aria, I will argue, can be enhanced visually in the art of film making.
Martin Scorsese, master of fusing the visual art of film with other media: a brief example
2018.09.15 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. In this essay, I focus on the opening of the film Casino, 1995, directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, and Joe Pesci. The story is based on the book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas, by Nicholas Pileggi, 1995, who co-wrote the screenplay with Scorsese.
Ch’unhyang—further typological comparisons from late-Chosŏn Korean song culture and modern Korean film culture
2018.08.29 | By Gregory Nagy
§0.1. Continuing my commentary on the film Ch’unhyang as a point of typological comparison, I will compare here, more broadly, the visual art of film-making with the verbal art of poetry and song as we see that art at work in the epic and lyric traditions of ancient Greece. In making such a comparison, I will highlight two general features of verbal art, metaphor and metonym (an alternative way of referring to the second of these features is metonymy). Examples of these two features can easily be found in both the Korean and the ancient Greek verbal arts, but my emphasis for now is different: examples can also be found in the modern visual art of film-making as we see it at work in the film Ch’unhyang. And what I find most remarkable about the uses of metaphor and metonym in this film, as also in all visual arts, is that these uses are transcendent, that is, they are relatively free of limitations. Similarly in the case of ancient Greek verbal art, as we will see, the uses of metaphor and metonym transcend categories of genre such as epic and lyric—even if we accept the idea that Homeric poetry is a general form of epic, and that the singing of lament is a specialized form of lyric.
Ch’unhyang—typological comparisons from late-Chosŏn Korean song culture and modern Korean film culture
2018.08.29 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. I focus here on two clips that I could describe as “lament-by-premonition” and “lament during moments of excruciating pain.” These clips will both involve a kind of comparison that is known as “typological.” Here is a working definition from H24H 3§11… typological comparison is a kind of comparative method that has to do with the study of parallelisms between structures as structures pure and simple, without any presuppositions. Such a mode of comparison is especially useful in fields like linguistics: comparing parallel structures in languages—even if the given languages are unrelated to each other—is a proven way of enhancing one’s overall understanding of the linguistic structures being compared. In what follows, I will not be doing any linguistic comparisons, however. Instead, I will simply be comparing art forms as they exist in two historically unrelated cultures, ancient/medieval/modern Greek and late-Chosŏn/modern Korean.
Blade Runner—further thoughts
2018.08.29 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. The anguish of a replicant named Roy in the story of Blade Runner is only one example of the unseasonality suffered by artificial humans. I explore another example here, where a replicant named Rachael experiences the shock of being told that she is not human. Unlike Roy, who knew all along that he was not human, Rachael never knew. Once she is told that she is not human, she weeps bitterly. But how can she be sad if she is not human? How can she have emotions, like sadness? How can she even feel human? And, if she feels emotions, are those emotions real? Or are such emotions hopelessly warped? Rachael’s anguish about such questions is comparable, I think, to the anguish felt by ancient Greek heroes who sense that their emotions are warped precisely because they are heroes.
Blade Runner—replicants are good to think with, while thinking about ancient Greek heroes
2018.08.29 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. For studying the ancient Greek hero, I think that the kinds of things we see in the storytelling of films and other such contemporary media can be “good to think with.” The expression I have just used here derives from a commonly-used paraphrase of wording once used by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in his book Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (1962). He was referring to the many different espèces or ‘species’ of animals in our world as bonnes à penser. His point was, animals are “good to think with” in mythmaking. I apply here this same expression to the “replicants” that populate the story being told in the film Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott (1982; there was also a sequel in 2017, Blade Runner 2049, directed by Denis Villeneuve). These replicants, as we will see, are comparable to the heroes that populate the myths that were being told and retold in ancient Greek civilization.
