WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.
Susan Sontag: Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson
“Some art aims directly at arousing the feelings; some art appeals to the feelings through the route of the intelligence. There is art that involves, that creates empathy. There is art that detaches, that provokes reflection.
“Great reflective art is not frigid. It can exalt the spectator, it can present images that appall, it can make him weep. But its emotional power is mediated. The pull toward emotional involvement is counterbalanced by elements in the work that promote distance, disinterestedness, impartiality. Emotional involvement is always, to a greater or lesser degree, postponed.
“The contrast can be accounted for in terms of techniques or means—even of ideas. No doubt, though, the sensibility of the artist is, in the end, decisive. It is a reflective art, a detached art that Brecht is advocating when he talks about the “Alienation Effect.” The didactic aims which Brecht claimed for his theater are really a vehicle for the cool temperament that conceived those plays.
“In the film, the master of the reflective mode is Robert Bresson.”
Lycophron’s Alexandra is a dazzling but little-known poetic achievement of Greek literature after the classical period. Written in the third or second century BCE, the poem consists of 1,474 lines in the form of a classical tragedy, but without chorus or dialogue. Instead we get a play-length “messenger report” of a prophecy uttered by the Trojan Alexandra (a Spartan name for Cassandra) when her brother Alexandros (Paris) set out for Sparta on his fateful voyage towards Helen. The prophecy unfolds between Cassandra’s own future and the poem’s literary past as she anticipates and retells a series of Greek myths across the Iliad, the Odyssey, Athenian tragedy and Herodotus’ Histories, along with stories of the settling of the Mediterranean by Achaean and Trojan heroes after the Trojan War and (importantly for Cassandra) the foundation of Rome by the Trojan Aeneas. But, more than that, the Alexandra’s rewriting of Greek literature and history from the perspective of a single female speaker is also a powerful meditation on the limits of language and naming, the gendered voice, literary history and narrative “truth”.
Piece found in 15 December TLS by Matthew Ward, no link because app is broken.
Saved because I don’t know this poem and the form sounds interesting.