Notizie

If filming classical literature always presents difficulties to the filmmaker, one of them is the haloed status of classical texts. Since the classics appear not to be about ordinary people, we are uncertain how Achilles or Arjuna should be represented, whether they should be made human or beings of another kind. The efforts made by writers to humanize epic characters by infusing them with ‘psychology’ – e.g. Iravathi Karve’s Yugantha – may be well-intentioned but they do not add to our understanding of the epics. Putting our thoughts and our kind of motives into the heads of epic characters seems to reduce their stature. A reason may be that the epics were created before the birth of the ‘individual’, before Man and the World had been differentiated, before the inner and the outer were set apart. Oedipus killed his father and married his mother not because of ‘psychology’ – i.e.