L’Orestea nel cinema greco e italiano contemporaneo: due recenti casi di studio

This paper focuses on two recent film adaptations of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. The first movie is Interruption (2015), directed by Yorgos Zois: during a postmodern representation of Aeschylus’ trilogy in an Athenian theater, a group of armed men and women get on stage. After imprisoning the theater actors in a see-through cage, the newcomers invite some of the spectators on stage to resume the representation. Suspended between fiction and reality, the staging goes on up to its tragic epilogue. The second movie is Le Eumenidi (2020), directed by Gipo Fasano: it tells the story of Valerio, a modern Orestes belonging to Rome’s upper class, torn between guilt and hope to escape because of an undefined act of violence that he committed. In both movies, the Aeschylean plot is problematized in light of the issues faced by contemporary society. By interviewing Zois and Fasano, I could place their observations and perceptions at the center of the analysis. Interestingly, both the filmmakers, even if coming from different countries and backgrounds, decided to focus on Orestes’ story as told by Aeschylus in order to investigate the meaning of the Tragic and its correlation to modern times. Through the analysis of these two examples of Greek and Italian cinema, I wanted to examine the weight of classical myth in the two countries, as well as the possibilities offered to (as much as the problems faced by) Greek and Italian artists when dealing with ancient tragedy.