Art imitates art: Alexander follows Achilles
Homer’s «Iliad» begins with the words: «Sing O goddess, the anger of Achilles!» which along with «The Odyssey,» has been studied and recited by generations. However, it has now come to us in a mediocre feature film with Brad Pitt of the long and curly locks in the role of Achilles, sending sales of both «The Iliad» and «The Odyssey» sky high on the best-seller lists, according to Amazon.co.uk. «This year we have noticed great interest in classical Greek epics, which we attribute to the film ‘Troy’,» said a representative of the online bookshop. Now it is the turn of «Alexander the Great,» a film by Oliver Stone starring Colin Farrell that soon premieres in the US. This all confirms the power of the cinema in promoting role models and encouraging people to read books. After all, the Nobel Prize for Literature has just been won by Austria’s Elfriede Jelinek, whose book «The Piano Teacher» was made into a film by Michael Haneke, starting Isabelle Huppert. The cinema is gaining ground, taking viewers away from both television and Internet, even though there were many who had feared for its future.
