The Agora Speaker Series is hosted by the School of Liberal Arts. Lectures presented as part of the series are free of charge and are open to members of the School of Liberal Arts, the University and the general public.
Agora Talk by Dr Ben Ferris
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UOW Wollongong - Building 20 Room 4
Weaving Penelope: (re)presenting Homer's Odyssey in cinema
Abstract:
In 2007 I directed the feature film Penelope, an adaptation of the Odyssey set in Croatia. Having been affected by stories of some of the atrocities that took place during the Balkan War (1992-1995), my focus became the character of Penelope and my film a study of the experience of waiting: for those long departed or presumed dead. However, not content to merely adapt the content of the original story to suit my needs, I became thereafter obsessed with what it meant to adapt Homeric style. Herein was born an enduring interest in the poetics of Homer and how these might be conceived as a set of rules not only contained within the historical strictures of their original invention, but, also, as a phenomenon that might speak to an aspect of the universal human impulse of creation. With the assistance of the theories of Deleuze on cinema, I revisit the poetics of Homer and explore in what ways they may be considered cinematic and therefore, by implication, trans-historical.
Bio:
Ben Ferris is a filmmaker and a recent PhD graduate of the University of Sydney. His doctoral thesis, entitled “Deleuze’s ‘crystal images’ in Homer’s Odyssey” approaches Homer not through the traditional linguistic (e.g. Saussurean) frameworks, but rather through the semiotic (“cinematic”) frameworks established by Deleuze. His first feature documentary, a hybrid doco-drama, 57 Lawson (2016), received critical acclaim, described as “a top 5 film…an assured exercise in minimalism” (Sydney Morning Herald), and “4/4 stars…Documentary and drama intertwine, but the outcome is a particularly cinematic truth” (The Age). In 2017 Ben won a residency at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris, where he directed his short experimental documentary feature In(di)visible, which in 2018 was nominated for the prestigious Eurimages Project Lab award at the 53rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. His Sydney-based film production company Breathless Films has released several recent feature films, including Birdeater (2023), Tennessine (2023), Love Road (2023), Lonesome (2022) and The Longest Weekend (2022).