Agora film review - Research Paper Example

Teacher’s Agora Film Review The film Agora follows the philosopher Hypatia, a historical person portrayed in the film, through the process of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire near the end of the fourth century AD. It also follows a central cast of character who surround Hypatia, and her school in Alexandria, through this tumultuous time period. The central conflict of the film is the growing conflict going on between Christians, a growing religion in the Roman Empire at the time, and the traditional Pagan religion that had been followed by Romans for centuries before the events of the film took place. The film consciously inverts the understanding of religion that we have in Western society today, where the Christians are dominant and other religions are more in the minority. In this film, Christians are the minority religion, though growing quickly and set to replace Pagans as the most powerful religion in the Roman Empire, but much of the state is still in the control of the Pagans. Hypatia and those around her get into frequent conflict with the Christians, including at one point being mobbed by a group of them during conflict over the teaching and interpretation of science. The Christians then go on to vandalize a library, one of the first assaults on science in the film. Hypatia frequently refuses to bow to demands that she stops studying sciences, which end up in her getting persecuted, and eventually stoned (though she is mercifully killed before the stoning by a good friend of hers, who strangles her). Hypatia was a scientist who taught at a platonic school that taught the most powerful people in the Empire. She had a love of science that rivaled almost anything else. She began the film as a highly respected person of a relatively high cast of society – her father was an important person and a slave owner, and she had a small cadre of very loyal follows and students in her school. Hypatia has several admirable qualities that are important to her. Firstly, she is a vastly intelligent person, as demonstrated by her qualification as one of the most important teachers in one of the most important schools in the most scientific city in the Ancient world. Beyond this alone, Hypatia is also a brave, and to be quite frank, an incredibly stubborn person. When put on by a mob of Christians who begin burning down the most important library in the world, Hypatia risks her life to save many of the scrolls of science that might be completely irreplaceable if they end up destroyed. Furthermore, she continues studying subjects that are forbidden by the newly powerful Christian religion, such as the theory of heliocentrism, which says that the sun is at the center of the universe instead of the earth, despite the fact that her life is threatened again and again because of her refusal of studying. Even when her former students, such as Orestes, give up and on several occasions review to answer questions regarding what they believe and do not believe because of their fear of consequences (or possibly because they have genuinely changed their minds because of conversions to Christianity), Hypatia stands firm with her beliefs in science over religion, despite the threats to her life. Finally, she is a good person, which is shown by the incredible loyalties that she develops, with her friends willing to stand firm with her through thick and thin, and even kill her mercifully when there is no other option. This film displays the decline and fall of the Roman Empire as centering around one issue and almost entirely one issue: the rise of Christianity and its replacing traditional Paganism. This represented a fundamental shift in the Roman Empire for several reasons. Firstly, the traditional Pagan religion allowed for the worship of a wide variety of gods and a great deal of different cultures and backgrounds. It would allow for other traditional religions to also exist in addition to the Roman one, it allowed for a great deal of cultural plurality. Christianity, on the other hand, only allowed for itself as the one true religion. It decided that all other religions were invalid and that only the followers of Christianity were correct. This created significant disturbances in the Empire for several reasons. Firstly, the Roman religion was fundamentally connected to the Roman state – the Emperor was enshrined in a kind of power as a semi-deity and there were many public spaces and festivals and so on to honor roman gods. This meant that Christianity felt it had to violently overthrow large parts of the Roman government, along with simply converting people. Once Christianity took over, it then began suppressing everything from the old guard, creating a complete reversal in the trajectory of the Roman Empire. Christianity’s suppression of scientific thought also certainly played an important role in the decline of the Roman Empire. Christianity tried to complete a universal set of knowledge that covered everything from religion and government to science. So this led to something of a destruction in original thought, and the repression of old ideas that were very important and also very valuable. Science plays a central role in the film. Hypatia, the protagonist, is a follower of scientific thought throughout the entire span of the film. The film shows that ancient peoples were still very capable of scientific thought that was actually quite advanced. Logic was placed in a very powerful role in ancient schooling and ancient science, and served as the central backbone of scientific thought. Unlike modern science, however, which rests on experimentation to control variables and demonstrate the way the world actually works, ancient science seemed to rest much more on thought experiments, and imagining how things would work. This kind of thought experimentation might be very different from modern science in many different ways, but it still rested on logic, much like modern science does, and still could create some amazing discoveries. The film points out, for instance, that it was in fact an ancient philosopher who first thought that the sun might be at the center of the universe, rather than the planet Earth. Furthermore, though strictly designed and controlled experiments of modern science were notably absent from ancient science, scientists still took great advantage of natural experiments: they still spent much of their time observing the world around them and trying to base scientific principles on those observations. Hypatia realizes, for instance, that there are a few stars that do not move with the rest of them, they wander, which is why they are called “wanderers” in the film, and much of her explanation of the heliocentric model rests on the idea that these wanderers would make sense if things revolved around the sun, like Earth does. It is important to note that there is one instance in the film that might appear to be experimentation, where Hypatia drops an object from a moving ship to show that it will keep up with the ship (which means that the Earth could be moving as well, because objects would keep up with it), but this is not a true experiment, but rather a physical demonstration of an idea. The architecture in the film Agora does an amazing job demonstrating what a Roman city would have looked like at the end of the Roman Empire. One thing that is important to note is that the film makers in this movie did not make use of three dimensional computer generated models to create the architectural effects, but actually built a wide variety of spectacular sets to allow their actors to interact with them. The architecture is largely what one would imagine when one thinks of Roman architecture: lots of colonnades, arches, domes and so on. But one of the most impressive things is the size of the architecture represented in the film, this really reminds the reader how vast and powerful the Roman Empire was in comparison to many of the cultures that immediately followed it: the Roman buildings looked so much more advanced and more useful than examples we see of medieval architecture, and much better constructed to last through time. This reminds the viewer of the massive impact that the fall of the Roman Empire had on the world, and what a truly gigantic fall it was from the height of its glory. Roman cities also displayed a great deal of public spaces – there were fountains and squares and open markets, many places that were designed for the general populace to enjoy, showing a focus on everyone being able to access the services of the city and not only the rich (who also enjoyed those public spaces, along with a great deal of spaces that were solely theirs). The gods mentioned in this film were most of the Gods of the Roman pantheon, such as Jupiter, Venus and Mercury, who had many statues and temples dedicated to themselves throughout the city. It also depicts Jews and Christians worshiping their god, though it is somewhat unclear whether the two groups imagined themselves as having the same god or having different ones, given that the religions were still somewhat related at the time, but also seemed to come into frequent conflict with each other. The film Agora paints a stunning picture of the end of the Roman world. It shows the role that Christianity and the emergence of religious fanaticism at the time may have played in the destruction of the most powerful Empire that ever existed, and also plunging the world into dark ages that would last for hundreds of years afterwards. It shows many aspects of Roman culture, such as the variety of religions and gods that were portrayed, the architecture of Roman cities, and the science that ancient Romans had access to, truly giving the viewer an interesting interpretation of Roman history and society. Bibliography Agora. Dir. Alejandro Amenabar. RBA, 2010 Read More