Assignment for Tuesday, 10-11-16

Dear Mythologists,

For Tuesday, October 11, please do the following:

(1) Watch the third-wave peplum Hercules (Luigi Cozzi, 1983), taking notes as you see fit. In addition to the DVD being reserved at the library, the film is also streaming on Amazon (though, oddly, the "cover" image there is from the 1958 Steve Reeves version). Our task is to make sense of this movie within the peplum tradition and in the context of its own times: toward that end, Clash of the Titans (1981) might provide some instructive parallels.

(2) Read the following sections of Looking at Movies Chapter 3 ("Types of Movies"): "Six Major American Genres" (pp. 90–108) and "Evolution and Transformation of a Genre" (pp. 108–11). Since peplum was clearly an evolving genre, these sections might help us think about its form and content in the 1980s and beyond.

(3) Read the following sections from chapter 7 of Emma Stafford's book, Herakles (Routledge, 2012): "Hercules the Movie Star" and "Conclusions: Herakles/Hercules." These sections trace the history of the peplum genre but quickly branch out into the 1980s and beyond, and so set the tone for the latter half of our Heracles/Hercules unit. Stafford herself is not kind toward the film we will watch for today's class, but, knowing that, we might aspire to try harder.

(4) Remember by noon on Tuesday to comment on this post with your choice of a sequence from Hercules to view in class.

DC