“Helena. Der Untergang Trojas” (1924)

Silent Movie
Directed by: Manfred Noa
Run Time: 219 minutes (Der Raub der Helena is 100 minutes and Die Zerstörung Trojas is 119 minutes)
Starring: Edy Darclea (Helen), Vladimir Gajdarov (Paris), Albert Steinrück (Priam)

Synopsis: Helena. Der Untergang Trojas – titled Helen of Troy in English although the German title translates to Helen: The Fall of Troy – is made up of two movies, originally released separately: Der Raub der Helena (The Abduction of Helen) and Die Zerstörung Trojas (The Destruction of Troy). As described on the DVD cover, the film is “an unjustly forgotten classic epic of the German silent cinema in a newly reconstructed and meticulously restored version. Shooting in Munich and its surroundings with an international cast, director Manfred Noa told the story of Helen of Troy and the decade-long war between the Greeks and the Trojans.”

My Thoughts: Finally, my silent movie obsession makes an appearance on this blog!

I get the impression that most people today have little experience with silent film beyond perhaps having watched one or two poorly preserved comedy shorts played at the wrong speed to mismatched music. Odds are those comedy shorts didn’t look or sound like that when they were originally released, and Helena. Der Untergang Trojas doesn’t look or sound like that either. It’s a big-budget, three-and-a-half hour serious epic with a cast of thousands. For some years, it was believed to be lost, as too many silent films have been, but I’m thrilled that it was found, reconstructed, restored, and provided with a new musical score. Since its 2016 DVD release, I’ve watched it four times.

My favourite thing about this movie is how it looks. Every costume, prop, and set is so detailed, and every frame makes such good use of foreground, midground, and background, that the resulting world feels populated and real. Although silent film is usually accompanied by music, it’s primarily a visual medium, and this movie demonstrates that extremely well. It’s full of gorgeous and moving shots like Hector approaching a hilltop altar against a background of decorated trees while Paris, who Hector thinks is dead, offers thanks to Aphrodite unseen on the other side, or Achilles praying desperately for Patroclus’s safety at a small shrine while women go about their daily chores behind him, or Priam ordering a huge crowd out of the throne room only to remain there alone, a small, helpless figure dwarfed by the room’s oversized architecture.

Helena also makes use of special effects to represent visions or nightmares. The bold use of light and shadow in the Judgement of Paris sequence or the scene where Helen and Paris first meet is reminiscent of more famous German Expressionist films. There are also some small moments taken straight from the Iliad, such as when Achilles pours dirt over his head at the news of Patroclus’s death. Viewers hoping for details accurate to the archaeological record may be disappointed – this movie moves both the Knossos throne and Mycenae’s Lion Gate to Troy – but I’m happy just enjoying the sheer visual richness on display. I suspect I could watch this movie twenty more times and still notice new things going on in the background.

Although Helena generally follows the usual story of the Trojan War, a decent amount of creative license is taken with the lead-up to the war and the relationships between the characters. I really enjoy the different dynamic that’s created by having Helen and Paris meet in a mysterious and isolated temple before either knows who the other is, and by having them arrive in Troy before Paris knows he’s a prince. I also think the way the Trojan royal family breaks apart as the end of the movie approaches is really interesting – Helen is torn between the Greeks and the Trojans, Paris is torn between Helen and Priam, and Priam loses his grip on his sanity as he’s forced to face the fact that his decisions have brought about the destruction of his city. The result is a series of dark and hopeless scenes that somehow makes the destruction of Troy feel even more final than usual.

The majority of the expected scenes are also executed well, but if I have one criticism of this movie it’s its portrayal of Achilles. Helena‘s Achilles constantly gets angry at the smallest insults. His motivations throughout the movie are his crush on Helen and the wreath he won in a chariot race that for some reason she still has eight years later. He agrees to return Hector’s body not because he and Priam reach a shared understanding, but because he wants to exchange it for the wreath. Achilles in this movie just comes off as so petty and petulant, which is not my preferred reading of the character.

The only other criticism I have is less a criticism and more a daydream. The musical accompaniment on the DVD is provided by a piano and a percussion section. This score is never bad or distracting, and in some places it’s quite good – I like the drums that accompany the Paris vs. Menelaus fight and the marimba (I think it’s a marimba?) that accompanies the more supernatural sequences like Priam’s nightmare. But surely an epic of this scale would be best accompanied by a full orchestral arrangement? I would absolutely love to see that someday.

Helena. Der Untergang Trojas is a fascinating, visually stunning adaptation of the Trojan War story and I absolutely recommend it. While of course I would love to see it grow in popularity among fans of Greek mythology on film, I especially hope that, now that it’s easily available, it will grow in popularity among silent film fans. I would love to one day hear it mentioned in the same breath as more famous German silent films like Metropolis (1927) and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). I may be biased, since Helena is a retelling of my favourite story, but I daresay it can stand alongside them.

Watch it: At the time of this posting, Helena can be watched in full on YouTube, although with no subtitles available for the German intertitles.

Buy it: Helena is available on a two-disc DVD set from Edition Filmmuseum Shop or Amazon.de. The intertitles are in German; subtitles are available in English and French. This is one of the best physical releases I’ve seen for a silent film outside of the Criterion Collection – it comes with a 20-page booklet (only a few pages of which are in English, but you can still enjoy the pictures), digital images of pamphlets from the 1920s when the film was released throughout Europe, and over an hour of alternate takes and different cuts of the same scenes. It seems Helena followed the silent film trend in that different versions of the movie were released in different international markets – and some of the versions are really different! I really enjoyed checking out all of these DVD extras.

Please note that the DVDs, although region-free, are PAL format. I couldn’t get them to work in my North American DVD player, but I was able to watch them on my North American laptop with VLC Media Player.

Screencaps: Below are five screencaps from the movie that I took to give you a small taste of what it looks like.

“Troy: Fall of a City” (2018)

Miniseries
Run Time: Eight one-hour episodes
Starring: Louis Hunter (Paris), Bella Dayne (Helen), Jonas Armstrong (Menelaus), Joseph Mawle (Odysseus)

Watch: the trailer
Watch it on: Netflix, BBC iPlayer (region-locked and for a limited time)

Synopsis: Searching for the woman promised to him by Aphrodite, herdsman Paris learns his true identity and falls for Helen of Sparta, igniting the Trojan War. (Source: Netflix)

My Spoiler-Free Thoughts: It has been pointed out that movies about the ancient world tend to be released in batches following some kind of change or technological innovation in the movie industry. Trojan War screen adaptations fit quite neatly into this pattern, and the adaptation for the current age of big-budget, on-demand TV shows is Netflix and the BBC’s Troy: Fall of a City. The series’ eight-hour run time allows for the inclusion of characters and events that are often cut from Trojan War movies, but don’t look here for a straight adaptation of the mythology. The show provides a fresh look at several characters, a new take on some of the main events, and an entirely new subplot. All this — plus the show’s focus on the characters instead of the battles — makes Troy: Fall of a City feel very different from previous Trojan War screen versions, and I absolutely loved it. It’s not perfect — sometimes plot elements are forgotten about from one episode to the next, the story stumbles a bit near the end, and I’m a little iffy on the new subplot — but the music is great, the acting is solid, the sets and locations and costumes are beautiful, the last episode holds nothing back, and overall I just really enjoyed seeing such a fresh take on my favourite story and the characters who inhabit it. It’s been fourteen years since the last big-budget Trojan War screen adaptation, and, for me at least, Troy: Fall of a City was worth the wait.

My Thoughts WITH SPOILERS!: Apparently this is the year I learn to love Paris because, as with Shin Toroia Monogatari, my favourite thing about Troy: Fall of a City is its Paris.

Mario Camerini: “Ulysses”

Movie
First Released: 1954
Run Time: 115 minutes
Starring: Kirk Douglas (Ulysses), Silvana Mangano (Penelope, Circe), Anthony Quinn (Antinous), Rossana Podestà (Nausicaa)

Synopsis: This lush adaptation of Homer’s grand epic the Odyssey stars Kirk Douglas as the hero Ulysses. After victory in the Trojan War, Ulysses embarks on a ten-year journey back to his kingdom. But before he can reunite with his beloved wife (Silvana Mangano), he must defeat the brutal Cyclops, escape the spell of Circe who turns his crew into swine, and outwit the Sirens who lure sailors to their death. Peril is everywhere — even at home, where the arrogant Antinous (Anthony Quinn) plots to steal Ulysses’ wife before he can complete his final quest in this powerful tale of heroism.

My Thoughts: The eight-episode miniseries Troy: Fall of a City is due to hit the BBC and Netflix next year and I am pretty ridiculously excited. Thinking that I should stop wasting that excitement on constantly refreshing the series’ IMDb page, I decided instead to watch some of the older Trojan War-related movies that I hadn’t seen. First up, Kirk Douglas makes his second appearance on this blog (following his role as Peter in Mourning Becomes Electra), this time as the star of the 1954 peplum Ulysses.

Douglas’s Ulysses is hard to get a handle on. We first see him for just a split second during a flashback to the fall of Troy. Then we see his meeting with Nausicaa, where he has lost his memory. (I’m not sure why the filmmakers introduced this idea and I’m not even sure what the in-story reason for it is supposed to be. His memory returns with equally little reason.) After a bit of that, we get a flashback to Ulysses and his men as they almost humourously stumble upon the cave of the Cyclops. This movie gives us three different introductions to its main character and he acts differently in each one. This is a problem that continues throughout the movie — sometimes Ulysses wants to go home, sometimes he wants to go on an adventure, sometimes he’s desperate to keep moving, sometimes he’s content to stay in the same room for months. Not to say that you can’t have a Ulysses with contradictions — of course you can — but this movie feels like a highlight reel of the Odyssey, jumping from scene to scene with little care taken to ensure that they fit together as a whole. Ulysses doesn’t seem to change because of his personality or his experiences; he changes to suit the filmmakers’ plans for whatever scene is up next. The editing is abrupt, Greek names are mixed with Roman names (Zeus and Athena but Ulysses and Neptune), and the Cyclops scene doesn’t even include the “Nobody” ruse, which was an odd surprise.

Another thing that stood out to me is how much in this movie happens offscreen. It’s true that I don’t really need to see the Cyclops’ eye being stabbed, but when Ulysses shows up in Ithaca talking about how he just spoke with Athena? That feels like an odd scene to leave out. Definitely the biggest offender comes in the very last moment of the movie, when Ulysses is about to finally embrace the wife he hasn’t seen in twenty years, and — he steps offscreen. End movie. Roll credits.

What kind of movie gives the hero his happy ending but doesn’t let you see it?

Thinking about this scene made me curious, so I went back and rewatched the two scenes where Ulysses and Penelope converse, and I discovered that the two characters are only in the same frame for a grand total of about eight seconds. And it happens at the end of the scene where she doesn’t even know it’s him! I don’t know if this has something to do with the fact that this movie was filmed with Douglas (and Quinn) saying his lines in English and everyone else saying their lines in Italian, but it’s baffling! We don’t even get one nice shot of the reunion to cheer us up after the bloody homecoming scene.

Perhaps I shouldn’t rag on this movie so much when almost everything above is something I thought of after I finished it. I enjoyed it while I was watching it! The story moves quickly and the sets and costumes are well done; I especially liked Circe’s sparkling outfits. The effects used to make the Cyclops are also pretty good, if a little uncanny valley at times. Silvana Mangano plays both Penelope and Circe, which is an interesting idea. I thought the Siren scene was surprisingly good — just one long take of Ulysses as he panics because he believes he’s sailing away from Ithaca — and Ulysses’ reunion with Telemachus was as moving as his reunion with Penelope should have been. Rossana Podestà, who would play the title role in Helen of Troy two years later, brings a calm but youthful energy to Nausicaa that I really liked, although the English language version of this movie can’t decide how to pronounce her name. I also liked Anthony Quinn’s scheming Antinous and wouldn’t have minded seeing a little more of him.

So that’s Ulysses. Pretty uneven, but not awful. Although to be honest, I think it’s the type of mindless movie where, if I hadn’t watched it with the intention of reviewing it, I already would’ve forgotten about it.

Buy it at: Amazon.com, Amazon.ca

Adèle Geras: “Troy”

When Hector died, Andromache thought, I didn’t know there could be a greater pain, but now I know why the Gods made him suffer like that, and made me suffer for him. It was a rehearsal.

YA Novel
Pages: 358
First Published: 2000

Synopsis: The grimmest of wars is about to get worse.

The siege of Troy has lasted almost ten years.

Inside the walled city, food is scarce and death is common. From the heights of Mount Olympus, the Gods keep watch.

But Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, is bored with the endless, dreary war, and so she turns her attention to two sisters: Marpessa, who serves as handmaiden to Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world; and Xanthe, who tends the wounded soldiers in the Blood Room. When Eros fits an arrow to his silver-lit bow and lets it fly, neither sister will escape its power.

Agamemnon, commander of all the Greeks, watched his army scattering through the streets of Troy like cockroaches overrunning a house, scuttling into corners and hiding in the crevices of the stones. He made his way up the hill, toward Pallas Athene’s temple, and as he went, the tall black figure of Ares, the God of War, walked in his footsteps. Many saw him and not one of them realized who it was they were looking at. He moved through the city like a shadow among many shadows. He was everywhere, standing behind every man who carried a weapon in his hand.

My Thoughts: Two things: 1) This book has nothing to do with the 2004 movie Troy. 2) I have no idea why this is considered a YA novel.

I’m going to start with my criticisms of the book, which unfortunately are many.

· I will totally admit that I am super picky about dialogue. If I think a novel’s dialogue is unrealistic, it will drive me crazy the entire way through. And wow is Troy’s dialogue unrealistic. Characters often speak in full paragraphs that don’t even flow logically. Their emotions jump around from one line to the next. They clumsily deliver information that has nothing to do with what they’re talking about and should either have been provided by the narration or left out entirely. Achilles’ death scene reads like a joke, and part of the reason is that his dialogue in it is a disaster:

“Can you see me, Trojan Paris?” Achilles shouted. “Apollo’s rays are blinding you, that’s clear. I’m not hanging around down here for prophecies to come true, either. What chance do you reckon you’ve got of hitting a moving target? No chance at all. And even if you do hit me, don’t you know I’m protected?”

Yep, that’s an entire paragraph that Achilles shouts up to the top of the walls. While his chariot is moving.

Not a page later, we get:

“Bastard!” Achilles’ dying cry bubbled from his mouth as his body twisted itself into a knot of pain. “You have fulfilled the prophecy and killed me, but I can still …”

Seriously. What.

It could totally be that Geras was going for some stylistic characters-speak-in-paragraphs-and-tell-you-when-they’ve-been-slain thing that’s gone over my head, but until I find an interview in which she says as much, I’m afraid I just have to label this as terrible dialogue.

· One of the main characters is named Polyxena. When we first meet her, she complains about having the same name as one of the princesses of Troy, which seems like an odd thing to complain about when you finish the book and realize that, in its world, the princess Polyxena doesn’t actually seem to exist; the only daughter of Priam who appears in this book is Cassandra. Now, there are two events in the myth of the Trojan War that (potentially) involve the princess Polyxena. Occasionally, she is involved in the plot to kill Achilles. More often, she is killed during the fall of Troy. At both of these points in the novel, Geras gives herself an opening to do something interesting – some sort of plot twist in which the Polyxena involved in these events is not the princess, but this original character. Neither time does she take it. I don’t even know why Geras has her Polyxena accompany Priam to Achilles’ tent if she wasn’t going to do anything with it.

· Geras’ gods had so much potential. Their sudden appearances in dark corners of rooms, their no-nonsense attitudes, the way they disappear into mist, and the way the mortals who see them immediately forget them – these traits are really cool and a little creepy. Unfortunately, the effect is lost as soon as they open their mouths. Poseidon appears just to tell us that the man wearing Achilles’ armour isn’t Achilles. Apollo appears just to tell us that the Greeks haven’t actually left. As the gods’ words have no effect on the actions of the mortal characters – who never even remember them – it’s like the only purpose of the gods’ dialogue is to rob the following scenes of any suspense they might have had for the reader.

· We are told many times that Troy is in a desperate situation, that the city is running out of food and that its people are dying both in the city and on the battlefield, but this often contradicts what we are actually shown. It seems like everyone in the city has a secret stash of food and drink and no one who lives outside the walls seems to be suffering at all. Meanwhile, both Paris and boring love interest Alastor are able to avoid combat for little reason and without comment. Which I guess makes sense when you realize that apparently so few soldiers are being wounded that only one room is needed to tend to them. Then, less than a day after the Trojans discover the Greek ships have gone, they’re able to go out and gather enough food for a royal feast. The beginning of this book had me looking forward to an intense depiction of a city on the brink of starvation, of young characters who had spent almost their entire lives with enemy soldiers trapping them inside their walls. But the farther into the book I got, the less desperate the whole situation felt.

· For me, Paris was one of the highlights of this book, because he was a rare example of Geras getting creative with an aspect of the Trojan War myth. A Paris who is not entirely satisfied with his marriage to Helen – that’s awesome! I’d never seen him portrayed like that before! And when characters started mentioning Oenone, I got rather excited. Oenone is rarely used in Trojan War novels, but I find her story really interesting and I think there are a lot of things an author can do with it. Unfortunately I HATE how Geras handled it. It begins in the usual fashion, with whispers that Paris had a wife whom he abandoned when he met Helen. On page 211, the son of Paris and Oenone appears (and asks to see Helen only to tell her he actually wants to see Paris, seriously Geras get your dialogue under control) and doesn’t last two pages before Paris kills him. Fifteen pages later, a dying Paris is taken to Oenone, who refuses to heal him. Aphrodite fills us in:

“I was there, you know. When they carried Paris up the mountain to her cave, or grotto, or whatever she calls it. He was half dead. She came out looking smug, and what did she say? I’ll tell you. She said: You left me for Helen, even though I loved you. Now go to your Helen, and see how much use she is to you. I won’t save you. What a bitch! She could have brought him back to life and chose not to.”

Okay, wait. What is even happening here? Does Oenone not know that Paris killed her son?? What was the point of the son’s appearance in the story if it didn’t affect anything that happened afterward? How could it possibly not even be mentioned in this scene?! Why does Oenone say “I won’t heal you because you left me for Helen” and not “I won’t heal you because you killed my son”?? And on top of all that, where does Aphrodite get off dismissing Oenone as “a bitch” when Paris’s leaving her was Aphrodite’s fault??? Did Dan Simmons write that line? Geras takes a character who I think adds a really interesting layer to the myth, strips her storyline down to its bare minimum, never allows her onscreen, introduces her son, immediately forgets about him, and then has both Aphrodite and Helen label her a “bitch.” I have so many problems with this I can’t even wrap my brain around it.

· The above point, the novel’s less than subtle pro-life messages and the way that every male character who cries is referred to as “womanish” make me really confused as to why this Publisher’s Weekly review claims that Geras “recreates the saga of the Trojan War from a feminist perspective.” From a woman’s perspective, perhaps, but not so much from a feminist perspective. Seriously, this is a myth that begins with a queen sending her newborn son away to be killed, apparently without any sort of criticism. So why would a citizen of that queen’s city believe that the gods will punish her if she has an abortion?

· You perhaps have already gathered that a major problem I had with this book is that it presents so few new ideas. I love the Trojan War myth to death, obviously, but the reason I read novels based on it is because I want to see new takes on it. I want to see characters reimagined, I want to see events from different perspectives. With the exception of Paris, in Troy I didn’t feel that any of the myth’s characters had been changed or added to. They all hit their marks exactly as they do in the mythology, with no new insight into their actions. I would be completely fine with this if Geras’ original characters were interesting enough to compensate, but they’re not. They seem like perfectly nice people, but not exactly compelling. By the way, not gonna lie, I would love to read a Trojan War novel told from the point of view of regular Trojan citizens who have nothing to do with the royal family. Too bad for me, Troy is not that novel.

· Another recurring issue I had is the way that Geras introduces characters or storylines that she never returns to. One example is Oenone’s son; another is the Luck of Troy. In a conversation about how the statue has been stolen, the characters speculate that Helen has a romantic relationship with Odysseus that would lead her to help him steal it. Is it true? I don’t know! None of this is mentioned again. I got the feeling that Geras wanted to include as many aspects of the mythology as she could, but couldn’t or didn’t want to actually flesh them out into something that would be interesting and have an effect on the rest of the story. What especially frustrated me about the Luck of Troy example is that the “the Luck has been stolen from the temple, perhaps with Helen’s help” conversation comes directly after a scene in which a character who works for Helen is seen running away from the temple. But of course, those two scenes have nothing to do with each other. Geras constantly comes so, so, so close to doing something interesting with the story, and for whatever reason she just … doesn’t.

· Things I liked: Paris (before Oenone). The gods (when not speaking). The relationships between Helen and the other royal women. The relationships between the royal women and their servants. The line “Polyxena had sat in King Priam’s halls long enough to recognize adoration when she saw it.” The brief but hopeful scenes where the people of Troy are able to walk across the plain to the sea for the first time in ten years. Helen’s lack of fear during the city’s fall. The portrayal of Andromache’s grief often felt like too much to me, especially in a book where the reader only gets three scenes’ worth of Hector, but her subtler moments were pretty heartbreaking. The descriptions of the burning city were well done (… pun?) and I enjoyed the way it took characters longer to notice the fire depending on where they were and what they were doing – a nice change of pace from the tired ~everyone notices the fire at once~ montage. Boros has a shift in his character near the end which could have been quite interesting had we seen more of it. Astyanax … oh my goodness. His final scenes were heartwrenching. Easily the most emotional scene of the book is the one in which we see a Greek soldier’s immediate reaction to the baby’s death. And Xanthe’s reaction was stylistically the most interesting page.

I have probably made Troy sound like the worst novel ever. It isn’t. But it is far from the best, and the story of the Trojan War deserves better. To be completely honest, I was actually frustrated to learn that Geras has also written an Odyssey-inspired Ithaka and an Aeneid-inspired Dido. While I can’t say I’ll never read them, you won’t see me rushing out to get them.

Buy it at: Amazon.com, Amazon.ca

Helen continued. “I don’t really care anymore. Isn’t that dreadful? My love, this love that has nearly drowned the city in blood, is fading. It’s nearly gone. There are times when he sets my flesh on fire … Forgive me for speaking so frankly … And then it’s like it was at the beginning, but more and more often I look at him and think: Is this what I left my country for?”