41. Describe the content of the videotext "Agora" and formulate your conclusions on it.

Set in the Roman Egyptian city Alexandria in the 4^th century Agora is something of a revisionist epic that is less about male heroes in sandals achieving glory with their swords and more about celebrating the achievements of proto-feminist mathematician, philosopher and astronomer Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) in an era of religious turmoil.

While the various men in the film are seen preaching the supposedly definitive virtues of their chosen religion, Hypatia is seen teaching, engaged in early scientific and astronomical research, and calling for calm and mutual respect. Her scientific work, in particular on the movement of celestial bodies, is often presented in Agora with the sort of grandiosity that other films reserve for the climax of a great battle scene. When Hypatia has her various breakthroughs the music swells and the tempo of the editing increases to heroically present such moments. In this way director and co-writer Alejandro Amenábar (The Others, The Sea Inside) stylistically privileges the pursuit of knowledge and rational thought. On the other hand, at the conclusion of the first half of the film when the Christian hordes gain control of the city, over run the Library of the Serapeum and destroy its contents, the camera is turned upside-down to depict the triumph of religious fundamentalism over intellectual enquiry as an example of the world literally turning itself on its head.

To give the film a human-interest angle and to create focal points for the various political and religious factions, Agora includes a love triangle subplot between Hypatia, one of her students, the aristocrat Orestes (Oscar Isaac), and one of her slaves, Davus (Max Minghella). As a woman devoted to her work teaching philosophy Hypatia has no desire to marry and end her professional career, plus she is extremely wary of the romanticised visions of what constitutes as love and demonstrates her cynicism by giving Orestes a very abject reminder of a significant element of womanhood that he probably wasn’t thinking about while publicly serenading her.

Agora is a film more to be admired than truly enjoyed. It effectively dramatises the events that occurred in the life of a remarkable woman in order to critique the intrusiveness of religion on intellectual and political discourse. Made at a time when pockets of the Christian Right are increasingly attempting to depict other religious groups as violent barbarians, Agora is also commendable for reminding audiences about the less than noble origins of Christianity. However, Agorais ultimately weighed down by the lumbering nature of the historical epic genre. The sweeping shots of the reconstructed settings and the elaborate crowd scenes are impressive but feel strikingly empty in contrast to the core of the film, which is Hypatia’s relentless philosophical and scientific enquiry. Agora could have been a powerfully subversive feminist film, but while it does have its moments it never truly lives up to its ambitious potential.