Seneca in the Movies
Desecrating the Theatrical Death
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14393/LL63-v40-2024-45Keywords:
Reception Studies, Cinema, Roman History, Seneca, Robert SchwentkeAbstract
‘Seneca’ (Germany/Morocco 2022) is a biopic about the last day of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a controversial figure in imperial Rome who died in the year 65 CE. Two generations later, the scene of Seneca’s death was portrayed by the Latin historian Tacitus in his work Annales (15.60-64). The description fueled the Western imagination, resulting in a broad iconographic repertoire. This article aims to show how the death of the greatest propagator of late Stoicism was idealized in ancient literature and modern painting but desacralized in the film by German director Robert Schwentke. Based on Classical Reception Studies (Hardwick 2003), one cannot speak only of an ‘adaptation’ of literature for cinema or an ‘appropriation’ of a text to sanction certain ideas but rather of an ‘intervention’. The filmmaker says that he never intended to make a realistic recording; on the contrary, he wanted to be ‘aggressively anachronistic’.
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