The Owl's Legacy

The air on the heights of Mount Olympus is rarefied -- at least, most of the time.  And as Hegel tolds us:  The owl of Minerva flies only at twilight.  That is, true wisdom takes wing in the gathering darkness:  thought proceeds from darkness to deeper darkness.  Chris Marker's documentary TV series on the legacy of Greek culture, produced for French broadcast in he late 1980's illustrates these aphorisms.  Marker has assembled a stellar cast of mostly French and expatriate Greek scholars and lets them expostulate for the camera on topics relating to his subject.  French philosophes tend to speak in windy, inexact, and melodramatic abstractions -- great importance is claimed for concepts to which allusion is made only indirectly and, then, through arcane metaphors.  You have the sense that something vastly important is being said but you can't always understand what it is.  (In fairness to the French, the windiest and most metaphysical of the commentators is George Steiner who has written most of his books in English but who bloviates in a belligerent, obtuse manner.  I like Steiner a lot and have read many of his books, but candor requires that I admit that he is a master bullshitter.  Several of his favorite techniques are on clear display in this series:  one thing Steiner likes to do is make huge claims for a concept and, then, completely fail to explain what he means (he airily leaves this for "other thinkers") -- in this show, he alleges that the Greek thought is fantastically important because it dramatizes "three paths" and not just two; he cites the story of Oedipus and the three forks in the path that the hero confronted.  Steiner, then, mysteriously says:  It would be oversimplification to call the paths by the Hegelian terminology:  thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.  I agree:  Hegel's notion of a single organism developing by dialectical antithesis has nothing to do with alternative paths.  So what does Steiner think the three paths represent?  He doesn't deign to tell us.  Later, Steiner plays one of his most characteristic games:  he makes a wild claim, retracts it, and, then, restates the claim as if his retraction has proven it.  That is, Heidegger was totally wrong and even Fascist to claim the Germans are the heirs to Greek thought, but, of course, he was also exactly right in making this argument. The only two modern poets who authentically breathe the air of Pindar are Rilke and Hoelderlin.  Hoelderlin is a special case, of course, but the lounge lizard Rilke? Sure, I suppose, if the only poem Rilke wrote was the one about the archaic torso.)  Some episodes of The Owl's Legacy are, more or less, inexplicable -- particularly a couple of early shows; however, a number of the 27 minutes programs are quite lucid and, even, conventionally documentary. 

Marker stages four symposia, drinking parties in Athens, Paris, Berkeley, and Tbilisi, Georgia.  At the symposia, there are a bunch of fat old guys wearing horn-rimmed glasses or pallid young intellectuals interspersed with beautiful young women who seem to be merely "eye-candy".  The old guys make speeches while the young women look on adoringly -- the tables are laden with grapes and wine and the light seems more or less Mediterranean.  (In Paris, the Symposium is at the Sorbonne and takes place above a cellar full of plaster casts of Greek -- actually I think Hellenized Roman -- statues.  Marker equates the statues to people waiting for the "all clear" during an air raid.)  The symposia are intercut with "talking head" interviews with various pundits.  The "talking head" interviews are shot with the speaker always posed in front of some kind of large image of an owl.  (Steiner's case, the professor seems to be talking to a screen on which a woman's face appears turned very obliquely to the audience -- although in one shot in episode  7 we can see her clearly.  A large owl appears over Steiner's shoulder.)  Notwithstanding the metaphysical aspects of some of the shows, the tone of the program is light, even jocular -- at one point, Marker flashes an image of an owl apparently fashioned by the archaic Greeks with the logo That's Owl, Folks!  In the credits, after a credit for "Long Distance Phone-calls", Marker is identified as "Skipper" -- it's like credits for Gilligan's Isle.  The shows are organized according to Greek words -- for instance, "Democracy" or "Nostalgia" or "Amnesia" (about Greek history between 1930 and the end of the military Junta) or Logomachy (about dialectic).  Some of these episodes, for instance, "Amnesia" are quite conventional and will teach the viewer many things that he or she didn't know.  Other episodes are willfully perverse:  the show on Mathematics makes exaggerated  claims for the Ionian Greeks and their invention of mathematics.  But the subject doesn't much interest Marker and so he opts to present its primary points through a glossy and ridiculous series of shots derived from some kind of earlier show about arithmetic:  a beautiful woman filmed in soft focus whispers endearments about math to the camera while bathed in bright light and wearing a skimpy Greek robe -- she's supposed to simulate some kind of goddess.  In this show, there's a Canadian film board short by Norman McLaren about addition (it's like something you'd see now on Sesame Street).  This whole episode has a Steiner-like structure:  huge claims are made for Greek mathematics, then, the talking heads detour into the question of what mathematics represents -- are numbers real?  do we discover them or have we invented them?  After some daunting and abstract discussion of this subject, the film reverses itself and admits that most modern mathematics involves algorithms -- but "algorithm" is not a Greek word:  so computers, etc. are really a Muslim and Arabic invention.  Accordingly, after claiming the Greeks invented math, the show retracts that assertion and puts the blame (or praise) on the Egyptians and the Babylonians.  There are many interesting things in these episodes:  Elia Kazan, of all people, discusses the Greek diaspora and makes some cogent points.  Theo Angelopoulos, the Greek filmmaker, talks about the sense of myth in his movies.  A beautiful Greek singer recites poems and sings a song.  We see clips of old movies, ruins, Heidegger standing at the Parthenon, all sorts of interesting images.  Marker even taps some talking heads for their ignorance -- there is an Australian guy who is interviewed primarily because he doesn't seem to know anything.  If you have patience for this kind of thing( and I enjoy it) this 13 part series is highly recommended.