... and who, because she tried to keep knowledge and learning alive after the Library was destroyed, was flayed alive by the Christian Ayatollahs who then pulled her naked corpse around behind a chariot through the streets of Alexandria and burned her remains in the Agora.
I've loved Hypatia since I was a child, and always wanted her to be part of the mainstream common knowledge so I had high hopes for this film and have to tell you that ...
YES!!!
... "Agora" the probably the most beautiful film I've been to since ... since ever! Visually stunning and beautifully told, I have to confess it's a little slow now and again but just achingly and astonishingly beautiful and just so deeply and desperately SAD.
Never have I cried as much as I did when the Christians stormed the Library and started burning the books; watching all the knowledge in the world going up in flames and watching the awful triumph on the faces of the burners who honestly thought they were winning some great and grand prize with this monstrous act.
Lessons to us all in there someplace. Particularly to the Taliban, who these early Christians so closely resembled.
Let's see if I can find the trailer for you:
And sincerely, respect! for the script. I know how tough it was to turn out something this beautiful because I wrote a film treatment of the historical Hypatia as one of the many exercises I had to turn in for my Masters in Screenwriting, and I know I found it impossible to turn her stupid and pointless death into something with some bigger meaning ... but this film does manage to do it, a little, by changing the facts a bit and having her dead already when the Christians stone her to death. And yes, they choose to have her stoned rather than strip her skin off her bones, which would have been too awful visually to be stood.
So, really, what more can I say except this film is wonderful and I hope everyone on earth goes to see it because ... well, it's a story about the Triumph of Hated and Ignorance over Light and Rationality ... and that's something that we really should have back on the agenda these days, don't you think?
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Unfortunately this movie actually distorts history to fit its agenda of presenting Hypatia as a martyr for reason. See http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2010/05/hypatia-and-agora-redux.html for details.
As someone who tried herself to write the Hypatia biography as a screenplay and found it desperately hard to find any meaning in her hideous death, I commend this scriptwriter for how he managed to make it work.
And, for heavens sake, she WAS a Martyr for Reason! Even my own film treatment had that. Even as a child I read her as that. Even the poster on the wall of my classroom has that!
It's, simply put, what she was! And it's also why she's important. And why she should be part of mainstream common knowledge. AND why she should definitely be thrown into the arena today when things are what they are ... and shouldn't be!
Regarding the ban on Agora in parts of the USA, I was reading a '90s Dana Stabenow last night, where a teacher is murdered viciously for teaching evolution in a primary school, and Fundamentalism and religions in general get a furious pasting, and found myself thinking that she'd probably get a lot more reaction from said fundamentalists nowadays.
And that we now take it for granted that such crap has to be pandered to, rather than outrightly condemned.
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