20. The Fires of Olympus or, on Sticking it to the Man (2019), dir. Tim Benjamin

I've got a chum coming round to watch films tomorrow afternoon, so I'd better get on top of my write-up back-log first.

This one was a filmed version of this opera, produced by the Radius Opera company, which I went to see primarily because my colleague Emma Stafford provided the composer with her expertise in Greek mythology when he was writing it, but also because I had heard that the music was very Handelian, which I like, and which turned out to be entirely true. The film was premiered at the University of Leeds, which made it easy for me to go to, and indeed Emma, the young man who had played Hephaestus, the music director and the composer all took part in a Q&A led by one of the academics from the School of Music before the film itself began:


I am not actually 100% sure who the director of the film, as opposed to the opera, was, but Tim Benjamin was the composer, so it seems only fair to credit him in the title of my post. It should be said anyway that the film is far from just a film of an ordinary theatrical performance of an opera. It was fully re-staged and re-shot, with a prelude sequence and cameras moving around the characters in a way you couldn't do when also trying to perform for a theatre audience. Indeed, Emma herself featured in the prelude sequence as a refugee after a disaster hearing stories from a mysterious stranger about what had happened on Olympus a few years ago...

The main story is basically the tale of the brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus, and their rather inept attempts to steal fire from Zeus. They appear early on as quasi-Occupy Wall Street or Extinction Rebellion-style activists who have sneaked into Zeus' palace and are looking for ways to cause chaos. While there, they discover his Fire, kept in a jar - to Zeus, just a pretty toy, but they quickly realise its potential value if taken from him. Before long, however, Prometheus is captured and tortured by Hephaestus, who is basically the head of Olympus' secret police with a Naziesque military coat and knee-high leather boots to match

For me, the most enjoyable character was Zeus. He was a big, bearded thundering baritone, playing an authoritarian leader who understands exactly how to manipulate his people. He had a repeated refrain which articulated this perfectly, basically expressing his pleasure at Prometheus and Epimetheus' activism on the grounds that it will give him an excuse to crack down, which it went like this:

A crisis! An opportunity to demonstrate authority,
To reassure the people, and exercise control.
To talk about community, and praise the role of family,
Be firm, be fair, show strength to the prole.

I went round singing that to myself for several days afterwards. :-)

1. The Reptile (1966), dir. John Gilling

This is a Hammer film which I hadn't previously seen. It was shot back-to-back with Plague of the Zombies (which I have seen: LJ / DW), using lightly-amended versions of the same sets and some of the same cast, and indeed the stories are quite similar as well. Both basically involve horrors brought back from overseas which cause deaths in a Cornish village. In Plague, Squire Hamilton has brought zombie enslavement back quite deliberately from Haiti to help him exploit the labour of the locals and he doesn't care who suffers as a result. In Reptile, Dr Franklyn has brought back the snake sickness which possesses his daughter Anna from Borneo involuntarily, after a local cult imposed it on her to punish him for probing into their secrets. It is a matter of shame and torment which he is trying to conceal - though he too only really cares about the local deaths which result insofar as they might lead to Anna's secret being uncovered.

Both stories are thus about the consequences of empire and imperialism, and one character in Reptile even voices this in more or less perfect reverse colonisation terms when he says that their village was a good place until "they came, bringing their vileness with them." But they differ in detail and emphasis. While Hamilton is clearly an exploitative imperialist, and indeed personifies the British empire's ruling classes, the fact that he's equally exploitative of the Cornish villagers makes class rather than imperialism the central issue of Plague. Franklyn, by contrast, has exploited the empire for its intellectual rather than its economic potential. He is a Doctor of Divinity, rather than an aristocrat like Hamilton, who has travelled to India, Java, Borneo and Sumatra with Anna in pursuit of his research into 'the primitive religions of the east', but found in Borneo that a local Snake Cult did not appreciate his attentions - hence the curse on his daughter. This means he has no particularly malign intentions towards the locals back home himself (though he certainly considers himself aloof from and superior to them), which in turn allows the morality story about the consequences of empire to emerge more clearly in Reptile than in Plague. In Plague, Haiti is more a plot device which has allowed Hamilton's exploitation than anything (and of course Haiti was never a British colony anyway), and its role as a source of dangerous, exotic magic is wholly Othering. But in Reptile, the horrors experienced in Cornwall are quite explicitly the result of Borneans biting back, which is a rather more post-colonial perspective on the whole issue.

Looking a little more closely at the production details for the two, I'm going to hazard a guess that one reason for these differences is that they were written by different people, and that in the case of Reptile specifically, the writer was Anthony Hinds. I had cause to mention him recently in my review of Tom Holland's Supping with Panthers (LJ / DW), where I noted that he had insisted that Kali in the proposed Kali, Devil Bride of Dracula should be explicitly a fraud, rather than the real Hindu goddess, since the latter would be hugely offensive to Indian audiences. I think we might be seeing something of the same ability to understand the perspective of colonial peoples in Reptile. Certainly, it's noticeable that the main hero, Harry Spalding, has been in India, just as Hinds had in real life, while the one villager who is willing to help him try to solve their problems, Tom Bailey, has also seen the world as a seaman. This isn't to say Reptile is wholly progressive. We're still supposed to deplore what the snake cult did to Anna, while a Malay servant in Franklyn's house who is himself an adherent of the cult is portrayed as the greatest villain of the piece. As for the snake cult taking their vengeance on Franklyn through his daughter, of course, that is a very Hammerish device which occurs in several Dracula films (Risen, Taste, AD 1972, Satanic Rites), and is just the sort of thing you have to learn to look past if you otherwise love their films.

Overall, definitely provided a lot of food for thought, and has made me interested to look more into Anthony Hinds - both by watching the ten films he scripted which I haven't yet seen and by reading more about his role at Hammer and general biography.