Word: herostratus
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...that if you want to make your power felt, a good way to do it is by destroying something that, unlike human life, is not even notionally a renewable resource. That "something" is the sense of a readily accessible past, without which there is no memory and no civilization. Herostratus, a narcissistic Greek, burned the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus because he thought it would make his name immortal. The depressing fact is that he was right. If he had not burned the temple, he would be utterly forgotten, along with 99.99% of the rest of the human population...
...siblings who squirm their way to royal fame and power in the Persian-dominated Greek cities of the 4th century B.C. Murray Morris sees them mainly as Lana and Ava in a huge marble bathtub, but Eric shifts the film's focus to the sisters' half brother, Herostratus. Betrayed to the Persians as a Greek rebel by Helena, who is also his lover, Herostratus dashes both sisters' dreams of immortal fame by burning the spectacular Temple of Diana. In one rash act he has overshadowed his conniving sisters and secured for himself a notable historic role...
Donald Levy's Herostratus belongs to no such currently fashionable style as Godard's but harkens back to the furious experiment ??? of the twenties, attempting to rethink the problems of cinematic form from fresh, non-dramatic perspectives. As such it challenges our expectations of how movies should look and feel, answering certain questions in unusual ways while leaving others in abeyance. The critical yardsticks with which I am comfortable, dependent upon consistency of style and certain principles of dramatic construction, are no longer applicable, and I can't come to an evaluation with which I can feel at case...
...which the actors were allowed a maximum of freedom to improvise their own dialogue: aside from what may be some over-acting by Michael Gothard as Max, the result comes off as well as any improvised acting I've ever seen. But the distinction between acting and being in Herostratus is hazy, complicated by Levy's choice of actors whose personalities he felt were in harmony with those of the characters they were to portray. Consequently, the character can be over acting-that being the nature of his fictive interpersonal style (especially in Max's case)-while the actor...
...HEROSTRATUS should stir some critical controversy, and it's worthy of it; but whatever the outcome of the debate about its relative merits, or the validities of Levy's theories and ambitions for the cinema, no one can deny that it's an astoundingly original work in a medium where convention is all a film that draws on the avant-garde's history yet reaches its own conclusions. What is most exhilirating about the whole experience is the raw intellectual energy, the pulse beat of an unflagging imagination, the sense that an important artist has places to go and visions...
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