L'héritage de la chouette

- Season 1

(1990)

The 1st of 13 episodes sets a tone for back and forth brainstorming by savvy talking heads, some pictured gathering in cities round the world for old fashioned drinking: how much of what we know about the Greeks is not exactly true?

Instead of its commonly assumed use to promote Democracy, thinkers show how the Nazis distorted the legacy of ancient Greece, such as the Olympics, for their own undemocratic purposes.

The City of Dreams examines what was meant by Democracy in ancient Greek cities such as Athens, what were it's limitations, and how it relates to what we mean by the word today. Some, such as Elia Kazan, do not think it amounted to much.

Spinning off from the stories of the Odyssey and of updated migration epics such as that of Elia Kazan 's family, Nostalgia questions to what extent we can actually put ourselves back in ancient times we do not fully understand.

The Greek word for loss of memory is used in this episode to explore how modern politicians deliberately speak only to the present and passing moment, and do not foster a sense of history.

Mathematics, in its original sense meaning Learning, is another word we got from Greece.Here a smaller group of talking heads focus on how ancient concepts of numbering and measuring underlie our ability to think.

Essay filmmakers like Marker and Godard love word play.Here as images show how Greek derived words permeate our media, our street signs, even our graffiti, we delve in a semiotic kind of way into the basis of speech itself.

As music (again a Greek word) stemmed from imitating nature's sounds and in Byzantine/ Orthodox times became an expression of suffering and misery, Marker challenges with new experimental examples from the UPIC studio and Iannis Xenakis.

This episode is classic Chris Marker, tying together an abandoned Athenian power plant turned cultural center, ancient Greek statuary, a department store in Japan, young men destroyed by armored warfare during WWI, and a comparison between Plato's parable of the cave and contemporary cinema.

What were the stories Greece shared that were a kind of religion, how do the stories relate to ones in Japan,and was violence involved or did polytheism prevent the more extensive violence accompanying, several speakers argue, monotheism?

The complicated subject of sexuality and gender in Greece includes homoeroticism, how large a social role women did play , how teaching about the danger of desire and the limits of the body compare with more repressive Christianity.

As Marker compares staging of Greek plays with their Japanese counterparts,questions arise as to the meaning of such theater in a specifically democratic space, and warnings against excess and hubris.

The banquets we have seen over 13 parts come to an end, as our talking heads make their last comments on the lasting gifts of a culture without a sacred book, and where the owl looms even larger as a symbol of wisdom.