Ancient Ruins in Contemporary Cinema and Theatre

Ruins have always provided artists with a rich storehouse of concepts and materials, but some epochs have had the capacity to create an interest in ruins more than others. Ancient Ruins in Contemporary Cinema and Theatre postulates that we are now in such an epoch. Since 1945, the world has been facing images of wreckage--the results of colonialism, wars, terrorist attacks, climate change, capitalism. This new age of "ruin-gazing" is particularly interested in the kinds of ruins that are caused by humanity and is thus directly related to a growing awareness of the Anthropocene. In this context, there is a necessity to question the concept of the ruin invented by the West. Written by sixteen authors in the fields of classics, cinema, theatre, philosophy, history, postcolonial studies, and queer studies, this interdisciplinary volume approaches the ruin from a classical reception point of view, using ancient ruins as both a starting point and a horizon. The attraction to past civilizations did not disappear with the wars of the twentieth century and the use of classical antiquity by totalitarian ideologies: contemporary artists and researchers often compare ancient ruins and contemporary rubble. Both theatre and cinema have reshaped perceptions of antiquity by "performing" ruins, on diverse levels of content, process, and form. By bringing together these two disciplines, Ancient Ruins in Contemporary Cinema and Theatre takes up their specificities to map out the theory and representation of ruins since 1945 in so far unexplored ways. Through the paradigm of the ruin, the authors look at both the state (the object) and the process (destruction). In the works of art that they analyse, ruin is thus conceptualized both as an object of representation and as a creative process affecting text and image as well as bodies and space. Ultimately, ruin operates as a critical tool for questioning the construction of history, thinking through trauma, and imagining ways of surviving and resisting.