Often in modern media the women of the Roman world gain the centrality, agency and voice denied them in the distant past. Yet, when Roman women gain this opportunity, what do they do and say? This colloquium explores how the women of Roman antiquity are empowered or demeaned in the literature and the cinema of the twentieth century, and to what ideological, aesthetic or commercial ends. It will include a screening with piano accompaniment of Agrippina (1911, dir. Enrico Guazzoni), a short film concerning the political scheming and brutal death of Nero’s mother. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the musician Michele Sganga about his especially composed score and on how music affects the modern representation of Roman women.
The colloquium at the BSR initiates an international conference that continues on May 4, 5 and 6 at Sapienza or the Polish Institute with further panels on Roman women in modern novels and children’s picture books, theatre, film, television and computer games. The full programme for all 4 days of the conference can be found here. For more information about the performance section(s), please see this flyer. Registration in advance is only required for the first day at the BSR, and attendance on all the days is free.
Further details, and the abstracts for all the papers, can be found on the Audio-Visual Romans conference website.
This event will be in English.
Image: ‘Roman Women’, in Albert Kretschmer, Costumes of All Nations (1882)
