Recently thru a reading of “The Oresteia” trilogy, I picked up on something new that made me sit and pause for a while. What if the events of the second book (The Libation Bearers) started not because Apollo told Orestes to kill Clytemnestra, but rather because Orestes has some sort of mental issue. To give a little more background: Clytemnestra had already killed her husband Agamemnon in the first part of the play before Orestes has come home. The shock of the news must have been devastating for Orestes to have dealt with and somehow he internalizes this by imagining that Apollo has told him to kill his own mother. I thought that this might be an interesting way to interpret “the will of the gods”.
I didn’t want to focus with the death of Clytemnestra because that would have been difficult to capture on the “still image” part of my portfolio. Rather I think in this case I’m going to focus on setting the modern anguish that Orestes is going thru by setting up why you would hear voices” and maybe do a metaphor on mental illness. Also I’ve gone ahead and set everything up in modern times. Included hear are at least a few of the places where I’ve done reshooting.
It’s been really difficult to set up Orestes in this scenario. Originally while setting up this visualization I wanted Orestes to come off as sympathetic in our modern age (having just lost his father, and now coming to terms with it). The person I had invited to play Orestes couldn’t capture the range of emotion I was trying to convey thru the set pieces. So instead today I have some of the locations that I scouted that might work out. The final visualization will be shot in black and white with someone who can be “facially” expressive.
