Appropriating Greek myth: Iphigenia and Argentine patriarchal society in Inés de Oliveira Cézar's Extranjera

This article focuses on Inés de Oliveira Cézar's film Extranjera (2007), a free adaptation of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis, and examines the way the discourses of gender, power, morality, and ethnicity intersect with each other. The article argues that de Oliveira Cézar borrows the motif...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Classical receptions journal 2010, Vol.2 (1), p.92-113
Main Author: Nikoloutsos, Konstantinos P.
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:This article focuses on Inés de Oliveira Cézar's film Extranjera (2007), a free adaptation of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis, and examines the way the discourses of gender, power, morality, and ethnicity intersect with each other. The article argues that de Oliveira Cézar borrows the motif of human sacrifice from Euripides' tragedy in order to expose the inconsistencies and incongruities of patriarchy and interrogate the hierarchical structures of rural Argentine society, which perpetuate female dependency and oppression. The article conducts a close reading between the film and its Greek prototype aiming to demonstrate the thematic and ideological relation between the two and concludes by showing how the main characters are implicated in a cinematic rhetoric about limits and their transgression.
ISSN:1759-5134
1759-5142
DOI:10.1093/crj/clq004