Film Studies

This article explores the coincidence between Sarah Bernhardt's role as a theatrical manager in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and her pioneering work in the nascent film industry. I argue that Bernhardt was not only a performer and manager in the theatre, but a creative agent in modern media industries. Questions about the relationship between Bernhardt and early film allow us to discuss the formation of female business experience in the theatre and its subsequent movement into a cinematographic culture that would dominate and define twentieth-century culture and commerce. Even if Bernhardt is regarded as a 'lone entrepreneur' and therefore extraneous to broader national discussions of theatrical industrialisation, it is important to understand the impact she has as a media celebrity who used film in order to expand her own twentieth-century global marketability. Sarah Bernhardt is one of the most globally celebrated actress-managers of the late nineteenth century. Her renown hinges on her capacity to remain in the public eye for over sixty years and to gain control of her professional career through forty years of theatrical management.

The intention of this article is to investigate the visual presence of animals in contemporary literary and cinematic productions, specifically in the films La ciénaga (2011) and La
mujer sin cabeza [The Headless Woman] (2008) by Lucrecia Martel, Verano [Summer] (2011) by Jose´ Luis Torres Leiva, Perro muerto [Dead Dog] (2011) by Camilo Becerra,
and in Carlos Busqued’s 2009 novel Bajo este sol tremendo [Under this Terrible Sun]. Despite the fact that authors like John Berger and Akira Lippit have claimed that the animal tends to disappear in modernity, authors like Pick and Jonathan Burt have rescued a persistent animal presence in literary and flim productions as a positive element. Burt emphasises the
visual agency of the animal not so much as subjectivity, but rather as an affective power facing the human observer, and Pick underlines the vulnerability of the animal on screen. In this
article I show the importance of the animal-human figuration, the look between species and the mobility/immobility duality as axes around which the visual presence of animals is articulated in these contemporary Latin American cultural productions.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13569325.2014.1000285#.VXnv7NKG-Fc

This article considers The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012) in order to argue through Fredric Jameson that postmodern aspects of a text are capable of obfuscating, if not altogether obliterating, any Marxist polemics. The first portion engages with Jameson's The Political Unconscious, particularly his emphasis on class struggle and identification of ideologemes which manifest in the text. The subsequent section considers The Dark Knight Rises as a postmodern text through Jameson's concepts of pastiche and nostalgia. Moreover, The Dark Knight Rises is contextualized within the recent spate of class-oriented cinema. Collectively, the goal is to identify a trend within such films of establishing a correlation between capitalism and inequality, ideologemes and postmodernism. The final result is an increasingly impressive group of genre-spanning films which address contemporary inequality in its multifarious forms, but which treat these issues more so as narrative devices than tenable critiques of the sites of oppression.

This article describes how Kamal Amrohi's Pakeezah distils the idioms of the historical courtesan film, poised as they are between the glorification of courtesan culture and lamenting the debased status of the courtesan; between a nostalgic yearning for the feudal world of the kotha and a utopian desire to escape from it. The article argues that Pakeezah self-consciously defines the particular " chronotope, " or space-time, of the historical courtesan genre by showing that nothing less than a transformation of the idioms of that genre is required to liberate the courtesan from her claustrophobic milieu—whose underlying state is one of enervation and death—into the open space and lived time of modernity.

Why is it that we then all go to dark rooms to collectively commune over empathizing with fictional characters, as we do when watching films? Specifically, there have been few cultural touchstones to cause as much discussion and communing in the past ten years as Marvels' Avengers series and the film industry as a whole!

The role of food in literature, art and film has been receiving a lot of critical attention lately. Food is not just a matter for the sustenance of life and its cultural and sociological significance is often discussed. Recently numerous studies have scrutinized texts to read meaning into the instances of eating and drinking in art. In the creative circle, food is frequently laden with a symbolic role and has a rhetorical function to perform. So often has this been practiced that it has resulted in a film food genre. Chocolat directed by Lasse Hallstrom is a film belonging to this genre. Chocolate, here, is more than an item of food. It is the exotic 'other'. It is the consummation of sin. It mediates the struggle between conventions and forces of change. The richness of Vianne's chocolates lends the movie its sumptuous richness. This paper intends to examine how chocolate breaks down the Catholic fortress to bend to the winds of change.

When we—that is, Pavitra and Debashree—sat down to articulate our understanding of a decolonial and feminist media studies, we knew that we were entering a conversation that had long been underway. Anticolonial movements of the twentieth century ousted powerful and globe-spanning modern empires. Postcolonial and decolonial theories helped us understand the epistemic violence that made the material extraction of colonialism possible. They cautioned us that colonialism looked different in different parts of the world, used different weapons, and had different avatars in the present.
As many of the authors in this issue observe, the work of decolonization does not end at a definite historical milestone, and calls to decolonize become defanged when they are appropriated by the very institutions we seek to challenge. The struggle against the colonization of our minds and bodies and lands is ongoing. The task of the feminist media scholar, then, is to enter the struggle midstream and try to make sense of the different currents that make up the turbulence.

This thesis is a historical and filmic analysis of the Black Panther Party, using two documentaries, All Power to the People: The Black Panther Party and Beyond (1996) and The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2015). It is first stated what the documentary film should set out to achieve when framing a political narrative. The films will be looked at separately, in regard to the context of their production and release. Power to the People was a reaction to the Rodney King riots. Vanguard of the Revolution was filmed alongside the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement. The Black Panther origins as a movement are briefly considered to allow for a base understanding of the party’s precepts and aims. This includes the roles of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and an introduction to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The content analysis begins by looking at the main ideologies of the party and its operations. The empowerment of women but also hyper masculinity within the party is then discussed. This follows on to social and survival programs set up by the party. Primarily using two significant cases, the deaths of Bobby Hutton and Fred Hampton, there is an examination of concerted efforts by police and FBI to mobilise and neutralise the party. Comparisons and contrasts are then made between the style and content of the two films. It will be concluded that the films serve two purposes, to give the positive work of the Black Panthers a legitimate platform, but also to address the criticisms levelled at the party. The overarching conclusion will be that the Black Panthers were involved in a vicious cycle. Once they brought any semblance of solidarity to their communities, the FBI and Police would move against them leading to reactionary violence which caused the party’s eventual disbandment.

When Avatar (2009) became the highest grossing movie of all time, it marked a high point in 3D cinema's turbulent history. Although 3D cinema draws in box-office takings that surpass 2D cinema, it continuously emerges and disappears as a passing fad. Experiments with 3D moving-images have been with us since the birth of cinema, and it is a form of visual expression already seen by billions of twenty-first century viewers, yet there is little understanding of how 3D cinema operates as an art form. We know that it simultaneously uses depth modes to approximate our visual reality and spectacular effects that go beyond traditional perception, but we do not have an appropriate grasp of its creative function. This book examines 3D cinema's unique visual regime in order to understand the optical illusions and tactile experiences that it presents.

Our time is characterized by a crisis of representational
practice, fuelled by unprecedented technological and economic changes on a global level. Narrative, therefore, takes a wide variety of forms. This course examines the aesthetics and techniques of film and literature from around the world, and analyses the masters of each art form. Through short stories and plays, we will study different ways a story can be told and the many exciting ways embedded "narratives" (or discourses) can be framed. Similarly, through films and film adaptations of great literary masterpieces, we will study how visual elements challenge the reader's imagination.


Specifically, we examine the relationship between meaning
and narrative structure. The course considers the tensions
between claims for originality and poetic license, between
producers and audiences, between fiction and reality, narrative and history, memory and representation. We will study representative theorists of narratology, such as J. Hillis Miller, Wolfgang Iser and Hayden White. Cutting-edge scholarship on film and the new media will also be introduced, such as Seymour Chatman, Rey Chow, as well as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's Remediation. In addition to becoming familiar with major issues in film studies and East-West comparative studies, students will acquire a working knowledge of narrative theory.

Edited by Rimgaila Salys

The early years of the twenty-first century have been an exciting transitional period in Russian cinema, as the industry recovered from the crises of the late 1990s and again stepped onto the global stage. During these years four generations, from the late Soviet directors through post-Soviet and New Russian filmmakers to the Russian millennials, have worked in varying visual styles and with diverse narrative strategies, while searching for a new cinematic language. Financing and distribution models have evolved, along with conservative politics driving Ministry of Culture regulation. This reader is intended both for contemporary Russian cinema courses and for modern Russian culture courses that emphasize film. It does not attempt to establish a canon for the period but seeks to provide undergraduate students with an introduction to significant Russian films released between 2005 and 2016 that are also available with English subtitles. The twenty-one essays on individual films provide background information on directors’ careers, detailed analyses of selected films, along with suggested further readings both in English and Russian.

Learn more & purchase: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/filmandmediastudies/the-contemporary-russian-cinema-reader

Current discourses about migrants and diaspora communities in Europe are often informed by a social worker's perspective and haunted by residual notions of supposedly pure and authentic cultures of origin. Between national entrenchment and transnational globalization, ethnic minorities are "imagined" as outsiders on a subnational level. The consequent othering of so-called "third" or "substate" cinemas by cultural producers, critics and policymakers is highly problematic. I therefore propose to reframe the discussion about such "minor" cinemas within a broader consideration of traveling cultures and global flows, of mobility between margin and center, between independent and mainstream productions, as well as crossovers between different genres and their reception across national boundaries.

This work outlines a new methodology for film analysis based on the radical materialist thought of Baruch Spinoza, re-evaluating contemporary cognitive media theory and philosophical theories on the emotional and intellectual aspects of film experience.
Sticchi’s exploration of Spinozian philosophy creates an experiential constructive model to blend the affective and intellectual aspects of cognition, and to combine it with different philosophical interpretations of film theory. Spinoza’s embodied philosophy rejected logical and ethical dualisms, and established a perfect parallelism between sensation and reason and provides the opportunity to address negative emotions and sad passions without referring exclusively to traditional notions such as catharsis or sublimation, and to put forth a practical/embodied notion of Film-Philosophy. This new analytical approach is tested on four case studies, films that challenge the viewer’s emotional engagement since they display situations of cosmic failure and depict controversial and damaged characters: A Serious Man (2009); Melancholia (2011); The Act of Killing (2012) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).

Drawing from longitudinal research with newcomer communities in Ireland, anthropological literature, and film theory and practice, Alexandra argues for a re-conceptualisation of the participatory media genre of Digital Storytelling (DS). Rather than understanding images and sound as “secondary concerns” disconnected from broader filmic practices, the chapter places DS in conversation with documentary and ethnographic arts. Arguing for the importance of both the audiovisual artefact and the intensively collaborative process that facilitates its creation, the finished artefact is conceptualised as an “embodied object”. Through inquiry, exchange and montage, this object is imbued with the knowledge, longings, and sensorial experience of a particular moment in the emergent practitioner’s life. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the connective tissue between DS and ethnographic and documentary film and video.

The argument proposed here is that an analysis of time as it is manifested by the film festival illuminates both the particularity of the festival's structure and the continuation of its appeal. Equally, through the study of a film festival as a model or figural form we are able to comprehend our contemporary experience of time as it has mutated from a regulated clock-time of the early twentieth century to a more amorphic modality at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In summary, at cinema's inception over a century ago the populace encountered a new temporal regime that forced them to inhabit life as a series of units designated by schedules and conforming to standardized timetables. Cinema famously played it both ways, colluding with the uniformity of an increasingly mass culture in its roll-out of repetitive exhibition programs, but it also broke with the demanding nature of working life in the provision of a new spectacular culture of distraction. If factory life meant clocking in, cinema culture equaled release from duty. If we travel forward 100 years, the patterns of life and the experience of time have radically changed in a climate of deregulation and deinstitutionalization. Both work and leisure (including film viewing) in the process of relocating to the home have become mixed up and overlapping. The collective nature of film viewing is all but lost as film is dispersed across technological forms, locations, and times. In short, the dominant concept of time at the beginning of this century is one of distributed nonalignment. The film festival, however, operates a temporality that runs counter to the deregulated environment in which it exists. To a certain extent this argument runs counter to the paradigmatic features of the film festival as they have been established in a growing body of scholarship that identifies its effectiveness and appeal through spatial terms (De Valck 2007; De Valck and Loist 2009). It is useful to enumerate the most prominent of these at the beginning. First, film festivals provide for film cultures that would otherwise remain marginalized by a dominant, high-budget cinema. These " alternative " films may be minority language, or they may focus on identitarian politics, or they may locate themselves within a minority aesthetic such as cult cinemas. Second, collectively festivals operate routes of distribution where each autonomous site also belongs to a series of nodes that 659_04b_Film Festivals.indd 69 2/12/15 15:06:31

Poter accedere a qualsiasi immagine, in qualsiasi momento, in qualsiasi luogo. I nuovi media prospettano straordinarie vie di fruizione. Ma come orientarsi in questo scenario? La nostra cultura visuale è capace di tenere il passo della tecnologia? Questo libro racconta come il cinema, ben prima dell'avvento della tecnologia digitale, abbia saputo accogliere immagini provenienti da archivi pubblici e privati: dai rapporti con la pittura al foundfootage, dalla pratica del remake all'intermedialità. Molte volte assegnato al compito di produrre un calco del "reale", il film costituisce piuttosto uno spazio del pensiero nel quale si rielaborano le immagini del passato e si rigenerano i materiali "usurati" della cultura. Se i nuovi media invitano lo spettatore a manipolare le immagini e non semplicemente a osservarle, è dunque a partire dalle lezioni di montaggio offerte da maestri come Godard e Herzog, Sokurov e Van Sant, Pasolini e Moretti, che diventa possibile assumere un ruolo attivo e consapevole nell'orizzonte estetico e mediatico contemporaneo.

This article focuses on the relationship between the history of spiritualist séances in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and the introduction of film. It examines in particular two cases: the convergence of psychological studies on magic and spiritualism with early film theory, signalled in particular by Hugo Münsterberg's involvement in both fields; and the trajectory from spirit photography, a spiritualist practice that was based on the appearance of spectres on the photographic plate, to the trick movies of early cinema. The conclusion sets the relationship between beliefs in spirit and fictional representation of ghosts in film as a promising field of inquiry for contemporary film studies.

Con le espressioni “Cinema a domicilio”, “piccolo cinematografo privato”, “cinema in casa”, giornalisti, intellettuali e addetti ai lavori salutano l’avvento della programmazione televisiva italiana sperimentale, alla fine degli anni Trenta. Alla fine degli anni Quaranta, quando la RAI riprende quegli studi e quegli esperimenti che, nel giro di pochi anni, porteranno al varo del servizio regolare di trasmissione, il dibattito si rianima; ma la ricerca dello specifico televisivo si accompagna questa volta alla crescente preoccupazione per l’avvenire del cinema stesso quale mezzo di intrattenimento di massa. Attraverso lo spoglio sistematico delle riviste corporative dell’AGIS, il mio intervento intende esaminare il posizionamento degli esercenti cinematografici italiani nel conflitto cinema-televisione e il loro contributo alla messa a punto delle principali strategie di contenimento della concorrenza.

With the labels “home cinema”, “small private cinema”, “home theater”, journalists, intellectuals and professionals welcome the advent of experimental television in Italy, during the late thirties. At the end of the forties, when RAI resumes those studies and experiments that, within a few years, will lead to the launch of the regular television service, the debate is revived, but the search for the specificity of the medium is accompanied by a growing concern for the future of cinema itself as mass entertainment. Through the study of AGIS’ major corporate magazines, this essay will examine the positioning of the Italian film exhibitors in the conflict cinema-television, and their contribution to the development of the main strategies of containment of the competition.

GORA is a product of the new televisual production regime in
Turkey. GORA represents the coming together of two products of
television in Turkey: the technical excellence of the television infrastructure and the new, popular television talent. The year 1999 was a turning point for cinema in Turkey as digital post-production facilities came in line with their American counterparts in terms of quality.

Parmenides is probably the most influential of all Presocratics on the subsequent history of philosophy, yet he has been poorly served by his English translators. They persistently turn his poem into awkward and deadening prose, as if he had written an obscure treatise on logic. By rendering Parmenides’ poetry as poetry, in an English equivalent of its meter, this translation aims to show that his medium is essential to his message — that he is not a would-be analytic logician but a mystical visionary.striving to convey a revelation of ultimate reality.

Die Auswirkungen struktureller Diskriminierung in Form von Audismus werden gegenwärtig gesellschaftlich und politisch unterschätzt. Privile-gien, die sich für Menschen durch die Fähigkeit, zu hören, ergeben, bleiben tauben Menschen verwehrt. Es wird deshalb in der vorliegenden Arbeit an-genommen, dass die Lebensrealität hörender Menschen zu Nachteilen für taube Menschen führt. Die Diskriminierungen, die taube Menschen tagtäg-lich in vielen wichtigen Lebensbereichen innerhalb der hörenden Gesell-schaft erfahren, bleiben jedoch im Diskurs unsichtbar (Tuccoli 2008, 23 f.). Beispielhaft für die daraus anzunehmenden Spannungen zwischen der tau-ben sprachlich-kulturellen Minderheit und der hörenden Mehrheit soll im Folgenden das Phänomen der "kulturellen Aneignung" von Gebärdenspra-che und der diesbezügliche Diskurs-ausgelöst durch den Eurovision Song-contest (ESC) 2017-stehen und untersucht werden. Ziel der Arbeit ist es, eine wissenschaftliche Grundlage anzubieten, um auf deren Basis den Diskurs über "kulturelle Aneignung", Audismus und hearing privileges breiter und fundierter führen zu können. Sie greift das im Postkolonialismus geprägte Konzept der "kulturellen Aneignung" auf und beleuchtet dabei mithilfe der Kritischen Diskursanalyse nach Jäger (2015) die Reproduktion struktureller Diskriminierung. Die Analyse des Diskur-ses wirft Schlaglichter auf seine Aspekte und Argumente und versucht, die-se zu entschlüsseln. Dabei werden verschiedene Subjektpositionen sowie Diskursverschränkungen,-brüche und-verschiebungen sichtbar gemacht.

Tijelo kao film | Body as Film | Body and Sexuality in Short Feature Film; Retrospective at Croatian Film Days 2015 curated by Željko Luketić. Featuring works from Ante Babaja, Miroslav Mikuljan, Mišo Budisavljević, Neven Korda, Tomislav Gotovac, Dasen Štambuk, etc.

Published by Cognella Academic Publishing (San Diego), ISBN 978-1-7935-2153-8. Previous editions have been adopted at 10 universities and colleges.

"Media Environments: Using Movies and Texts to Critique Media and Society" uses popular film as a gateway to critical readings, encouraging students to think creatively and critically about media, society, technology, and popular culture.

The text anthology explores media in their totality and provides models and theories for interrogating many universal themes that span media, technology, and planetary civilization. Using popular films about media as lead-ins, students are introduced to the works of well-known thinkers and writers such as Marshall McLuhan, Charlton D. McIlwain, Shoshanna Zuboff, Julia Hildebrand, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Devon Powers, Antonio Lopez, and many others. Chapters span interconnected topics:

Memes (original meaning),
Networks (McLuhan),
Spectacle (Debord),
Hyperreality (Baudrillard).

Capitalism and Consumerism,
Freedom and Protest,
Social-Mobile Media,
Ecology and the Anthropocene,
Science and Our Place in the Universe,
Pseudoscience and Conspiracy,
Celebrity and Superheroes,
New Concepts of "Hot" and "Cool" Media,
Land Art, Dark Skies, and Technological Civilization.

The fourth edition features 19 new readings that explore Afrofuturism in Black Panther, Avatar and global media ecosystems, Hollywood and climate change, Blade Runner 2049 and future earth scenarios, Avengers and environmental advocacy, #BlackLivesMatter and Black movements in digital culture, and the International Dark Sky movement as a radical media-tech philosophy. Intellectually rigorous and thematically diverse, Media Environments is ideal for courses and programs in media and/or communication studies.

This paper identifies the impact of movie induced tourism on the branding of areas, which have become popular tourist destinations as a result of their featuring in a movie or television series (O’Connor, 2000). The paper outlines some of the benefits of tourism branding that accrue to a destination based on an area’s image as moulded by a number of television series. The researcher’s hypothesis is that a brand based on the image derived from the television series may be a strong means of marketing the area and harnessing tourism. The study area is the Yorkshire region in the North of England which has been the subject of a number of popular English television series’ and is already the subject of much research in the tourism and destination management field; Mordue (1996), Riley and Van Doren (1992) and Tooke and Baker (2002).

In order to test this hypothesis, a survey of visitors to Yorkshire over a seven day period in July 2003 was carried out. The main aim of the survey was to assess the linkages between movie induced tourism and branding and to identify research issues in relation to destination branding and management. Surveying a sample of the general tourist population completed this. The initial part of the paper outlines the concept of destination branding and the embryonic yet evolving area of movie induced tourism. This review of existing literature identifies a gap in previous research, which shows that there has been little research on the impacts of television on general tourist perceptions of an area or region. The survey undertaken by the researcher and outlined in the methodology section is an initial attempt to fill this gap. The findings of this survey are outlined in the remaining sections of the paper and have a number of implications for the future branding of destinations based on television and film imagery.

This thesis examines seven films from the cinemas of Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky—Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), and The Silence (1963), and Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983), and The Sacrifice (1986).

These films were chosen as they represent the deepest periods of two directors’ engagements with the possible death of God and the subsequent loss of intrinsic existential meaning—topics with which this thesis is principally concerned.

As a starting point, this thesis argues that the films present the silence of God as the primary indicator of God’s absence from the human world. Becoming aware of this silence thus causes one to interrogate religious certainties which have hitherto been taken to be timeless and true. This thesis then contends that, when faced with this silence and its implications, Bergman desperately sought evidence of God’s existence while Tarkovsky unyieldingly maintained an attitude of faith.

The directors’ progressions toward these contrasting positions are evident through the uses of sound elements in their films. As Bergman unsuccessfully pursued evidence of God’s existence, the soundscapes in his four films become increasingly minimal. The sparse use of sound reveals Bergman’s conception of a Godless void. On the other hand, metaphysical silence in Tarkovsky’s films was not perceived as emptiness. Instead, “silence” in his films was, paradoxically, often depicted through complex layers of sounds. Presented as manifestations of the metaphysical, the sounds of “silence” in Tarkovsky’s films consequently become affirmations of faith.

Through this sound-based approach to film analysis, this thesis sets out to explain why Bergman and Tarkovsky understood metaphysical silence so differently by examining how they portrayed literal silences.

Once viewed as an embarrassing superstition, the theatrical religious performances of Korean shamans—who communicate with the dead, divine the future, and become possessed—are going mainstream. Attitudes toward Korean shamanism are changing as shamanic traditions appear in staged rituals, museums, films, and television programs, as well as on the internet.

Contemporary Korean Shamanism explores this vernacular religion and practice, which includes sensory rituals using laden altars, ecstatic dance, and animal sacrifice, within South Korea's hypertechnologized society, where over 200,000 shamans are listed in professional organizations. Liora Sarfati reveals how representations of shamanism in national, commercialized, and screen-mediated settings have transformed opinions of these religious practitioners and their rituals.

Applying ethnography and folklore research, Contemporary Korean Shamanism maps this shift in perception about shamanism—from a sign of a backward, undeveloped Korea to a valuable, indigenous cultural asset.
https://iupress.org/9780253057174/contemporary-korean-shamanism/

The seeds of a culture of elite drug use that were sown in the first season of Rome blossom to full prominence in the show’s second series as male and female characters within the city and without are shown conspicuously consuming narcotics. What emerges from the haze of opium and hemp smoke is a swirl of inference as a decidedly modern habit is thrust into ancient hands, along with all of its connotations. Perhaps inspired as much by Shakespeare as by orientalist stereotypes, the prevalence of the vice is striking: the reimagined Cleopatra is often addled with opium and her paramour Antony succumbs to the vice all too quickly, while in Rome itself the parvenue Jocasta corrupts the well-to-do Octavia with her imported hemp whose potency is enough to attract the dabbling of Atia, whose later casual dismissal of the habit implies that it was neither scandalous nor out of the ordinary. Commonplace, seductive, and always aphrodisiac, drug use in the show nevertheless brings with it the dangers and associations of the modern habit. Notions of degeneracy, addiction, sexual impropriety and juvenile delinquency come with the vice and speak to the character of the users, while the foreign origins of the substances themselves bear political associations that play into dichotomy of Roman versus non-Roman in the series. And all of this emerges from what is essentially an historical embellishment of a drug culture that never was present. This chapter seeks to delve into what lies behind this retrojection of a modern vice onto the ancient elite by considering the ramifications of drug use within the world of the series, and the implied judgement of the characters involved. All the while drug use in Rome will be situated in relation to both historical context, and the increasing frequency with which this modern decadence is grafted onto the ancients in contemporary depictions of the Classical world.