Motifs
Power and tyranny
The mechanisms of domination and servitude.
How does a man become capable of anything, and why do the others obey him: the question runs through centuries and regimes. Shakespeare asks it with a king who rises by murder, Orwell with a state that rewrites the past every morning, Asturias and Roa Bastos with Latin American dictators seen from inside their own palace. Cinema treats it through close portraiture or through mechanism: an emperor surrounded by silent courtiers, an underground city where people work for those living above.
Classroom reading paths
La révolte (being reviewed)
works 12
- EssayThe PrinceIl PrincipeNiccolò Machiavelli · 1532A fallen secretary of state writes, for those who drove him out, how to hold on to power.Literature
- TheatreMacbethWilliam Shakespeare · 1606Three women tell a general that he will be king, and the king comes to sleep at his house that very evening.Literature
- NovelWeМыYevgeny Zamyatin · 1924A novel of 1920-1921, long banned in the Soviet Union: the diary of an engineer in a future totalitarian state.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelDarkness at NoonArthur Koestler · 1940A leader from the first hour is arrested in the name of the revolution he helped make.Literature
- CinemaThe Great DictatorCharlie Chaplin · 1940The film caricatures Hitler while the United States was still officially neutral, and has him speak a gibberish that imitates German.Cinema
- CinemaCitizen KaneOrson Welles · 1941The film tells the life of its hero through several successive points of view, out of chronological order; Gregg Toland uses great depth of field, visible ceilings and low-angle shots.Cinema
- Feature filmIvan the TerribleIvan GroznyySergei M. Eisenstein · 1944Coronation, war and court plots: the young Ivan IV imposes his power on the boyars.Cinema
- NovelThe PresidentEl señor PresidenteMiguel Ángel Asturias · 1946The terror of a Central American dictatorship, told in the language of nightmare.Literature
- NovelNineteen Eighty-FourGeorge Orwell · 1949A man whose job is to remake the past begins to keep a notebook.LiteraturePublic domain
- Feature filmZCosta-Gavras · 1969A political thriller from 1969 that transposes into an unnamed country the murder of a Greek deputy that had taken place six years earlier, filmed during the dictatorship of the colonels.Cinema
- NovelI the SupremeYo el SupremoAugusto Roa Bastos · 1974The country's first dictator, trapped by his own dictation, in a fragmented form that questions the writing of power.Literature
- CinemaKagemusha影武者Akira Kurosawa · 1980A 1980 film in which a thief takes the place of a dead lord, and an entire clan pretends to believe he is alive.Cinema