The Iliad, Pinchuk’s reference in this work, is incomparable as a story of war

Melbourne-trained Ukraine artist Stanislava Pinchuk stages a triple screen history hopping meditation.

A scene from Stanislava Pinchuk’s Theatre of War.

When Australian troops were sent to the Dardanelles, in what became known as the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, many would have realised that they were being sent to fight just across the water from the site of the ancient city of Troy and the legendary war that represented the climax of Mycenaean history and, according to Virgil’s Aeneid, eventually led to the founding of Rome itself by refugees from the conquered and devastated city of Priam.

Virgil’s narrative picks up from the conclusion of the story that was originally told by Homer in the Iliad, and it is this story that provides the foundation also for Stanislava Pinchuk’s meditation on war, evoked in three different and complementary modes on the three concurrently running screens of her video work, Theatre of War, a Mordant Family Moving Image Commission for Young Australian Artists.

Homer was Virgil’s model and virtual master in the same way that later Dante, in the first book of Inferno, says to Virgil, “tu sei il mio maestro e il mio poeta” – you are my master and my poet. But Homer has never ceased to be a colossus of world literature; it is a remarkable fact that this earliest author in the western canon remains unsurpassed, and that new translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey appear at least every decade.

Of course the proliferation of translations reminds us that no version can do justice to the original, especially in poetry, where the precise play of rhythm and sound, the choice of words and their order and conjunction, are all-important and can never be adequately replicated. We gain at best a blunt impression of Baudelaire even in the best translations. The flavour, colour and tone of the original evaporate in their rendition into English, just as English poetry seems insipid in French versions.

On the other hand, even a very imperfect knowledge of the original language will help to regain some of this lost quintessence when reading with the help of a parallel text, which is why poetry is quite often published in this way. Whether Horace, Garcia Lorca, Heine or Dante himself, the translation gives us the bones of meaning, but the original helps us touch the living flesh of the poem. This is one of the very good reasons for learning ancient and modern languages; even a little knowledge of Ancient Greek, for example, will open a world of insight in the reading of poetry, philosophy and history.

Stanislava Pinchuk references The Iliad in this work. Picture: Gavin Green.

The Iliad, Pinchuk’s reference in this work, is incomparable as a story of war and still more deeply of the tragedy of human existence in an absurd world, or in ancient thought one ruled by incomprehensible and arbitrary fate. For although the excerpt quoted in the work – from the first lines of Book I – refers to the fulfilling of the will of Zeus, it is clear from the rest of the poem that fate, though seldom affecting them directly, is beyond the control of the gods.

Homer’s heroes are entangled in events beyond their power, and the only way to transcend meaninglessness is to accept the fate that is given and act with courage and steadfastness even in the face of inevitable destruction. Achilles knows that he has a choice between a short and glorious life and a long but ignoble one; and he is well aware that he is not in Troy because of any animosity against the Trojans, but because an arbitrary fortune has placed him there. Sarpedon reminds Glaucus that life is ephemeral, and that courage is the dignity of princes. Hector knows he is doomed to die but that he must strive to protect his people.

Homer never forgets that war is a horrible thing, nor does anyone die anonymously; whenever a warrior is killed, we are reminded that he was a respected and loved member of a community, that his parents, his wife and children will be distraught at his loss. There is no mowing down of faceless enemies, as in modern war movies, and indeed there is no simplistic sense of the enemy, since neither the Greek nor the Trojan side is characterised as good or bad; they are alike caught in the vortex of a cruel necessity.

He knows that a warrior can be carried away by the intoxication of killing and the exultation of triumph on the battlefield, but also that he can be overcome by fear, exhaustion or discouragement. He evokes the anguish of losing a friend or a son, and one of the most touching scenes in the epic is the final encounter between Achilles and Priam, who each finally overcome their own grief in witnessing that of another. Equally moving is the scene between Hector, his wife Andromache, and their infant son Astyanax.

Pinchuk’s work begins with her three screens empty of figures. On the left we see a theatre and stage, reminding us of the work’s title; in the centre is village with a street stretching away between houses that seem abandoned; on the right is a hill with the sea in the distance, and a path leading towards the top.

The theatre, as it turns out, is in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina; Pinchuk, born in Ukraine and a graduate of the University of Melbourne, now lives and works in Sarajevo. Allusions to the war in Ukraine in the introduction to the work outside may lead us to imagine that the second screen shows an abandoned village in that country, but in fact it is a mock one near Salisbury in England, used for training in urban warfare. Pinchuk filmed troops there as an official war artist in 2023.

We might assume that the third screen represents part of the ruins of Troy and the narrow path may conjure up pathetic memories of Homer’s description of the “wide roads” of the lost city. In reality the site is the traditional and probably apocryphal burial place of Homer on the Cycladic island of Ios, not to be confused with the Ionian island of Chios, of which he was a native. He was reputedly blind, too, but this is partly based on the assumption that the vividly-depicted figure of the Phaeacian bard Demodocus in Book 8 of the Odyssey is a kind of self-portrait.

A scene from Stanislava Pinchuk’s Theatre of War.

Then people enter all three scenes at once. On the left, women in traditional Bosnian folk costume take their places on the stage, ready to perform as a choir. On the central screen, soldiers appear. On the right, a pair of teenagers walk up the path, on a pilgrimage to the site of Homer’s tomb. The women chat among themselves. The soldiers prepare their weapons, taking apart and cleaning their automatic rifles. Behind them is graffiti in Russian, translated in the subtitle as “Putin is a F--kwit”. On the right the camera lingers over a relief bust of Homer. Then the girl in the couple turns on her mobile phone and plays the first lines of the Iliad: “Tell, Muse, of the anger of Achilles son of Pelias, the destructive anger which brought countless woes to the Achaeans, which cast many mighty souls of heroes down to Hades, and left their bodies prey to dogs and every kind of bird; and the will of Zeus was fulfilled, from that time when first they stood against each other in strife, Agamemnon, lord of men and godlike Achilles.”

The same text is then sung by the choir, verse after verse. The soldiers finish their preparations and start to march; one has the word “Greek” on his back. The girl has an inscription on her shirt, too: “kleos”, the Greek word for fame or glory – literally being spoken of, and thus remembered. The concept is pervasive in the Homeric poems, and when, for example, Odysseus finally introduces himself to the Phaeacians in Book 9, he speaks of his own kleos as reaching as high as the heavens.

Meanwhile the soldiers enter a house and begin to search it, as though to flush out terrorists; their faces are blurred, for these are real soldiers in training for real conflict, but it is clear by now that they are here engaged in an exercise, and the interior of the house has been set up with dummy obstacles and partitions for practice. This is, as the title suggests, a “theatre of war”, and the point is emphasised by a series of shots in which we see soldiers not involved in the exercise leaning over a rail from a balcony and watching their colleagues. The soldiers fire their rifles; on the third screen there are spent cartridges from a hunter’s shotgun lying in the grass. The camera pans over the same sea that lay all around the island in Homer’s time, oblivious of history and its passing conflicts. We see little rock memorial cairns, erected by visitors, on the site at Ios. The shooting ends, the choir falls silent. Stone cairns appear in the village as well. The girl turns on her mobile and recites Homer’s lines into it.

The choir is still silent, and the village is deserted, rubble suggesting the ruins of war. The sun sets over the sea around the island. A little statue of a seated female figure appears on the choir stage and then the scene on Ios. Soon after it appears in one of the interiors on the central screen as well. This figure is evidently that of the Muse, invoked in the first line of the Iliad. There were nine Muses, daughters of Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory, and Zeus, who lay with her on nine successive nights. They were later conceived of as the companions of Apollo and accompany him on depictions of the sacred mountain of Parnassus, as in Raphael’s fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura.

A scene from Stanislava Pinchuk’s Theatre of War.

There were, at least later, Muses dedicated to Lyric and Dramatic poetry as well as to History and other subjects, but the most important is the Epic Muse invoked by Homer here and at the beginning of the Odyssey, by Virgil at the beginning of the Aeneid, and even by Dante at the start of the Inferno and Purgatorio; for the more challenging task of Paradiso, he calls on Apollo himself, even for this greatest of Christian poems.

The poet prays to the muse not just to inspire him, but virtually to speak through him, for epic is the most impersonal of genres, quite different from lyric verse in which the poet sings of intimate and personal feelings. The epic narrative, on the contrary, is like a great “river of speech” to borrow Dante’s words to Virgil, flowing impersonally through time, recited by the bard as though possessed by the divine, recalling the perennial passions and travails of humanity in an incomprehensible world.

Stanislava Pinchuk: Theatre of War
ACMI to June 9

Stanislava Pinchuk: Theatre of War
ACMI to June 9