Broken Scenes: Resurrecting Ancient Fragmented Voices Through Animation

在过去十年中，希腊-罗马世界的学者一直面临着通过网站和基于视觉和文本数据的应用程序将他们的学科整合到数字领域的挑战，以便为该领域的专业人员和学生制作工具。然而，直到最近，针对学术领域以外社区的真正公众参与和教育倡议才在数字经典应用程序的开发中得到解决。使用动画直观地呈现著名的神话场景，并将古代花瓶上的绘画栩栩如生地用于课堂，已经取得了一些成功。但是，虽然用确定的情节线制作动画可以起到说教的作用，但它提出了一个更大的问题，即动画与整个古代世界研究之间的潜在关系。动画的艺术性能否与古代手稿研究相结合，以复活仅保存在零碎纸莎草纸中的表演性声音？现在，我们提议把牛津大学的纸像学家和洛杉矶获得奥斯卡奖的动画工作室Acme Filmworks的一个团队聚集在一起，重建保存在P.Oxy中的希腊Mime的破碎场景。5189，一种来自公元6世纪埃及的残缺纸莎草纸。我们的目标是在动画制作方法中融入学术关注和实践，并制作一部在人类笑话和舞台戏剧的背景下具有共时性和历时性文化影响的动画短片。该项目的理念是，以实践为基础的动画艺术不仅可以帮助古代手稿学者重构碎片化的表演，用于进一步的研究和教学，还可以产生一种唤起更广泛人类体验的艺术创作。在P.Oxy的情况下。5189的目的也是为了复兴一种流派，尽管这种流派在希腊-罗马世界广泛传播，但作为一种流行的形式，娱乐并没有进入人们熟悉的中世纪传播渠道(在这个过程中，选定的作家被抄写者和学者抄袭)。默剧不仅缺乏对希腊悲剧和喜剧的学术关注，而且在现代舞台上也缺乏任何艺术接受度。现存哑剧的碎片化状况当然是这一事业的障碍，但它们所谓的“低”文学价值也可能与相对稀少的关注有关。然而，在他们较低的文学伪装下，这些作品暗示了对表演方面的强烈关注，而不是文本本身，这使得它们更能表明古代的实际表演方法，而不是例如，索福克勒斯的戏剧，它作为一篇文学作品被传播出来，供人阅读而不是表演。在P.Oxy中。我们发现了一个闹剧、身体喜剧和笑话的时刻，形式不是剧本，而是对上演的动作的叙述和描述，以及要说的话的引语和入口和出口的指示。由于文本的碎片性，纸莎草纸上的字面上的洞，以及只保留了59条虚线的事实，需要有针对性的语言学工作来隔离和定义人物，他们的动作，什么文本属于叙述，以及什么实际上构成了口语台词。但是，即使学者们提供了这些数据并设定了场景，结果也非常不完整。这从来不是要读的文字，它是要付诸行动的。动画作为一种融合了数字技术和绘画和舞台实践技能的艺术形式，是一种理想的艺术媒介，不仅可以完成文本的学术重建，还可以输入自己的创作人才，产生一件能够在视觉上传达信息、教授和启发非学术团体的艺术作品。由于我们只有少量的虚线，动画短片的体裁，三到五分钟的产品，最适合这项任务。

Over the past decade scholars of the Greco-Roman world have been facing the challenge of integrating their discipline in the digital sphere through websites and applications based on visual and textual data to produce tools for professionals and students in the field. However, only recently true public engagement and education initiatives aimed at communities beyond the academic sphere have been addressed in the development of digital Classics applications. The use of animation to visually render famous mythological scenes and bring to life paintings on ancient vases for use in the classroom has been implemented with some success. But while animating well known stories with defined plot lines can have a didactic effect, it raises a larger question about the potential relationship between animation and the study of the ancient world in general. Can the artistry of animation be integrated with ancient manuscript studies to resurrect performative voices preserved only in fragmented papyri? We now propose to bring together papyrologists from the University of Oxford and a team from Acme Filmworks, an Academy Award winning animation studio based in Los Angeles, to reconstruct the broken scene from a Greek Mime preserved in P.Oxy. 5189, a fragmentary papyrus from VI century Egypt. We aim to incorporate scholarly concerns and practice in the methodology of animation production and produce an animated short film that has synchronic and diachronic cultural impact in the context of human joking and staged play. The idea underwriting the project is that the practice-based art of animation can help scholars of ancient manuscripts not only reconstruct fragmented performances for further study and teaching, but also produce an artistic creation that invokes a larger human experience. In the case of P.Oxy. 5189, the aim is also to resurrect a genre that, although wide-spread in the Greco-Roman world, as a popular form entertainment did not make it into the familiar channels of the mediaeval transmission (a process in which selected authors were copied by scribes and scholars). Mime does not only lack the scholarly attention bestowed on Greek Tragedy and Comedy, but also any artistic reception on the modern stage. The fragmentary condition of the extant mimes is certainly an obstacle to such an enterprise, but their supposedly 'low' literary value may also have something to do with the comparatively scarce attention. And yet in their lower literary pretenses these works suggest a strong focus on the performative aspect more than on the text itself, which makes them far more indicative of ancient approaches to actual performance than, for example, a play of Sophocles that was transmitted as a piece of literature to be read instead of acted. In P.Oxy. 5189 we find a moment of slapstick physical comedy and joking in the form not of a script, but of a narration and description of the staged action, with quotations of the words to be uttered and indications of entrances and exits. Due to the fragmented nature of the text, the literal holes in the papyrus and the fact that only fifty-nine broken lines are preserved, targeted philological work is required to isolate and define the characters, their movements, what text belongs to narration, and what actually constitutes spoken lines. But even once scholars produce that data and set the scene, the result is very much incomplete. This was never a text to be read, it was meant to be acted. Animation, as an art form embracing digital technology and the practice-based skill sets of drawing and staging, is an ideal artistic medium to not only complete the scholarly reconstruction of the text, but also to input its own creative talents and produce a work of art capable of visually informing, teaching, and inspiring non-academic communities. And since we have only a small number of broken lines, the genre of the animated short film, a three to five minute product, is best suited for the task.