The Death of Pentheus

The Death of Pentheus is the first of the five installations chronologically. Like the paintings on the ancient Greek cup that was its inspiration, the film is in tondo format––sometimes a single image, sometimes a central image ringed by others. It is projected on a screen in the form of a disk that seems to hover above the floor. Through lighting, Haas suggests alternately the modes of Greek vase painting: red figure against a dark background––as in the Kimbell cup––and black-figure, i.e. silhouette. The cup is a wine-cup (or kylix) whose paintings celebrate the power of the wine god, Dionysus. Throughout, Haas brings to life vase-images of Dionysus and his followers––cavorting, tailed satyrs and the ecstatic women devotees known as maenads. At drinking parties both mortal and divine––with Dionysus and his wife, Ariadne––couples play the game of kottabos, throwing the lees from their cups at floating targets. In black-figure mode, we see first men then the god and his satyrs harvesting grapes. Potters form and fire the kylix, and the artist, Douris, begins painting his scenes from the story of Pentheus, the young king of Thebes. Pentheus opposes the Dionysiac cult of wild abandon, throwing down the god's ivy crown in contempt. Cunningly, Dionysus offers him a secret look at the Theban maenads from a treetop. The maenads see him and, in a blind frenzy induced by wine and ritual dancing, tear him limb from limb thinking he is an animal. Even their leader, Agave, who is Pentheus’s own mother, fails to recognize him. At the palace, Agave’s father Cadmus reveals to her whose head it is that she has brought back from the woods. She screams in horror and Dionysus dances in triumph. The story is told in Euripides’s play The Bacchae, from which Haas has taken dialogue and songs, all performed in ancient Greek.