Yay Youtube!

For my introduction into Plato's Symposium, I surfed the god of all search engines, Google, for a few hours finding mostly scholarly articles, which, though informative, were less interesting than a few random videos I found on Youtube on the same subject. I'm posting them here. Enjoy!

The first one is a French video on the origin of the genders as explained in the speech of Aristophanes. There are English subtitles, and, while it can be bizarre at times, it gives a pretty clear picture of what he was saying (if you haven't imagined something close to this already) =)



This one is a song by Rufus Wainwright called "Origin of Love" on the same subject:




I'm not sure about the credibility of this video on Diotima, but it raised some interesting points on the importance of Diotima to the discourse on love.



This last link is to the first of 8 videos from a french movie entitled "Le Banquet". It's a reenactment of Plato's Symposium. The film quality is not the best that it could be, but if you understand French (or Spanish subtitles)....or if you just want to watch this or other parts of the movie and try to guess what they're saying, here's the link.

"All I had ever felt was gathered together around this woman. Nothing lay around loose in me any more but was finished up by her."
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"What happened?" the boy asked.

The old man's voice was high and clear: "Peace," he answered."

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"A tree. A rock. A cloud."