Magic Flies

Loading...

Sign in or sign up now!
Alert icon
Upgrade to the latest Flash Player for improved playback performance. Upgrade now or more info.
319 views
Loading...
Alert icon
Sign in or sign up now!
Alert icon

Uploaded by on Jul 4, 2010

Flies have often been used in mythology and literature to represent agents of death and decay, such as the Biblical fourth plague of Egypt, or portrayed as nuisances (e.g., in Greek mythology, Myiagros was a god who chased away flies during the sacrifices to Zeus and Athena, and Zeus sent a fly to bite the horse Pegasus causing Bellerophon to fall back to Earth when he attempted to ride to Mount Olympus), though in a few cultures the connotation is not so negative (e.g., in the traditional Navajo religion, Big Fly is an important spirit being). Emily Dickinson's poem "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died" also makes reference to flies in the context of death. In fact, many flies, such as the genus Hydrotaea are used in forensic cases to determine time of death for many corpses. In William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the fly is a symbol of the children involved.

Not surprisingly, in art and entertainment, flies are also used primarily to introduce elements of horror or the simply mundane; an example of the former is the 1958 science fiction film The Fly (remade in 1986), in which a scientist accidentally exchanges parts of his body with those of a fly. Examples of the latter include trompe l'oeil paintings of the fifteenth century such as Portrait of a Carthusian by Petrus Christus, showing a fly sitting on a fake frame [5], a 2001 art project by Garnet Hertz in which a complete web server was implanted into a dead fly [1], and various musical works (such as Yoko Ono's album Fly, U2's song "The Fly", Dave Matthews' song "The Fly" and Béla Bartók's "From the Diary of a Fly"). Damien Hirst's famous work titled A Thousand Years featured a severed cow's head contained in a box with thousands of flies and a bug zapper, creating an entire life cycle within a glass box.The ability of flies to cling to almost any surface has also inspired the title of Human Fly for stunt performers whose stunts involve climbing buildings, including both real life and fictional individuals.

Aside from the fictional and conceptual role flies play in culture, there are practical roles that flies can play (e.g., flies are reared in large numbers in Japan to serve as pollinators of sunflowers in greenhouses), especially the maggots of various species.

Music & Video John Silence 2010 Album: Xperimental Track: Experiment.

  • likes, 0 dislikes

Link to this comment:

Share to:
see all

All Comments (0)

Sign In or Sign Up now to post a comment!
Loading...
Alert icon
0 / 00Unsaved Playlist Return to active list
    1. Your queue is empty. Add videos to your queue using this button:
      or sign in to load a different list.
    Loading...Loading...Saving...
    • Clear all videos from this list
    • Learn more