Ovid on Screen
Ovid on Screen
This book presents the first systematic appreciation of Ovid's extensive influence on, and affinity with, modern visual culture. Some topics are directly related to Ovid; others exhibit features, characters, or themes analogous to those in his works. The book demonstrates the wide-ranging ramifications that Ovidian archetypes, especially from the Metamorphoses, have provoked in a modern artistic medium that did not exist in Ovid's time. It ranges from the earliest days of film history (Georges Méliès's discovery of screen metamorphosis) and theory (Gabriele D'Annunzio's fascination with the metamorphosis of Daphne; Sergei Eisenstein's concept of film sense) through silent films, classic sound films, commercial cinema, art-house and independent films to modernism and the C.G.I. era. Films by well-known directors, including Ingmar Bergman, Walerian Borowczyk, Jean Cocteau, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Max Ophüls, Alain Resnais, and various others, are analyzed in detail.
- Systematically traces and interprets the importance of Ovid in the age of the moving image in general and for film history in particular
- Helps readers understand literature and visual arts as related forms of storytelling, with roots in classical antiquity
- Written in an accessible and jargon-free style by one of the most distinguished scholars of antiquity and film
Reviews & endorsements
‘The book displays the author's impressive erudition in ancient Greek and Latin literature, and also his intimate familiarity with film theory and the necessary literature.’ H. M. Roisman, Choice
‘… Ovid on Screen: A Montage of Attractions, emerges as [Martin Winkler’s] most ambitious and wide-ranging contribution … This is an engaging and also enjoyable book from which I have learned much.’ James J. Clauss, Bryn Mawr Classical Review
'… detailed, meticulously-researched, highly readable and erudite …' Jo-Marie Claassen, Anabases
Product details
March 2020Hardback
9781108485401
462 pages
235 × 159 × 26 mm
0.91kg
47 b/w illus. 28 colour illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Fade-in: Prooemium
- Adages
- Part I. Theory and Practice:
- 1. Cinemetamorphosis
- 2. Ovid's film sense and beyond
- Part II. Key Moments in Ovidian Film History:
- 3. D'Annunzio's Ovid and the cinematic impulse
- 4. The Labyrinth: narrative complexity, deadly mazes, and Ovid's modernity
- Part III. Into New Bodies:
- 5. Effects and essences
- 6. The Beast in Man: not Ovid's, but how Ovidian!
- Part IV. Love, Seduction, Death:
- 7. Varieties of modernism: Orpheus and Eurydice
- 8. Love and death
- 9. Lessons in seduction
- Part V. Eternal Returns:
- 10. Immortality: philosophy, cinema, Ovid
- 11. Ovidian returns
- Sphragis: end credits
- Bibliography
- Index.
