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This book examines different affinities between major classical authors and great filmmakers alongside representations of ancient myth and history in popular cinema.
List of contents
Part I. Creative Affinities: Ancient Texts and Modern Images: 1. The classical sense of cinema and the cinema's sense of antiquity; 2. Pasolini's and Cocteau's Oedipus: no quarrel of the ancients and the moderns in the cinema age; Part II. Elective Affinities: Tragedy and Comedy: 3. Medea's infanticide: how to present the unimaginable; 4. Striking beauty: Aristophanes' Lysistrat; Part III. Non-Elective Affinities: Plot and Theme: 5. 'More striking': Aristotelian poetics in Achilles Tatius, Heliodorus, and Alfred Hitchcock; 6. John Ford, America's Virgil; Part IV. Counter-Affinities: Ideological and Narrative Distortions of History: 7. Fascinating ur-fascism: the case of 300; 8. Good Nero; or, the best intentions; Part V. Aesthetic Affinities: portraits of ladies: 9. Regal beauties in Franco Rossi's films of the Odyssey and Aenid; 10. Helen of Troy: is this the face that launched a thousand films?
About the author
Martin M. Winkler is University Professor and Professor of Classics at George Mason University, Virginia. His most recent books are Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo's New Light (Cambridge, 2009), The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology (2009), and Arminius the Liberator: Myth and Ideology (2015). He has also published numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews, and edited several essay collections on classical antiquity and film.
Summary
This book argues for a new approach to the creative affinities between ancient verbal and modern visual narratives. Examines screen adaptations of classical epic, tragedy, comedy, myth, and history using ancient theories of drama and rhetoric. Demonstrates the undiminished vitality and importance of classical antiquity in our visually oriented media.
