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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.
List 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.
About the author
Martin M. Winkler is University Professor and Professor of Classics at George Mason University, Virginia. His publications include The Persona in Three Satires of Juvenal (1983), Der lateinische Eulenspiegel des Ioannes Nemius (1995), Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo's New Light (Cambridge, 2009), The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology (2009), Arminius the Liberator: Myth and Ideology (2015), and Classical Literature on Screen: Affinities of Imagination (Cambridge, 2017). He has edited the Penguin Classics anthology Juvenal in English (2001) and the essay collections Classics and Cinema (1991), Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (2001), Gladiator: Film and History (2004), Troy: From Homer's 'Iliad' to Hollywood Epic (2006), Spartacus: Film and History (2007), The Fall of the Roman Empire: Film and History (2009), and Return to Troy: New Essays on the Hollywood Epic (2015).
