Classical Literature on Screen
Cambridge University Press, 9/30/2017
EAN 9781107191280, ISBN10: 1107191289
Hardcover, 400 pages, 26 x 18.8 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
Martin M. Winkler argues for a new approach to various creative affinities between ancient verbal and modern visual narratives. He examines screen adaptations of classical epic, tragedy, comedy, myth, and history, exploring, for example, how ancient rhetorical principles regarding the emotions apply to moving images and how Aristotle's perspective on thrilling plot-turns can recur on screen. He also interprets several popular films, such as 300 and Nero, and analyzes works by international directors, among them Pier Paolo Pasolini (Oedipus Rex, Medea), Jean Cocteau (The Testament of Orpheus), Mai Zetterling (The Girls), Lars von Trier (Medea), Arturo Ripstein (Such Is Life), John Ford (westerns), Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho), and Spike Lee (Chi-Raq). The book demonstrates the undiminished vitality of classical myth and literature in our visual media, as with screen portrayals of Helen of Troy. It is important for all classicists and scholars and students of film, literature, and history.
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?