Classical Antiquity and the Cinematic Imagination

The first systematic study of classical literature and arts to explain their close affinities with modern visual technologies and media.

Martin M. Winkler (Author)

9781009396714, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 February 2024

554 pages, 27 b/w illus. 81 colour illus.
23.5 x 16.1 x 3.7 cm, 0.94 kg

This book aims to enhance our appreciation of the modernity of the classical cultures and, conversely, of cinema's debt to ancient Greece and Rome. It explores filmic perspectives on the ancient verbal and visual arts and applies what is often referred to as pre-cinema and what Sergei Eisenstein called cinematism: that paintings, statues, and literature anticipate modern visual technologies. The motion of bodies depicted in static arts and the vividness of epic ecphrases point to modern features of storytelling, while Plato's Cave Allegory and Zeno's Arrow Paradox have been related to film exhibition and projection since the early days of cinema. The book additionally demonstrates the extensive influence of antiquity on an age dominated by moving-image media, as with stagings of Odysseus' arrow shot through twelve axes or depictions of the Golden Fleece. Chapters interpret numerous European and American silent and sound films and some television productions and digital videos.

Part I. Prolegomena Leptomerestera: 1. Fade-in
Part II. Progymnasmata – Ways of Seeing: 2. Douris' Jason: reckless interpretations and the ongoing moment
3. Classical cinematism
Part III. Complex Cinematism: 4. Motion images in ecphrases
5. Shadows and caves: the cinema as Platonic idea and reality
6. Static flight: Zeno's arrow and cinematographic motion
7. Lucretius: dream images and beyond the infinite
8. The cinematic nature of the opening scene in Heliodorus' An Ethiopian Story
9. The face of tragedy: mask and close-up
Part IV. The Cinema Imagines Difficult Texts
10. Apollonius and the golden fleece
Or, the case of the missing ecphrasis
11. Arrow and axes in the Odyssey
Or, the case of the insoluble enigma
12. Peckinpah's Aristotle
Or, how well does The Wild Bunch fit The Poetics? Part V. Epilegomena Syntomôtera: 13. Fade-out.

Subject Areas: Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1]