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.
Demonstrates the affinities between antiquity and today by interpreting several themes in classical literature and arts and illustrating these with numerous films, ranging from silents, classic Hollywood, and European popular and art films to documentaries, animation, and digital media and special effects.
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The first systematic study of classical literature and arts to explain their close affinities with modern visual technologies and media.
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.
MARTIN M. WINKLER is University Professor and Professor of Classics in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University, Virginia. He has written and edited several books on Roman literature, the classical tradition, and antiquity in the cinema and has published over a hundred articles, book chapters, reviews, and notes. He is an honorary member of the Sociedade Brasileira de Retórica.
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