Chapter 1 - Fade-In

Summary

This chapter prepares the ground for everything that follows. With the advent of photography, ways of seeing static images from earlier eras (paintings, statues, etc.) radically changed. Cinematography further increased, even complicated, traditional understandings of the past in both text and image. New ways of interpreting and appreciating Greek and Roman culture, too, are thus called for. Terms like Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematism and Pierre Francastel’s pre-cinema point to such new ways of approaching arts and literature from the vantage point of our technological media, which show sequences of static images that appear to be moving. Since the era of silent film, numerous directors have expressed the close connections of their medium with antiquity, among them Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, Manoel de Oliveira, Theodoros Angelopoulos, and Eisenstein himself. The chapter also addresses the question of how faithful modern screen versions should or could be to their sources.