Chapter 1 - Cinemetamorphosis

Summary

Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical basis on which the following chapters build and defines adaptations of literature to cinema, television, and other screens as cinemetamorphoses, an allusion to the title of Ovid’s most famous work. Scholars distinguish between foreground and background Ovidianism: the former indicates intentional, the latter unconscious or not immediately obvious affinities between a work or passage by Ovid and allusions to, or echoes of, this source in later literature or the visual arts. Sergei Eisenstein, the great Russian filmmaker and theoretician of cinema, coined the expression montage of attractions for one of the creative principles of film editing; in the present book, his term is applied in an expanded sense: that of indicating the affinities, either close or loose, between Ovid’s works and films based on or taking up various topics, characters, plot situations, and additional aspects, primarily from famous myths in his Metamorphoses, to which Ovid has given definitive shape. A Roman marble relief showing Hermes, Orpheus, and Eurydice illustrates the close ties between text and image through a classical visual work of art. This chapter also provides a preview of the following chapters’ contents. Finally, Chapter 1 gives examples of the kind of background Ovidianism largely excluded from this book.

With its almost limitless narrative possibilities, the cinema, together with later media, has left all earlier verbal and visual adaptations or imitations of classical literature far behind. Film versions of literary texts may be adaptations, imitations, or the like. The essential change from one medium to another is tantamount to metamorphosis. Such metamorphoses follow their own rules and principles. I propose to call them cinemetamorphoses.

1 A Working Definition

Parker Tyler, in Magic and Myth of the Movies, titled four of his twelve chapters “Magic-Lantern Metamorphoses.”¹ Cinemetamorphosis then is a conceptual approach whose purpose is to apply a filmic perspective to Greek and Roman literature and, when appropriate, to ancient static images like paintings, sculptures, or mosaics. Cinemetamorphosis examines the affinities between classical texts and images on the one hand and modern visual narratives on the other.² Its chief focus is on the visual qualities in narrative literature and the literary qualities in narrative images. Modern literary critics, with their theoretical agonies over what exactly visual adaptations of literary texts are, have by now produced a veritable jungle of terminologies: “translation, actualization, reading, critique, dialogization, cannibalization, transmutation, transfiguration, incarnation, transmogrification, transcoding, performance, signifying, rewriting, detournement.”³ Or this list, applicable to word, image, and beyond: appropriation, assimilation, creative destruction, disjunction, encapsulation, focalization/obfuscation, hybridization, ignorance, montage/assembly, negation, reconstruction with or without supplementation, resignation/revaluation, substitution, translation.⁴ Or, more succinctly but still rather nebulously: “Borrowing, Intersecting, and Transforming Sources.”⁵ By contrast, the all-inclusive term cinemetamorphosis can provide a kind of Ockham’s Razor through the thickets of that jungle – or, to stay within antiquity, a kind of Heracles’ sword rapidly slashing through the proliferating necks of the terminological Hydra. Both of the critical lists quoted above include terms synonymous with metamorphosis. They support, although unintentionally, what I am proposing here. So it seems sensible to use with caution a term like translation in regard to film versions of literature, not least because the change from text to screen is far more intricate than that from one text to another, the basic meaning of translation.⁶ Equally, adaptation may be too vague to be useful, not least since any adaptation runs the risk of being judged inferior to a revered original. What is called for is a neutral term that describes the process of change from text to moving image with greater accuracy and on a larger scale but with less danger of falling victim to prejudice. Cinemetamorphosis encompasses analytical and comparative work in two directions, as it were: transformations of classical texts to the screen, as in films based on Greek and Roman epic, tragedy, comedy, or historiography; and, conversely, the discovery and interpretation of classical themes and archetypes in films not ostensibly based on anything ancient at all. As already indicated, a related area is the cinematic analysis of classical visual art works, especially those that express or imply either motion or a narrative. I turn to a famous example below.

Cinemetamorphosis is not an explication de texte (or d’image) as traditionally practiced since the days of the Alexandrian scholiasts. Rather – and here is a working definition – it is a retrospective interpretation and appreciation of the complexity of classical texts and images made possible by the invention of the motion-picture camera and projector and their digital heirs. To put it slightly differently, cinemetamorphosis is an explication filmique des textes et images classiques. It can also – and here is the other direction mentioned above – be an explication classique des textes filmiques. The fact that the narrative medium of film was unknown and technically impossible to the ancients is by no means an obstacle to the approach I am advocating. Much of the storytelling in moving images is by definition a process of metamorphosis, for the individual static images on a filmstrip appear to be moving and changing in sequential order when they are being projected. The same holds for storytelling on film, video, or computer. To tell about changing forms and appearances – in Ovid’s words: In nova … mutatas dicere formas … corpora (Met.1.1–2) – is the very essence of cinema. It is Ovidian by nature and should be of interest to classicists for this reason alone.

2 Ovidianism and Cinemetamorphosis

What is simultaneously the attraction, even fascination, inherent in such an approach and also its crux is the question of where to draw the line in pursuing a particular theme or figure from Ovid. There exists a huge variety of works to choose from, even if we restrict ourselves to European and American cinema. Many of these lead inevitably to yet others. To put the matter in Ovidian terms: how far should I follow my thread into the labyrinth of cinema history in this book? Traditional philologists may conclude after perusing my chapters that I have on more than one occasion followed it too far away from Ovid, while film experts may criticize me for not going far enough, given the extremely intertextual essence of narrative cinema. Those who believe that I drew the line at exactly the right place are likely to be few. But this dilemma is in the nature of the matter.

Classicists have become increasingly aware of the postclassical and modern uses of the reception of ancient texts and begun to consider allusions and intertexts as integral parts of modern critical thought about literature.⁷ Stephen Hinds once made the following observations about the presence, as it were, of Ovid in Seneca’s plays:

I shall be alert not just to strongly signalled allusions but also to a kind of background Ovidianism (if I may so term it) discernible within the seemingly indiscriminate intertextuality of a Senecan topos. The aim will be to complement the expected … passages with some larger (if less tidy) impressions of the … space which Ovid and his poetry occupy in Seneca’s tragic imagination.⁸

Hinds’s term background Ovidianism is a felicitous soubriquet for what a considerable part of the present book will attempt to show in regard to a non-literary medium. Alessandro Barchiesi once summarized what he calls “the Ovidian poetics of allusion” as “a crucial moment in the history of Roman intertextuality” and included other Roman and Greek poets as well: “allusion reanimates previous works of literature, and even … the issues of ‘voice’, ‘polysemy’, and ‘levels of communication’.” Appropriately, the first chapter in his book is called “Continuities”: “The basic condition for Ovid’s poetics is a sense of continuity and co-existence, between stories as between texts.”⁹ Barchiesi was not thinking of the cinema. But we can easily extend his view of Ovidian poetics to include stories in moving images.

Hinds, Barchiesi, and others, not all of them classical scholars, point in the directions that my subject will take me. The continuities and kinds of co-existence to be demonstrated and examined here will be primarily between stories on the page and stories told in moving images. Obviously all these reanimate previous literary and visual works, from Ovid – really, from Homer – through the entire history of the cinema. Readers will encounter issues of voice, polysemy, and intricate levels of communication in each chapter. To adapt Barchiesi’s phrasing: the cinematic poetics of allusion are a crucial phase, not just a moment, in the cultural history of Ovidian intertextuality. Charmingly and wistfully, Ovid himself envisioned the different books of his “Collected Works” as speaking among each other while lying on their shelf (Tristia 1.1.105–120). What Barchiesi did in his context, I do in mine: I take Ovid’s image of books in their library as an impulse and justification for putting his texts into our modern collection of visual texts, but on a much larger and less tidy (but not untidy) shelf in a nearly endlessly expanding library of narrative.

The chapters that follow may at first appear to present seemingly indiscriminate intertextualities. But my reason to pursue just these and not others will become clear, I hope, through my combination of foreground Ovidianism – expected themes, characters, plots – and background Ovidianism: larger but not untidy impressions that Ovid has left on the cinematic imagination. What Hinds stated about Ovid’s epic shortly after the words quoted above could count as my own justification:

the whole system of Greco-Roman myth has an important and inescapable post-Ovidian dimension. We are used to the idea that the pretension of the Metamorphoses to a kind of mythological comprehensiveness actually does lead to its becoming the encyclopedia of myth for the Middle Ages and Renaissance; but I think we have tended to underestimate just how thoroughly the Metamorphoses is already being absorbed as the “bible” of myth in the Rome of the first century CE.¹⁰

What began in that first century came to flourish in later ages and culminates, if only for now, in ours. And it does so in a medium that has become the biggest “Bible” of mythmaking ever: the cinema with its unending and unstoppable neo-mythologism.¹¹

In sum, Ovidianism is not limited to conscious or intentional adaptations of the poet’s oeuvre. I therefore attempt to demonstrate the nature of filmic engagements with ancient texts by turning to different kinds of visual texts: films based on or inspired by Ovid, films connected to his works only loosely, and films that have no direct model in Ovid but exhibit situations, themes, or characters that we encounter in his works.

The ancients already knew that narrative texts are not to be separated from the visual arts.¹² Concerning Ovid and his Metamorphoses, we can only assent to the following statement: “In classical culture generally and particularly in Ovid … metamorphosis is of crucial importance for thinking about art, in both literary and visual media.”¹³ I demonstrated the nature of cinema as visual texts in other contexts, in which I examined a number of possible varieties of affinity between classical literature and film.¹⁴ The present book continues and extends that approach. Ovidianism is useful for the establishment of a wider framework in analyses of connections between ancient literature and modern visual arts. Gérard Genette’s concepts of hypotexts, hypertexts, and various related kinds of such -texts are useful for a broader understanding of narrative than he himself practiced.¹⁵ This is so because they can readily be linked with the idea of transformation from the verbal to the visual. It is therefore time for a more panoramic view of ancient and modern narrative modes and their interconnections.

My procedure combines two aspects: an explication de texte ovidien based on the inherently visual nature of Ovid’s poetry and an explication ovidienne des textes filmiques, a demonstration of his works’ analogies with the cinema. While much recent scholarship applies modern theories to Ovid, I proceed largely but not exclusively in the opposite direction: by applying, as it were, Ovid’s texts to a modern medium and, to some extent, its theories. Hence my mainly positivist or evidentiary procedure, which makes adherence to specific theories and any immersion in their jargon superfluous.

Before we proceed further with our Ovidian subject, we should briefly glance backward to remind ourselves of the narrative complexity that may be found in ancient visual arts. Here is one example. A Roman copy of a Greek relief sculpture from the fifth century BC shows Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes, the divine guide of the shades of the dead to the Underworld. It illustrates a famous tale from Ovid (and Virgil), dealt with in Chapter 7. Marcel Camus’s classic film Black Orpheus (1959) begins with a close-up of this famous relief, showing Orpheus and Eurydice’s heads under its title. (Plate I. Black Orpheus. The film’s title card, with Orpheus and Eurydice on a Roman copy of a Greek relief sculpture.) A medium-long shot showing them with Hermes closes the film. But how can this static image tell a story? Art historian Ernst Gombrich explains:

First we must recognize the protagonists by what are called their ‘attributes’, the singer’s lyre, or the traveller’s hat of Hermes, the guide of the dead. Only then can we identify the episode here represented, the fatal moment when Orpheus has disobeyed the condition imposed on him and has looked back on Eurydice, who is therefore taken back to Hades by the god.

This is straightforward enough, although readers of Virgil or Ovid will immediately have noticed that no Hermes (or Mercury) is present in their ways of telling the myth. The unknown Greek sculptor may be representing a version with which poets, centuries later, have taken some liberties by omitting the divine guide. But how do we know that the moment depicted is the one identified above? The image itself tells us so. Gombrich is again to the point:

Hermes is seen to bend back slightly as he gently takes Eurydice by the wrist to return her to the realm of Hades. The two lovers face each other, her hand rests on the shoulders of the guide who had failed her [i.e. Orpheus], her head is slightly lowered as they gaze at each other in a mute farewell.

This interpretation is entirely convincing. As does the work of art it discusses, it presupposes a point that will come up in another context in Chapter 2: the one that Xenophon’s Socrates made concerning visual art expressing states of the soul. About our relief Gombrich remarks: “There is no overt expression in their [the figures’] blank features, but nothing contradicts the mood we readily project into this composition, once we have grasped its import.” Then comes his most important conclusion. It is worth keeping the art of the moving image in mind when we read what Gombrich says about the interactions between the text or texts that told the myth and the static image based on it:

Such a subtle evocation must rely on the kind of beholder who would also know how to appreciate the reworking of a familiar myth …. The relief, in other words, is not really created to tell the story of Orpheus and Eurydice but to enable those who know the story … to re-live it in human terms.

The relief is an example of “that free dramatic evocation that Greek art had evolved.”

I. Black Orpheus. The film’s title card, with Orpheus and Eurydice on a Roman copy of a Greek relief sculpture.

After antiquity, free dramatic evocation evolved much further and expanded into new technologies, which in turn have changed and expanded the verbal and visual arts of storytelling nearly beyond any limits imaginable before. So it was a fitting choice, presumably on the part of the film’s producers, to include images of this ancient relief in Black Orpheus, one of the two greatest cinemetamorphoses of this myth alongside Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950). What has been said about visual art in the Western tradition since ancient Greece applies just as readily to the primary visual art of the twentieth century and beyond. As Gombrich put it: “the artist should show his mettle by interpreting known texts. It was the ‘how’ and not the ‘what’ that the connoisseur admired and pondered.”¹⁶

This last observation could serve as the guiding principle of my book, which is intended to point to the sheer endless possibilities of foreground and background Ovidianism as cinemetamorphoses. The argument advanced in this chapter is by no means any kind of ultimate statement. But I hope it will suffice as my book’s theoretical foundation, together with some additional observations in later chapters.

Concerning the subject of classical works that have been recast in new forms or, to say it with Ovid, that have been changed into new bodies, I adduce one more quotation. Epic French filmmaker Abel Gance once employed a vivid epic metaphor:

Writers perpetually begin themselves again, stirring the ocean of words with the same poor oars that have, after all, been worn out since the time of Homer. And the raft of our minds, tossed about across the centuries, in vain searches for its shore or its anchor.¹⁷

The pages that follow are addressed primarily to readers who are sympathetic to Gance’s perspective.

3 Montages of Attractions

Sergei Eisenstein, one of the greatest artists and theorists in the history of film, planned but never completed a book to be called Pushkin and Cinema. In the texts he intended to incorporate into it, Eisenstein made an elegant and compelling case for the parallel examination of literary and filmic narratives, as he did elsewhere. He repeatedly pointed to the affinities between literature and film; hence my general debt to him as a model. Two classical scholars have already demonstrated that his views can be applied to Greek and Roman texts.¹⁸ The subtitle of my book takes up Eisenstein’s term montage of attractions, which denotes a particular aspect of his approach to film editing, perhaps the best-known one.¹⁹ My use of this expression is, however, not intended in a strictly technical or Eisensteinian sense. Rather, it is meant to alert readers to the nature of Ovidianism on screen: a montage – mosaic, matrix – of a varied number of subjects that should, or at least could, attract a sympathetic reader’s interest. In addition, my subtitle refers to a particular phenomenon of the cinema’s earliest phase, when the attractions presented on the screen tended to be there chiefly for their inherent visual value rather than for the sake of a coherent narrative. Plots in early short films could be flimsy or almost non-existent; what counted was spectacle, the hook to lure viewers. This aspect of cinema history has received extensive attention in recent years, primarily in the work of Tom Gunning, and applies to my own approach.²⁰ That is to say, my chapters form a montage of topics – attractive ones, I hope – to which readers can turn as self-contained units or as parts of an overarching theme. The former tends to reflect Gunning’s approach, the latter Eisenstein’s; there is, of course, no clear division between them.²¹ My own preference is, understandably, the second.

How far montages of Ovidian attractions may reach and what the nature of the affinities between an ancient author’s literary works and a modern medium of expression that did not exist at his time might be are large questions. If modern works of high or popular art evince noticeable parallels to an individual ancient work or to a classical author’s body of work but are not specifically or consciously related to antiquity, are such similarities worthy of consideration, let alone serious analysis? To readers who limit the extent of what is generally meant by the classical tradition to artists’ intentional engagements with ancient models or sources, the following chapters might appear to be meandering through, or to have got lost in, a labyrinth of my own making. But to readers who have a broader understanding, one that encompasses what today is generally called the reception of antiquity, any meaningful narrative or visual similarities between classical and modern works, any archetypal parallels even in disparate genres, forms, figures, characters, and media become important as objects of study. In the present context, they are part of background Ovidianism.

This latter perspective seems to be gaining more and more ground. Classicist Craig Kallendorf, editor of an essay collection on the classical tradition, referred in his introduction to “the changes in how we know what we know” about antiquity and noted the “profound consequences for how Greece and Rome are understood by later ages” in regard to modern theoretical approaches to classical reception. He concluded:

Traditional classical philology aims to recover the meanings that ancient texts had in their original contexts. If, however, the reader is an active participant in the making of meaning, then it will be very difficult, indeed perhaps impossible, to recover the original meaning of any text. If interpretation is not simply grounded in original meaning, the different readings of a classical text over time become not misreadings, but the only readings we have, ours being simply the last [better: latest] in the chain of receptions. From this perspective, the chain of receptions moves from the margins to the center.²²

If we include in this perspective not only classical texts but also classical visual arts, we can agree almost wholeheartedly. The “chain of receptions” has by now moved to the center of academic, educational, and general work on Greece and Rome. Equally, popular adaptations, re-imaginings, and other creative endeavors are not misreadings. At the same time they are not the only objects of readings since we still have the originals. Classical originals and later creative engagements with them exist side by side. This means that there is a place for both, separately or in conjunction. Traditional philologists are not superfluous. Neither are scholars of reception. And neither side ought to be dismissive of or hostile to the other. They ought to co-exist, because together they can demonstrate most effectively why antiquity always matters. What Malcolm Heath has remarked about classical literature may be applied to a wider context. About the scholars’ task of “allowing the text to speak in its own terms,” Heath observes:

The text already speaks in its own terms; the interpreter’s job is to render it intelligible to us by making it speak in our terms. Necessarily, therefore, the text as interpreted speaks in our terms, since the terms it speaks in are ones that we have supplied. But our stock of terms is not static: it changes as we change …. In attempting to achieve a satisfactory explication of a text, we are likely to encounter the need to adapt and extend our existing conceptual repertoire …. The interpreter’s task of making the text speak in our terms may therefore be, in part, a matter of giving us new terms – not in place of the terms we had before, but in addition to them.²³

These words describe the task of the philologist as interpreter. But what about creative artists as interpreters, especially in media unknown in antiquity? They, too, attempt a more or less satisfactory explication of an ancient text by extending the existing conceptual repertoire with their new artistic and technical or technological means. They, too, give us new terms, new expressions for old texts – not in place of these texts but alongside them.

All of the preceding applies in equal measure to all of the classical arts, whether literature or painting, sculpture, architecture. And it clearly applies to creative engagements with the classical arts after antiquity. Here the cinema and related visual media are especially prominent and therefore important. Today they are integral parts of classical receptions. Concerning film, classicist Joanna Paul has expressed the matter like this:

many [films] have no easily discernible relationship with antiquity or its narratives but … [may be taken] as evidence of its ongoing presence in the modern world. This forces us to confront the difficult question of what grounds we need in order to posit a meaningful relationship between film and ancient text or myth …. The value, or novelty, of such revelations may not convince all readers, but, as a previous skeptic of this kind of approach myself, I would argue that … they challenge us all to reflect further on what we mean by reception. Even though a filmmaker may not consciously appeal to ancient precedents, if [a film’s] “reader” identifies some thematic affinity between the two, then a relationship between past and present is surely enacted through [such a “reader’s”] reception of the film; and if it can be carefully accounted for, as it is here, then it must be afforded some credence and meaning.²⁴

Her confession of a change of heart is charming and disarming, but it is more important as an indication of open-mindedness. Here we may be reminded of Rudolf Pfeiffer’s concept of a philologia perennis.²⁵ I have elsewhere proposed to expand this fundamental idea into that of a philologia perennis et universalis in the tradition of the great Alexandrians who laid most of the foundation of classical scholarship.²⁶ Two scholarly books on Ovid and cinema are fruitful examples of this approach in their different ways.²⁷

Some of my readers (many, I hope) will share my enthusiasm for archetypal narrative themes that go beyond direct Ovidian influence – to them, as to me, this book will seem too short and incomplete – while others (few, I hope) will draw a more narrow line; to them, my book will be too long. But my chapters present readers of the latter kind with a series of intellectual test cases, which raise this question: Are more circumscribed views better able to do justice to a topic – in this case cinematic Ovidianism – than wider, indeed panoramic, views? All readers will doubtless reach their own verdict about what constitutes a successful montage of attractions between something ancient and something modern. And that is as it should be. The montage here presented is necessarily only one among many possible others. Here now is an outline of my montage.

4 Preview of Coming Attractions

Following on the theoretical framework introduced here, the next, complementary, chapter of Part I applies Eisenstein’s concept of film sense to Ovid’s works. It demonstrates Ovid’s inherently cinematic imagination by two examples from the Metamorphoses and one from the Amores. Chapter 2 finally considers a post-modern novel as an intentionally anachronistic re-imagining of Ovid from the vantage point of the cinema age, exemplifying the nearly infinite possibilities for retellings of texts, archetypal plot situations, and stylistic phenomena of narratives as they recur in moving images.

Part II is on exemplary moments in film history concerning, first, foreground and, second, background Ovidianism. Chapter 3 shows that Ovid provided the impulse for Gabriele D’Annunzio’s fascination with the cinema and for what has been called the first theory of film ever formulated. The sequence of changes Ovid deals with in his epic is comprehensive and nearly universal, encompassing myth and history from the creation of the world down to his own time. In the process Ovid deviates from linear narrative progression. The Metamorphoses becomes a kind of narrative labyrinth, the subject of Chapter 4. Telling about forms and appearances that have radically changed demanded narrative flexibility from the ancient poet and still demands it from modern artists.²⁸ The same demand exists for critical analyses, including those presented here. Additional observations in these chapters are intended further to emphasize the affinities between verbal and visual storytelling that are crucial for any thorough understanding of Ovid’s importance for the cinema. Later chapters include discussions of various theoretical perspectives whenever warranted.²⁹

The two chapters of Part III exemplify in detail my overall perspective on cinemetamorphoses. Chapter 5 examines the concept of metamorphosis by focusing on two pervasive if varied patterns: changes from inanimate matter to living body and the reverse. The former is exemplified by, or at least closely associated with, one of Ovid’s most influential tales, that of Pygmalion. The latter is best known from the myth of Medusa. Ovid’s Daedalus is also crucial as creator of movement from stasis. This chapter connects elements from these myths to a variety of related film forms and genres. Chapter 6 takes the first metamorphosis told in Ovid’s epic as its cue to discuss different approaches by filmmakers to putting abnormal psychic phenomena on the screen. This chapter also addresses technological aspects of cinematic metamorphoses from man to beast.

Part IV turns to a topic that is all-pervasive in Ovid: love, seduction, death. Chapter 7 deals with another of Ovid’s most famous tales, that of Orpheus and Eurydice, primarily in post-modern cinema. Chapter 8 starts with Ovid’s Heroides and then turns to the myth of Philemon and Baucis from the Metamorphoses. Chapter 9 provides a critical assessment of the only feature film in which Ovid has appeared as principal character. Since it is the work of an idiosyncratic maker of erotic cinema, it deserves particular attention. This film contrasts with two others by acknowledged masters of cinema. All three demonstrate the differences that are possible in tales of love and seduction.

Part V discusses aspects of immortality, artists’ fame, and the survival of their works. Chapter 10 deals chiefly with a cinematic parallel to one of Ovid’s most fascinating and enigmatic characters, the philosopher Pythagoras, and a tribute to Ovid in the culture of Renaissance Florence on the part of a great humanist filmmaker. Chapter 11 closes the book with a retrospect on Orpheus, Icarus, and Medusa. This chapter is also intended as an apologia to Jean Cocteau, whose Orphée, a milestone of cinema, deserves a chapter to itself. I have, however, addressed this film elsewhere, if from a different perspective, and numerous analyses are readily available. For this reason I concentrate on Cocteau’s two other Orphic films.

All his works, be they erotic, lyrical, or epic, reveal Ovid to be a master of psychology, both male and female. This circumstance predisposes him, in a manner of speaking, to be a master of cinematic character presentation. French filmmaker, cultural critic, and philosopher Edgar Morin provides us with an initial understanding of why this should be so:

It is not pure chance if the language of psychology and that of the cinema often coincide in terms of projection, representation, field, and images. Film is constructed in the likeness of our total psyche …. The inventors of the cinema have empirically and unconsciously projected into the open air the structures of the imaginary, the tremendous mobility of psychological assimilation, the processes of our intelligence. Everything that can be said of the cinema goes for the human mind itself, its power at once conserving, animating, and creative of animated images. The cinema makes us understand not only theater, poetry, and music, but also the internal theater of the mind: dreams, imaginings, representations: this little cinema that we have in our head.³⁰

This is as heart-felt a creed as it is insightful. More importantly perhaps, modern neurological research fully vindicates Morin. As a useful primer on the ubiquity of the image, especially the moving image, in our world puts it: “The Brain Sees Pictures First.”³¹ In Aristotle’s words: “the soul never thinks without an image.”³² We may call this the essence of cinema and adduce Alfred Hitchcock as a star witness. He once said: “My mind is strictly visual.”³³

Even though Morin was by no means thinking of Ovid, the concept of metamorphosis in various contexts and with different implications plays a major part in his overall argument. Morin was clearly Ovidian in his understanding of the film medium. He defined the cinema in quasi-Ovidian terms: “A mechanical metamorphosis of the spectacle of shadow and light.”³⁴ This statement is as concise as it is elegant.

Ovid introduces his epic as a “continuous poem” that extends “down to my own time” (ad mea perpetuum … tempora carmen; Met. 1.4). My book proceeds in a comparable manner. It presents Ovidianism in the cinema through a selection of themes and examples that lead down from early film history until my own time. I have attempted to discuss or at least mention some of the most significant aspects; I hope that readers will think of others. If they do, they may be reminded of Pythagoras’ speech in the Metamorphoses: everything changes, nothing is lost. Metamorphosis is a form of survival. So are the cinemetamorphoses of Ovid’s works. And so are the various manifestations of background Ovidianism that will remind friends of Ovid of their author, sometimes immediately. The entire body of Greek myths from which Ovid drew for his Metamorphoses is a coherent system of interconnected stories. So is the body of international and especially of European and American cinema. Myths and films are webs or tapestries of storytelling. Ovid’s Arachne and Minerva, dealt with in Chapter 2, are their patrons (of sorts).

I sometimes pursue a labyrinthine rather than a straightforward path through a particular topic. Occasionally I quote from published translations of texts not originally in English, but in most cases I use my own. Occasionally I provide both the original text and its English translation: when the original contains crucial terms, is of special importance to my argument, or may be presumed to be of interest to readers. Since my overall argument is an interpretive synthesis of disparate sources, I quote passages from primary and secondary texts and dialogues from films in greater number and sometimes at greater length than some readers may consider strictly necessary.

Only a few classicists have studied Ovid and the cinema in depth. Two recent monographs are especially important. One deals with Ovid’s visualization of myth and the inherently cinematic nature of his art.³⁵ This book, whose title (“Cinema in the Head”) echoes Morin as quoted above, makes for a valuable companion to mine. The other traces background Ovidianism exclusively in regard to the tale of Pygmalion.³⁶ It is instructive because of its wide-ranging content and for what it implies about Ovid and film. Its author lists nearly a hundred films and television productions about Pygmalion and Pygmalion-like characters in her filmography. It is no undue criticism of this useful work to say that the list could be expanded considerably.³⁷ I examine some additional films in Chapter 5. So it is as charming an instance of enthusiastic hyperbole as it is a revealing insight on the part of a cinephile to conclude:

It seems always to have been the artist’s domain to recreate life by reproducing movement.

And when Pygmalion, after resolving to live absolutely celibate, fell madly in love with the statue of Galatea, who materialized from under his chisel and whom Venus at his request animated with the fire of life, the celebrated sculptor created a film [faisait du cinématographe] just as Monsieur Jourdain created his prose; that is to say, without knowing it.³⁸

Pygmalion – the first filmmaker! Galatea – the first film star?

The first classical scholar, as far as I can tell, to have considered Ovid alongside the cinema, was Simone Viarre. The third chapter of her 1964 book on image and thought in the Metamorphoses is titled “The Spectacle of Movement” (Le spectacle de mouvement) and contains a brief section called “A Fundamental Relationship with the Cinema” (Une parenté avec le cinéma). Viarre begins by pointing to Ovid’s familiarity with sculpture and painting. But, in terms of the visual, something else is decisive where changes of shapes are concerned:

it is only between cinema and metamorphosis that we find a fundamental contact, on a level more profound than esthetic appearance. It is essential that the Ovidian analysis of the metamorphoses [l’analyse ovidienne des métamorphoses] and the sequence of cinematographic images share the same power of conviction …. One difference only is that the film owes its reality to the magic-esthetic power it produces, whereas Ovidian metamorphosis draws its resources from nature and creates shadowy ghosts [fantômes] endowed, on the other hand, with natural existence, not only in a psychological manner but an entirely concrete one: wolf, poplar, egret provide Ovid with direct models or corroboration, whereas the filmmaker’s work has no tangible proof for his success except in the spectator’s look.³⁹

Viarre follows these observations with two longer sections. One examines Book 7 of the Metamorphoses, the story of Jason and Medea, as a film, the other applies some basic cinematic techniques to a number of passages from Ovid’s epic.⁴⁰

Viarre did what I will do, on a larger scale, in Chapter 2: treat Ovid as a potential screenwriter. So I wholly agree with her conclusion: “We can, in this way, imagine a [complete] film of the Metamorphoses.”⁴¹ Today, classical scholars sympathetic to considering modern moving images along static ancient ones in their attempts to elucidate the profoundness and complexity of Ovid’s art, to say nothing of its modernity, can do the same. This was not always so. In 1967 E. J. Kenney published a scathing review of Viarre (“the failure of this book”) and dismissed her second and third sections on Ovidian cinema as “no more than a curiosity.” My readers, I hope, will not follow his example. But even Kenney considered Viarre’s first section on the subject as one of her (presumably few) “flashes of perception.”⁴²

5 Ovidianism on the Cutting-Room Floor

Many of the Greek myths that Ovid put into definitive shape have been adapted to the screen and constitute examples of foreground Ovidianism. Films whose plots contain thematic parallels to Ovid’s works exist in even greater number: background Ovidianism. Altogether there are far more instances especially of the latter than this or any one book could discuss. I have therefore not attempted to cover all possible angles. Hence, to mention only some random examples, no Pinocchio; no Transformers or shape-shifting superheroes or -villains from various comic-book worlds; no RoboCops, Re-Animators, X-Men, androids, cyborgs; no body snatchers, vampires, zombies, or other kinds of the undead; no replicant, equisapiens, or monster type; not even Ladyhawke, Ex Machina, Her, or The Lobster.⁴³ I have also excluded all videogames, total ignorance of which I gladly profess. Exclusions, omissions, oversights, and gaps are an unavoidable feature of all work on classics and cinema, for there is always more than even a professional cinephile can know. Regrettably, classical scholars have, overall, paid only little attention to this rich field.⁴⁴ Scholarly Companion volumes and comparable books on Ovid, doubtless meritorious, are generally innocent of listing words like film, cinema, or movie in their indexes even when their contributors examine Ovid’s influence on modern culture.⁴⁵ Art historians, on the other hand, occasionally betray insufficient knowledge or understanding of ancient sources, especially textual ones.⁴⁶ This is sometimes the case, too, when film scholars turn to the classical cultures. Since misguided judgments especially by the latter ought not to be ignored altogether, I point them out when appropriate. An example appears below.

Here are a few instances of the kinds of material I have omitted. The tragic love story of Pyramus and Thisbe (Met. 4.55–161) became the tale of the star-crossed lovers in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and, as farce, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and led to a host of retellings in sundry media.⁴⁷ To do justice to this subject, if such were possible, would require a substantial volume by itself. Another instance involves one of the cinema’s great poetic masterpieces, Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934). It tells the story of a newlywed couple’s voyage on the husband’s boat, whose name gives the film its title. In Greek myth there were two stories involving an Atalanta, although ancient authors did not distinguish between them very carefully. This is mainly because both are beautiful virgins, great hunters, and associated with Arcadia. In one myth Atalanta is among the heroes who participate in the Calydonian boar hunt (Met. 8.317–436). In the other she is a fast runner. Suitors intent on winning her hand have to defeat her in a footrace but will forfeit their lives if they lose. The hero Hippomenes manages to win her with a ruse devised by Venus on his behalf (Met. 10.560–707). Did director Vigo take a clue from Ovid, or perhaps from classical myth in general, for his film? Is Juliette, the young bride, an Atalanta figure? If she is, is this a significant aspect of the film? Or is the title unrelated to classical myth or Ovid? A few scholars have attempted to connect L’Atalante with antiquity. Marina Warner, well-known expert on myth, feminism, and film and theater, gives a perfunctory summary of the myth of Atalanta in a version different from Ovid’s, whom she does not mention.⁴⁸ More recently, a scholar of French literature and cinema makes no more than a tenuous case for a connection between L’Atalante and Ovid.⁴⁹ So it may make better sense to look for an explanation elsewhere. Jean Guinée (pen name of Roger de Guichen), the author of the original story on which Vigo’s film was based but which was altered considerably in the screenplay, named the titular boat after a frigate commanded by Guichen’s ancestor in the Seven Years’ War.⁵⁰ The reason for this name seems to have been the mythical Atalanta’s most famous quality, also prized by any navy: speed. As satisfying as it would be to establish either Ovid’s influence on Vigo or at least an unconscious Ovidianism, it may be pointless to search for one.⁵¹

How tantalizing the impulse may be to discover Ovidianism becomes evident from a momentary verbal echo of Ovid in Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941), a classic screwball comedy. Its hero is staying with a widow and her spinster sister; both women are elderly and unattractive. The widow, however, begins to set her sights on the handsome male. The tense situation between the sisters leads to the following exchange, here quoted in part:

Widow: Did you notice his torso?

Spinster: I noticed that you noticed it.

Widow: Don’t be vindictive, dear …. Even as a little girl you were more of the acid type, dear …. And furthermore, I have never done anything that I was ashamed of, Ursula.

Spinster: Neither have I.

Widow: Yes, dear, but nobody ever asked you to.

The widow’s withering retort is a clear echo of one of Ovid’s most famous pronouncements on women: “Chaste is she whom no one has asked.”⁵² Writer-director Sturges was one of the wittiest and best-educated filmmakers in Hollywood, so it is sensible to assume that he had read Ovid. But whether he actually had Ovid in mind seems to be equally beyond proof and disproof.⁵³ Here and elsewhere throughout film history, all we can do is note and wonder.

A distant echo of both the Pygmalion myth and Daedalus’ invention of moving statues (cf. Chapter 7) may be seen in Das wandernde Bild (1920), an original story by Fritz Lang, the film’s director, and Thea von Harbou, his future wife and frequent screenwriting collaborator. Both were sufficiently well versed in classical literature to incorporate analogies, even if there is no explicit mention or other indication of such intent. This highly melodramatic film survives in an export version shortened by about a third of its original length; plot development suffers accordingly. The Wandering Image, its English title, may be misleading because Bild here refers to a statue, not a painting. A scholar-philosopher believes bourgeois marriage to be all wrong and publishes a bestselling book on free love, if not on the art of free love. A young woman falls under his spell, agrees to forego marriage, and bears him a child. He renounces society, fakes his own death, and lives as a hermit in the Alps. A statue of the Madonna and Child near a cliff face prompts him to vow to return only if the statue were to move. (The film’s working title was Madonna im Schnee: “Madonna in the Snow.”) His lover turns into an angel of mercy to the poor and saves a dying mother’s newborn child. At the climax an avalanche has displaced the Madonna, and the husband sees a woman with a baby moving down the mountain nearby. It is, of course, his lover. He renounces his renunciation and is reunited with her. The sight of the statue apparently come to life is the most arresting shot in the entire film. Lang had filmed the actual statue in such a way that it looks dark against its snowy surroundings; the lover and the baby she is holding are dressed in black. The Madonna really seems to be moving. The traditional iconography of the Virgin Mary shows her, as here, with a headscarf; the woman wears one, too. The resemblance is uncanny, surprising, and wholly convincing even if viewers know who is moving through the snow. Lang had prepared them for the moment in an earlier shot of the mother, wearing a headscarf, with her own child at home (but not dressed in black). Religious overtones, true love conquering all, and a statue seemingly alive – all reminders of ancient archetypes.

A downright haunting example is Europa (1930–1931), a film made in Poland by Franciska and Stefan Themerson and lost or destroyed in World War II. It was based on a 1925 poem of the same name by Futurist Anatol Stern. Stern’s poem, and presumably the film, did not refer to or mention Ovid or the myth of Europa’s abduction and rape by Jupiter (Met. 2.833–875), but the film showed a “photo-collage of a bull’s head superimposed upon a huge molar tooth” and “a languorous Europa surrounded by a cubist pastiche of images.” What Stern said about his poem seems to have applied to the film as well: each was intended as “a dry chronicle devoted to the tragedy, the misery, the wisdom and the wickedness of Europe.” The film expressed “through montages and stream of associations … the mood of anxiety and dissolution” in Eastern Europe.⁵⁴

Except for occasional brief mentions I omit independent and other kinds of video productions, even if they may have their own quirky appeal. Examples of the latter are two videos by former Classics student Jim Piechocki. In Minotaur (1984) Piechocki combined Ovid and, reportedly, Carlos Fuentes. Piechocki’s Pygmalion is a “gender-bending twist” on Ovid “starring a Calvin Klein underwear model.”⁵⁵ When appropriate or sensible, I mention film or television appearances of characters who appear in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; when such mention would not be especially fruitful, I omit it. Examples of the latter are the science-fiction Niobe in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions (both 2003), the non-mythical Niobe in the TV series Rome (first season, 2005), and the free retelling of Cretan and Athenian material in the Canadian-British television series Olympus (2015), which is replete with characters from Ovid: Minos, Ariadne, Daedalus, among others. Some of the instances just mentioned show that not all possible Ovidian montages are attractive.