Chapter 2 - Ovid’s Film Sense and Beyond

Summary

Chapter 2 combines one aspect of Eisenstein’s theory, his concept of film sense, with Ovid (and beyond Ovid) and, in addition, applies the idea of cinemetamorphosis introduced in Chapter 1. Eisenstein considered classical antiquity as a kind of foundation for the cinema. On several occasions he related cinematic techniques to his expositions of classic (but not classical) literature: Dickens, Pushkin, Zola. Following Eisenstein’s model, this chapter demonstrates what might be called Ovid’s inherent film sense by transforming parts of two famous myths from the Metamorphoses (Arachne’s tapestry, the fate of Niobe’s children) into preliminary screenplays and by analyzing a famous moment in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window in conjunction with the beginning of Ovid’s Amores 1.5. The mirrored image of Ovid’s Narcissus (also from the Metamorphoses), who is deceived by his own reflection in water, is an analogy to the nature of insubstantial images on screen. Additional observations address the visual qualities in classical literature beginning with Homer. The chapter closes with Christoph Ransmayr’s The Last World, in which some of the tales from the Metamorphoses are being shown as films at the time of Ovid’s exile in Tomis. The intentional anachronism of impossible cinematic images in this postmodern novel illustrates, from a different (textual) perspective, the visual nature of Ovid’s art and his affinity for a creative medium he could not have foreseen.