This chapter considers the formations and transformations of Greek epic in the cinema. The cinema has been fundamentally heroic and epic in both subject matter (the mythic past) and elevated visual style since its birth in 1895. Rather than resurvey this prominence of epic themes in the history of film, Winkler demonstrates their power through a reading of the cinema’s own epic genre par excellence – the Western. The chapter first shows how the American Western follows archetypal heroic models in both plot and character and how many films are patterned explicitly on Homeric epic. Winkler then turns to specific archetypal aspects of ancient epic, primarily Homer’s, in the Western. These include fame (kleos); rivalry to be the best (aristos Akhaiôn / fastest on the draw); the heroic code’s implications of doom and death; heroic rituals (arming before duels/showdowns as forms of aristeia); and fundamental story patterns, primarily the development from savagery to civilisation (chaos to kosmos) in the form of ktisis narratives connected with revenge (tisis). Winkler details the power of these archetypes by examining one of the most profound epic-mythic Westerns.

Building on the concept of enargeia, Chapter 4 examines the cinematism of epic ecphrases: passages containing detailed descriptions of remarkable objects. To the ancients, Homer’s vividness of presentation put him in the forefront of painters, while film directors, chiefly Eisenstein, have repeatedly referred to him as a precursor. In particular, the stories told on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad validate Eisenstein’s concept. Eisenstein wrote extensively about Lessing’s thesis, advanced in his influential Laocoön, about the limits of painting and poetry; both authors’ approaches are evaluated here, with Eisenstein’s argument proven the stronger one. The story of Theseus and Ariadne depicted on the coverlet in Catullus’ poem 64, the most complex ecphrasis in classical literature, is then treated as the basis of a film adaptation, which reveals the astonishing sophistication that can be discovered from the perspective of cinematism. Shorter observations about Virgil and, in passing, Juvenal round out this chapter.

In this chapter we find that Homer’s extraordinary vividness (cf. Chapter 4) is completely missing in a crucial scene of the Odyssey: Odysseus’ shot through twelve axes — through, not across, in-between, or anything else. Scholars have proposed several solutions to a textual problem that still resists any conclusive explanation. Screenwriters and film directors, too, have tackled it. The chapter first outlines the problem in the text and examines the major theories that commentators and translators have advanced to solve it, then analyzes all screen versions from the silent era until the age of computer videos. None other than T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), himself a translator of the Odyssey, concluded that “a cinema” (i.e. a film) is required to understand Homer’s scene. Several onscreen arrangements of the axes and the manner of Odysseus’ shot are surprisingly close to scholars’ theories.

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.

This chapter considers the mask of classical Greek theater as analogous to the close-up on screen. The argument here hinges on the comparable nature of the spectators’ emotional involvement and on the similarity of the psychological effects of masks on stage and faces on screen. The chapter enhances our appreciation of ancient stage practice with a discussion of close-up cinematography of apparently expressionless faces. The chapter further demonstrates the influence of Greek tragedy on the cinema and, on a larger scale, classical playwrights’ and modern filmmakers’ artistic goals concerning audience involvement. To present as coherent an argument as possible across almost 2,500 years, this chapter incorporates a large number of films as evidence and quotes various classical and cinema scholars, many well-known filmmakers, and some actors as expert witnesses. The chapter ends with the famous close-up of Greta Garbo’s face in Queen Christina.

Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Tale is a precursor of modern mystery-adventure-romances. Most famous is its suspenseful but enigmatic opening, which is remarkable for its inherently visual nature. This chapter offers an interpretation of this scene from a cinematic perspective. It adapts Heliodorus’ clever opening into a screenplay, thereby demonstrating the concept of enargeia (Chapters 3 and 4) from a yet different point of view. The chapter additionally juxtaposes Heliodorus’ first scene to the intricate opening shots of two classic Hollywood thrillers: Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The mystery inherent in Heliodorus’ opening is solved only when an eyewitness explains it later both to the characters and to the readers. This explanation constitutes what is today called a flashback. Hence the chapter examines complex flashbacks in a variety of film genres. Hitchcock’s cinema exhibits a number of lying flashbacks, with the one in Stage Fright the best-known example. But Heliodorus was there first.

The paradoxes of the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea seem to be perverse arguments about the nonexistence of bodily motion in time and through space. One of the best-known is that of an arrow that remains stationary during its flight. Aristotle refuted Zeno; most modern experts have done the same. Occasionally a modern – cinematic – view of the arrow’s flight has been advanced; this is the chapter’s topic. To Zeno, the arrow only appears to be moving but is at any one moment occupying one specific place. The images on our screens appear to move only because the unmoving images exposed on a filmstrip are projected so rapidly that they are perceived as moving. Extreme high-speed photography and computer-generated “bullet time,” as in the Matrix films and elsewhere, provide a new understanding of Zeno’s brain teaser. The chapter ends on a lighter note with the appearance of a modern Professor Zeno in a comedy film.

This short closing chapter returns to the camera obscura as earliest film apparatus and considers a related projection device, the zoetrope, as it may be imagined to have existed in antiquity. The ill-fated epic Cleopatra (1963) was to have included a charming tribute to its own medium in a scene in which Cleopatra shows Julius Caesar a zoetrope as an example of advanced technology. The chapter then turns to the Hollywood melodrama Primrose Path for the most irresistible tribute in film history to the ancient Greeks. The chapter, and the book, ends on the most stupendous view of the Acropolis ever filmed, which appeared in the Cinerama travelogue Seven Wonders of the World.

Chapter 2 analyzes an Athenian vase painting by Douris that is as unique as it is mysterious: Jason in the dragon’s maw. Traditional scholars have never reached a consensus about its meaning and have proposed various and often contradictory or mutually exclusive interpretations. On the basis of a critical survey of the painting’s reception history, this chapter proposes an approach that has been entirely neglected so far. It extends our appreciation of Douris’ sophistication into the age of moving images, adducing Aristotle’s concept of “the Now,” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s “fruitful moment,” Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment,” and Agnès Varda’s approach to photography and cinema. In cases like the one presented here, long-standing irresolution about an ancient work of art can be overcome when it is related to later works, even those of a kind that could not yet have existed when the original was created.