Classical Literature on Screen - Winkler, Martin M.

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Résumé :
Martin M. Winkler argues for a new approach to various creative affinities between ancient verbal and modern visual narratives. He examines screen adaptations of classical epic, tragedy, comedy, myth, and history, exploring, for example, how ancient rhetorical principles regarding the emotions apply to moving images and how Aristotle's perspective on thrilling plot-turns can recur on screen. He also interprets several popular films, such as 300 and Nero, and analyzes works by international directors, among them Pier Paolo Pasolini (Oedipus Rex, Medea), Jean Cocteau (The Testament of Orpheus), Mai Zetterling (The Girls), Lars von Trier (Medea), Arturo Ripstein (Such Is Life), John Ford (westerns), Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho), and Spike Lee (Chi-Raq). The book demonstrates the undiminished vitality of classical myth and literature in our visual media, as with screen portrayals of Helen of Troy. It is important for all classicists and scholars and students of film, literature, and history....

Biographie:
Martin M. Winkler is University Professor and Professor of Classics at George Mason University, Virginia. His most recent books are Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo's New Light (Cambridge, 2009), The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology (2009), and Arminius the Liberator: Myth and Ideology (2015). He has also published numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews, and edited several essay collections on classical antiquity and film.

Sommaire:
Part I. Creative Affinities: Ancient Texts and Modern Images: 1. The classical sense of cinema and the cinema's sense of antiquity; 2. Pasolini's and Cocteau's Oedipus: no quarrel of the ancients and the moderns in the cinema age; Part II. Elective Affinities: Tragedy and Comedy: 3. Medea's infanticide: how to present the unimaginable; 4. Striking beauty: Aristophanes' Lysistrat; Part III. Non-Elective Affinities: Plot and Theme: 5. 'More striking': Aristotelian poetics in Achilles Tatius, Heliodorus, and Alfred Hitchcock; 6. John Ford, America's Virgil; Part IV. Counter-Affinities: Ideological and Narrative Distortions of History: 7. Fascinating ur-fascism: the case of 300; 8. Good Nero; or, the best intentions; Part V. Aesthetic Affinities: portraits of ladies: 9. Regal beauties in Franco Rossi's films of the Odyssey and Aenid; 10. Helen of Troy: is this the face that launched a thousand films?