This book is the latest in an impressive array of works by W. on the affinities between Classical culture and the cinema in which he compares the strategies employed in ancient verbal and modern visual narratives. W. celebrates the creativity of practitioners in myth and mythic history, whether they are Greek or Roman authors or the film makers of today, a leitmotif of his past output and clearly realised in his 2009 book, Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo's New Light.
W. has reprised but also extended his past perceptions of a number of cinematic texts. Both the introduction and Part 1, ‘Creative Affinities’, reinforce his principles and ground rules for academic participation in the reception of Classical motifs on screen. W. draws attention to cases of mistaken identities where non-Classicists see false analogies between mythical figures and contemporary characters or narrative arcs (pp. 4–12). Nevertheless, he remains a bold and passionate advocate of the relationship of ancient poetry and powerful prose (from Homer to the later Classical novelists) to the spectacle of cinema, which achieves the kind of visualisation the Greek and Roman authors strove to achieve by figurative strategies as well as by direct and vivid storytelling.
I enjoyed W.’s lively reprise of ancient views on enslaving an audience with powerful pictures and the cultural trajectory of these techniques (pp. 21–40). However, there is still much to be said about the functions of ecphrasis in ancient texts and the way in which listening to orators or reading (aloud) could be a whole-body experience, relying upon all the sense perceptions. Of course, Classical readers would access their own moving images from theatrical performances and the arena to animate the inanimate. The special place cinema may hold in helping us to empathise with the response of Greek and Roman readers and viewers can be overplayed, so W.’s occasional inclusion of modern stage productions of Classical texts is welcome.
W. delights and irritates simultaneously. I always learn a great deal from his discussions of Classical philosophy and theories of aesthetics, his knowledge of Greco-Roman drama, poetry and general myth-making, and his familiarity with both well-known and recondite screen productions. He continues to have his favourite auteurs, for instance Pasolini, who some film critics would say stages rather than screens, but W. argues that this director's cinematic versions of Greek tragedies come close to capturing the complex spirit and psychology of the Athenian dramatists.
In his analysis of versions of Medea W. is thorough and thoughtful, demonstrating that modern interpretations bring additional nuances to illuminate the Colchian princess's conflicted personality although her semi-divine nature or, in twenty-first century parlance, her intersectionality is largely passed over, and the fact that Medea fools herself and manipulates others into believing that she is an ‘everywoman’. W.’s positive appraisal of Arturo Ripstein's Such is Life can be enriched by reading P. Salzmann-Mitchell's interesting chapter in J. Alvares and Salzmann-Mitchell, Classical Myth in the New Millennium (2017), pp. 221–48. I felt that the excursus on tragic children in cinema strayed too far from the myth of Medea and that at other times W. derails his structure, continuity and focus with too much extraneous information.
In ‘Striking Beauties’ W. looks at screen Lysistratas (with a slightly off-piste interlude on Up Pompeii) with a peppering of puns about tits and bums because he suggests that only humourless academics (or feisty feminists?) will experience a measure of discomfort at the discourse he has chosen (form fit for content perhaps) but this is a risky strategy (hardly captatio benevolentiae) given the current climate that is finally exposing and condemning the sexualisation of women in the film industry. W. relishes the smutty innuendos of an only partially bygone era of television and cinema as heirs to Aristophanic satiric scatology. Here, as elsewhere, he frequently qualifies female actors with epithets denoting their physical allure. W. only briefly and belatedly (p. 344) concedes that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but otherwise he very much buys into cultural constructs of attractiveness in women, which might set some readers squirming, regardless of their gender identities.
On the other hand, W. champions the work of female actor turned director Mai Zetterling and her 1968 film, Flickorna (The Girls), which W. dubs ‘Lysistrata's feminist apotheosis’. Zetterling must have been a modest trailblazer for gender equality in the films, and W. (pp. 142–9) offers a range of reviews on the strengths and weaknesses of this production with comments from the three principals. If we are able to cope with the ‘oo-er missus’ interjections in his ‘Striking Beauties’, W. introduces the reader to a fascinating array of stage and screen productions of Aristophanes’ comedy, and he sets them firmly in their political and cultural context. The inclusion of Hollywood screwball comedies with strong women makes for a less convincing connection with the fantasy of female hegemony at Athenian dramatic festivals.
In ‘More Striking’ W. proposes distinct affinities between the twists and turns of ancient Greek romances and the element of surprise and shock that Alfred Hitchcock, master of suspense, created in films like Psycho. Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius are portrayed as the inventors of the detective fiction genre, with their narratives reading like screenplays for films in which audiences will be kept guessing and gasping at sequences of unexpected events. This approach perhaps needs to be tempered with a closer look (had we but world enough and time) at all the cultural layers and filters in the chains of reception occurring before and after the literary giants of the past.
For me, W.’s heart is, ideologically, in the right place when he dissects John Ford's films for their ambiguity towards nationalism and empire building in the USA and hence their affinity with Virgil's Aeneid. His argument rests upon the equivocal voices we find in the Latin epic about casualties of war in the establishment of Rome and the muted sympathy of Ford's stance towards the first nations that were sacrificed to the American dream. So Virgilian and Fordian reservations (with quotes) about the price of patriotism and conquest are put into conversation with each other, which saves the section from being just too general about the dilemmas of the human condition and the contradictions of imperialism.
W. goes further on the dangers of beliefs in racial superiority with his chapter on Zac Snyder's 2008 300, a CGI enhanced view of Leonidas and the Spartans at Thermopylae. This is a convincing deconstruction of European fascist perceptions of the historical battle and of the Spartans as a super race which permeate the film. However, though the target audience may indeed have been testosterone-fuelled teenagers (p. 267), Snyder's film was popular with a wider demographic, and this phenomenon cries out for a viewer response survey to establish what else appealed about this slice of history delivered through the interpretative lens of fascism. Otherwise we are rather paternalistically assuming total ignorance and naivety in an audience ‘willing to be enslaved’. Nor does W. really engage with gendered readings of the film by Classicists like S. Turner in K. Shahabudin and D. Lowe's Classics for All (2009), pp. 128–49, or V. Tomasso in M. Cyrino's Screening Love and Sex in the Ancient World (2013), pp. 113–26.
The final chapters on Nero and then ‘Portraits of Ladies’ are rather bolt on, and there are some surprising omissions in his allusions to scholarship on Greco-Roman myth and history on film, for instance M. Wyke's groundbreaking monograph of 1998 Projecting the Past and J. Paul's accomplished chapter on screen Penelopes in K. Nicoloutsos’ Ancient Greek Women in Film (2013), pp. 139–61. Again the range of films for cinema and television is wide, but W. could have been less flippant in his critiques, and I would have liked a little more on the light these productions shed upon the legendary figures as portrayed in Greek and Roman literature.
I would readily recommend this volume to students and scholars of Greece and Rome as well as to cinema-goers and to those in media and film studies. The book begs to be rebutted, dismembered, even disliked, but it does make us think, and this for any author is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
