W. opens Ovid on Screen by instructing his reader that he will be attempting a ‘Systematic, although not exhaustive, appreciation of Ovid's pervasive importance for the cinema’ (p. xix). The scope of films is such that the reader could not hope to have seen them all, and W. gives preference to art house films/films from auteur directors as his major examples for detailed analysis, although popular blockbusters are also mentioned throughout. W. sets out that his aim is to shed light on the cinematic nature of Ovid's works, as well as analysing films that invoke Ovid by consciously or unconsciously employing Ovidian themes and visual clues. The book left me wanting to return to a number of films, both included in the book and not included, to revisit potentially Ovidian transformations that I had not focused on before. To use a most recent example, we could see Barbara Minerva's transformation into Cheetah in Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) as an Ovidian transformation, merging the unwished for side effects of wish fulfilment from the story of King Midas with the unexpected change from human to animal caused by a supernatural power, present in so many of the mythological stories in the Metamorphoses.
In the first chapter W. sets out his aims, proposing the term ‘cinemetamorphosis’ for the process of examining the correspondence between ancient (in this case written) and modern visual (in this case cinematic) texts, and combining films that have a conscious relationship with the works of Ovid (‘foreground Ovidianism’) and those that have an indirect relationship (‘background Ovidianism’). In the following chapter W. draws on S. Eisenstein to recommend approaching works of narrative literature using the tools of film analysis. To illustrate this approach, W. first turns to the story of Athena and Arachne, where Ovid's comments on colour and sound in the description of Arachne's tapestry lend themselves to the medium of cinema. W. then presents the story of Niobe and her children as a detailed series of scenes to be filmed. A varied use of camera angles is proposed, including close-ups to convey human emotion and high-angle long-shots as arrows rain down on the children from the unseen gods above. From this focus on the written text W. moves on to film texts that invoke Ovid, including an analysis of the opening scene of A. Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) in relation to Amores 1.5 and the appearance of the beautiful blonde Lisa (Grace Kelly) before her lover in comparison with the appearance of Corinna in the poem.
Chapter 3's discussion of Italian writer and World War I fighter pilot Gabriele D'Annunzio highlights the influence of the Metamorphoses and particularly the stories of Daedalus and Icarus and Daphne and Apollo on D'Annunzio's work. (Although not mentioned by W., references to D'Annunzio in Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli anime film, Porco Rosso [1992], where fighter pilot Marco Pagot has been turned into a pig, would also benefit from an Ovidian comparison.) W. discusses how D'Annunzio was initially sceptical about cinema as an art form, until he saw first-hand the potential for the cinema to represent metamorphosis, specifically the leaves growing from Daphne's arm.
Chapter 4 discusses the Metamorphoses' non-linear or ‘labyrinthine’ narrative structure, including stories within stories. This maze-like structure, and the use of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, is compared with numerous films from Citizen Kane (1941) to Wrath of the Titans (2012). Chistopher Nolan's Inception (2010), a complex film with the idea of the labyrinth at its heart, is also explored, followed by detailed analyses of the maze-like settings of A. Resnais's modernist film Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and S. Kubrick's horror film based on the Stephen King novel, The Shining (1980). An interesting comparison from television would be the Doctor Who episode ‘The God Complex’ (2011), set in a maze-like hotel in space and containing an ultimately sympathetic Minotaur.
In Chapter 5 W. moves on to the ability of cinema to bring life to the inanimate. First he interrogates different incarnations of the Pygmalion and Galatea story. He then briefly discusses examples of metamorphoses through animation, including the work of Ray Harryhausen, before moving on to a detailed analysis of the metamorphosis of Maria in Metropolis (1927) and Nina in Black Swan (2010), films pushing the boundaries of the visual effects available in their respective eras. W. finally turns to Medusa, and films where petrification occurs, ending with the power of the cinema to make three separate statues of lions appear to become one in Battleship Potemkin (1925), an early example of the metamorphic ability of cinema.
Chapter 6 covers transformations from human to beast, with evidence that Curt Siodmak, the screenwriter of The Wolf Man (1941), drew on the story of Lycaon from Ovid, and a discussion of werewolf films making use of on the ancient Greek heritage of lycanthropy. W. then moves on to discuss the techniques used by filmmakers of the early twentieth century to transform Jekyll into Hyde, ending with a discussion of Ovidian tropes in films of Ingmar Bergam, focusing on Dreams (1955), Persona (1966) and Hour of the Wolf (1968).
The next part of the book, ‘Love, Seduction, Death’, starts with a chapter on filmic versions of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, with a focus on two films from the early twenty-first century; Helmut Dietl's German fantasy comedy Vom Suchen und Finden der Liebe (2005) and Paul Auster's mystery drama The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007). Both films feature a male artist and a female muse, and subvert the Orphic storyline: in the first film it is the male character who goes to the underworld, and in the second it is revealed that the female character who returned from the underworld was a figment of the male writer's imagination. From films that consciously invoke Ovid W. moves on to close readings of films side by side with the Heroides and the story of Philemon and Baucis from the Metamorphoses. In a detailed analysis of Max Ophüls's melodrama Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) in relation to Ovid's epistolary poems, W. argues how Lisa in the film and Ovid's heroines are both victims of their male lovers and able to assert their own agency. The enduring love of Philemon and Baucis is then reflected back on The Notebook (2004), the love story of an elderly couple who die together, and other examples that specifically invoke the story of people turning into trees.
W. turns to the Ars amatoria, the work of Ovid that continues to be controversial, as evidenced in D. Zuckerberg's recent important and disturbing book Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age (2018). Film examples here include W. Borowczyk's erotic film The Art of Love (1983), featuring a historic Ovid as teacher of love, and a scene showing a seduction by an older man invoking Ovid that ultimately fails in Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). W.'s final and preferred example is Max Ophüls's La ronde (1950), with a Viennese gentleman from 1900s Vienna standing in for Ovid as teacher/curator of love affairs.
In the final chapters W. returns to stories and themes from the Metamorphoses covered in earlier chapters. First Orpheus and Pygmalion, and the use of statues, in films of J. Cocteau, and human flight with reference to Icarus in a range of films including Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda documentary Olympia (1938). W. shows the proclivity of the use of Icarus as a name for spaceships in science fiction films, signposting to viewers that a crash-landing is likely. He finally gives examples of characters citing Ovid in films across a range of genres into the twenty-first century, illustrating how Ovid is still on the minds of filmmakers.
Overall, this impeccably researched and well-illustrated book is a great addition to the outstanding work of W. in the field of Classics and cinema, and future scholars of Ovid and cinema will be able to use the proposed methodology with new texts across film, television and other modern media.
