Classics on screen FRANCESCA MARTELLI Paula James OVID’S MYTH OF PYGMALION ON SCREEN In pursuit of the perfect woman 284pp. Bloomsbury. Paperback, £18.99. 978 1 4725 0495 1 Joanna Paul FILM AND THE CLASSICAL EPIC TRADITION 352pp. Oxford University Press. £70. 978 0 19 954292 5 Published: 12 March 2014 Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (1964) Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (1964) R ecent studies on the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity on film hail cinema as the medium best equipped to take Classics out of the realm of the elite classroom and to make the subject speak to everyone. But any account of cinema’s debt to ancient texts and traditions poses a challenge. The imperative that underlies all “reception studies” – to engage fully with the post-classical medium that is supposedly in dialogue with the texts of classical antiquity – is particularly pressing in this instance. For if film is the medium that supplements and, in many cases, supplies the Western viewer’s cultural memory of the distant past, it is not a passive or inevitable receptacle of that past, but an autonomous art form with its own history. To deny or dilute that history is to patronize cinema, and to misunderstand how it has fashioned antiquity in its own image. Two of the most recent studies of Classics on screen, Paula James’s Ovid’s Myth of Pygmalion on Screen and Joanna Paul’s Film and the Classical Epic Tradition, promise rich pickings from this perspective. Both authors claim a democratizing agenda for their decision to focus for the most part on mainstream cinema. Yet both studies prompt the question whether the “reception” of the ancient world has provided the best framework for balancing the traditions of Classics and cinema in the most equal – or democratic – light. For Paul, whose book assesses the legacy of classical epic on screen, the balance swings heavily on the side of Classics over film. Her focus ranges from adaptations of ancient Greek epic literature to films set in ancient Rome that display epic themes, and so tends to assimilate the much wider category of “cinematic epic” to films set in the ancient world – on the grounds that these best display the vague criterion of “epic distance”. But by delimiting her subject according to these criteria, she has missed the opportunity to explore how strictly ancient epic traditions, both on page and on screen, are put in a new context by the tradition of epic cinema as a larger phenomenon. Why Gladiator should be seen as Homer’s heir any more than Blade Runner or Braveheart beats me. The story of Pygmalion deals with the animation of an inanimate object, and so speaks directly to (and of) the cinematic process In its approach to the question of genre, this book has many virtues: it avoids the common pitfall of obsessing over the criteria for what does and doesn’t count as epic, and charts instead the rendering on screen of this genre’s most conspicuous motifs. Paul points, among other things, to a preoccupation with kleos in film adaptations of Homer, and carefully dissects the problem of screen “heroism”, as displayed in the competing scripts written for the 1960 film Spartacus (which offer significantly different portrayals of its slave hero). But the book still runs up against a basic problem of definition, forever circumscribing the “epic tradition” according to the Classicist’s preference for the Greco-Roman; and it distorts our view of these films’ place in the wider history of cinematic epic in the process. The relationship between cinema and ancient literature is more harmoniously, if less ambitiously, negotiated in James’s study of film versions of the Pygmalion myth. This story lends itself particularly well to cinematic representation, because it deals with the animation of an inanimate object, and so speaks directly to (and of) the cinematic process. Scholarship on Ovid’s version of Pygmalion has been enriched by film theory in recent years, yet in her analysis, James resists the connection drawn by many others between Ovid’s vivid narrative techniques and the visual pleasures that cinema grants its viewers. Instead, her study limits itself to outlining the relationship between artist, statue, Venus and the promiscuous women of Cyprus whom Pygmalion shuns in the original story, before tracing the capacity for each of these figures to substitute for one another in the myth’s reception in film. From make-over movies, such as Pretty Woman, to the man- and woman-killing robots of Metropolis and Stepford Wives, James traces the creative and, more often, destructive power of the Pygmalion paradigm through a vast array of different films. Yet as the book progresses, analysis gives way increasingly to plot summary, and we move further and further away from Ovid. When Paula James writes that linking film theory with scholarship on ancient literature is outside her remit, we may wonder again about the alibi that classical “reception studies” can sometimes provide for its practitioners. Surely this branch of criticism is not best served by being treated as a one-sided contract. Francesca Martelli is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her book, Ovid’s Revisions: The editor as author, was published last year.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 02:48:28 +0000
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