Classics and Cinema

“Let Dickens and the whole constellation of ancestors, who go as far back as Shakespeare or the Greeks, serve as superfluous reminders that Griffith and our cinema alike cannot claim originality for themselves, but have a vast cultural heritage; and this causes neither one any difficulty in advancing the great art of cinema, each at their moment of world history.” Thus wrote Sergei Eisenstein, the great Soviet filmmaker, theoretician of cinema, and one of the most influential artists in the history of film, in his 1942 essay “Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves.” Eisenstein regarded Charles Dickens as one of the 19th-century precursors of cinema and here examined his influence on D. W. Griffith, the American film pioneer. Griffith has often been credited with inventing most of the grammar of film language. Since the cinema’s birth in 1895, classical Antiquity has played a major part in the history of storytelling in moving images. Films either present their mythical, literary, and historical material in ancient settings or they transpose classical themes and historical or narrative archetypes to contemporary or even future times. For most of the 20th century, classical scholars and teachers neglected the presence of Greece and Rome on the screen, although there were some honorable exceptions. (Examples are cited under The Pioneers: Antiquity and Cinema.) Since the 1990s, however, classical scholarship has increasingly focused on this area of reception, which is now outpacing all others. Two statements published in The Classical Review, one of the profession’s foremost book review journals, illustrate the change that occurred in less than a decade. In 1999, a reviewer began with the following statement: “The combination of classics and film studies is not a common field of interdisciplinary research” (Classical Review, new ser., 49: 244–246). In 2005, a reviewer observed: “Successfully—and fruitfully—the study of classics and cinema has asserted itself as a leader in the field of reception studies” (Classical Review, new ser., 55: 688–690, at 688). Further evidence may be found in the fact that a highly regarded publisher—Edinburgh University Press—launched the book series “Screening Antiquity” in 2015, which has by now published nine volumes, distributed by Oxford University Press. The hope expressed in 1958 by Paul Leglise, that his approach to Virgil’s Aeneid (see The Pioneers: Antiquity and Cinema) would lead to future research of a comparable nature on other classical authors has now been fulfilled to a greater extent than he may have imagined. Nevertheless, the study of classics and cinema and related media (television, computer videos) is still evolving. It is a broad and demanding field that requires a double expertise from its practitioners: a sound knowledge of all aspects of the ancient cultures on the one hand; close familiarity with film history, technology, theory, aesthetics, and economics on the other. These are preconditions for all serious interpretive work on cinema and Antiquity.