Despite the recent multiplication of studies in found footage cinema, the fog surrounding the figure of Myriam Borsoutsky remains thick. This article elaborates the rare extant information about her work to retrace an important chapter in the history of found footage cinema in France, in which women have played a major role. In an attempt to delineate a specifically female genealogy in the history of French compilation film, Myriam's work is studied alongside that of Nicole Vedrès, and situated in the cultural context of a net of relationships that includes other women, for instance Denise Tual and Yannick Bellon, as well as such masters of French cinema as Pierre Braunberger, Sacha Guitry, Henri Langlois, Alain Resnais, André Bazin, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, and Michel Leiris. A detailed analysis of two major works in this genealogy, Paris 1900 (dir. Nicole Vedrès, 1947) and Bullfight (dir. Myriam and Pierre Braunberger, 1951), draws upon Vedrès's own writings and André Bazin's critical notes on the films. The last section addresses the meaning of the neologism neomontage, coined by Bazin in his review of Bullfight to describe Myriam's “diabolical” editing abilities.

When in 1905 the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for outstanding services as an epic writer’, it was his novel Quo vadis. A Narrative of the Time of Nero that motivated the committee to bestow this notable honour. The extraordinary international success of Quo vadis catapulted the author into literary stardom, placing him at the top of international league tables for the sheer quantity of his readers. But, before long, the historical novel began to detach itself from the person of its author and to become a multimedial, mass–culture phenomenon. In the West and East, Quo vadis was adapted for the stage and screen, provided the inspiration for works of music and other genres of literature, was transformed into comic strips and illustrated children’s books, and was cited in advertising and referenced in everyday objects of material culture. No work in English to date has explored in depth the mechanisms that released Quo vadis into mass circulation and the influence that its diverse spin-off forms exercised on other areas of culture—even on the reception and interpretation of the literary text itself. In the context of a robust scholarly interest in the processes of literary adaptation and classical reception, and set alongside the recent emergence of interest in the ‘Ben-Hur tradition’, this volume provides a coherent forum for a much-needed exploration, from various disciplinary and national perspectives, of the multimedial transformations of Quo vadis. Uniquely, also, for its English-speaking readers this collection of essays renders more visible the cultural conquests achieved by Poland on the world map of classical reception.

No abstract