Cinemetamorphosis

Abstract

With its almost limitless narrative possibilities, the cinema, together with later media, has left all earlier verbal and visual adaptations or imitations of classical literature far behind. Film versions of literary texts may be adaptations, imitations, or the like. The essential change from one medium to another is tantamount to metamorphosis. Such metamorphoses follow their own rules and principles. I propose to call them cinemetamorphoses.  A Working DefinitionParker Tyler, in Magic and Myth of the Movies, titled four of his twelve chapters "Magic-Lantern Metamorphoses."  Cinemetamorphosis then is a conceptual approach whose purpose is to apply a filmic perspective to Greek and Roman literature and, when appropriate, to ancient static images like paintings, sculptures, or mosaics. Cinemetamorphosis examines the affinities between classical texts and images on the one hand and modern visual narratives on the other.  Its chief focus is on the visual qualities in narrative literature and the literary qualities in narrative images. Modern literary critics, with their theoretical agonies over what exactly visual adaptations of literary texts are, have by now produced a veritable jungle of terminologies: