Chapter 2 combines one aspect of Eisenstein’s theory, his concept of film sense, with Ovid (and beyond Ovid) and, in addition, applies the idea of cinemetamorphosis introduced in Chapter 1. Eisenstein considered classical antiquity as a kind of foundation for the cinema. On several occasions he related cinematic techniques to his expositions of classic (but not classical) literature: Dickens, Pushkin, Zola. Following Eisenstein’s model, this chapter demonstrates what might be called Ovid’s inherent film sense by transforming parts of two famous myths from the Metamorphoses (Arachne’s tapestry, the fate of Niobe’s children) into preliminary screenplays and by analyzing a famous moment in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window in conjunction with the beginning of Ovid’s Amores 1.5. The mirrored image of Ovid’s Narcissus (also from the Metamorphoses), who is deceived by his own reflection in water, is an analogy to the nature of insubstantial images on screen. Additional observations address the visual qualities in classical literature beginning with Homer. The chapter closes with Christoph Ransmayr’s The Last World, in which some of the tales from the Metamorphoses are being shown as films at the time of Ovid’s exile in Tomis. The intentional anachronism of impossible cinematic images in this postmodern novel illustrates, from a different (textual) perspective, the visual nature of Ovid’s art and his affinity for a creative medium he could not have foreseen.

Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical basis on which the following chapters build and defines adaptations of literature to cinema, television, and other screens as cinemetamorphoses, an allusion to the title of Ovid’s most famous work. Scholars distinguish between foreground and background Ovidianism: the former indicates intentional, the latter unconscious or not immediately obvious affinities between a work or passage by Ovid and allusions to, or echoes of, this source in later literature or the visual arts. Sergei Eisenstein, the great Russian filmmaker and theoretician of cinema, coined the expression montage of attractions for one of the creative principles of film editing; in the present book, his term is applied in an expanded sense: that of indicating the affinities, either close or loose, between Ovid’s works and films based on or taking up various topics, characters, plot situations, and additional aspects, primarily from famous myths in his Metamorphoses, to which Ovid has given definitive shape. A Roman marble relief showing Hermes, Orpheus, and Eurydice illustrates the close ties between text and image through a classical visual work of art. This chapter also provides a preview of the following chapters’ contents. Finally, Chapter 1 gives examples of the kind of background Ovidianism largely excluded from this book.