This chapter considers the formations and transformations of Greek epic in the cinema. The cinema has been fundamentally heroic and epic in both subject matter (the mythic past) and elevated visual style since its birth in 1895. Rather than resurvey this prominence of epic themes in the history of film, Winkler demonstrates their power through a reading of the cinema’s own epic genre par excellence – the Western. The chapter first shows how the American Western follows archetypal heroic models in both plot and character and how many films are patterned explicitly on Homeric epic. Winkler then turns to specific archetypal aspects of ancient epic, primarily Homer’s, in the Western. These include fame (kleos); rivalry to be the best (aristos Akhaiôn / fastest on the draw); the heroic code’s implications of doom and death; heroic rituals (arming before duels/showdowns as forms of aristeia); and fundamental story patterns, primarily the development from savagery to civilisation (chaos to kosmos) in the form of ktisis narratives connected with revenge (tisis). Winkler details the power of these archetypes by examining one of the most profound epic-mythic Westerns.

Although notoriously imprecise designations dating from the nineteenth century, ‘the Balkans’ and ‘Ruritania’ have played surprisingly prominent roles in configurations of identity in modern British literature and culture. Building on existing research into cultural representations, this chapter seeks to provide a survey of British engagement with the region, real or imagined, from early modern to recent times. Drawing on a range of examples and taking into account travel accounts and historiographical texts as well as fiction, cinema, and theatre, it argues that representation of these purported regions straddled fact and fiction, as well as high and popular culture. British images of the Balkans and/or Ruritania reflected both shifts in literary currents and modes, and changes in Britain’s relationship to Europe and the world as a whole.

On the Waterfront (1954) offers a particularly interesting case study of both film and music in the 1950s. Elia Kazan’s iconic depiction of waterfront corruption in Hoboken, New Jersey is revered for its neorealist cinematic techniques, masterclass in method acting, and concern for the collective plight of blue-collar longshoremen, but is perhaps best remembered as a classic story of one man’s tragic fall and ultimate redemption through the love of a woman. Concerned that the film lacked sufficient ‘star power’ for success at the box office, independent film producer Sam Spiegel eventually convinced Leonard Bernstein to compose what would be his first and only film score. This chapter argues that Bernstein’s music interacts with the film’s narrative in a way that is not only remarkable for one’s first score, but also represents an important contribution to 1950s cinema, employing textures and influencing composers who are still with us today.

Pirandello is one of the most famous and important cultural figures of Italian modernism, and his work is deeply invested in responding to the rapidly changing forces of modernization. This chapter examines his complex relationship with modernity through a comparison to the Italian avant-garde movement of Futurism: Where the Futurists were focused on using their cultural production to usher in and intensify processes of technological modernization, Pirandello’s stance is more complex and ambivalent. The chapter thus traces their responses to a shared set of cultural conditions, spanning from a shared rejection of scientific materialism and positivism to engagement with new models of sociology, psychology, and philosophy, and finally considers their divergent views of cinema and the promise of technology to transform the future.

Introduced in the 1890s, cinema became a vital part of the culture to which Pirandello devoted his career. While he engaged to some extent with cinematic practice in promoting his works for adaptation or writing a screenplay from his Six Characters in Search of an Author, his relation to the medium lies predominantly in the conceptual affinities between cinema as a unique and pervasive means of expression and his philosophical outlook as theorized in the essay On Humor, the blueprint of his poetics. Describing an author’s disposition and its ensuing literary technique, “humor” is a conceptual model according to which the reliance on reason in attaining truth leads to an interpretation of experience in multiple, coexisting, and conflicting illusory constructs. This chapter examines Pirandello’s response to cinema’s aesthetic possibilities, which is evident in some of the short stories he recommended for adaptation and in the novel Shoot! and his screenplay from Six Characters, a metafictional inquiry into artistic creation whose protagonist and actor in that role would have been Pirandello himself.

Chapter 2 asks how one constructs a tradition and transforms an available genre in the absence of one’s own. An essay on the flower “jasmine,” triggered by a remark that in the tropics one did not know what the daffodils in Wordsworth’s heavily anthologized poem meant, is the starting point of this chapter. How to connect language to thought and how to reconcile a language with an absent tradition takes Naipaul to a search for an appropriate genre that would function as creative structural plinths to his Trinidadian social comedies. At Oxford he had translated the picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes but had failed to find a publisher for it. Now he turns to the picaresque genre and its more immediate expressions in Joyce and Steinbeck as a vehicle for his representation of an essentially Trinidadian picaroon society. In the act, Naipaul consciously deconstructs the regulatory nature of the law of genre with its very opposite, its tendency towards disorder. The chapter examines Naipaul’s early works beginning with Miguel Street (1959), his first written work albeit third published, as well as the cinematic adaptation of The Mystic Masseur.

This chapter takes up the literary reverberations of two types of photography – still and moving – in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The invention and popularization of still photography in the nineteenth century posed a challenge to all existing forms of representation, visual or otherwise: Whereas earlier forms offered necessarily imperfect, inexact, and approximate renderings of depicted subjects, the detached “camera eye” promised total transparency, accuracy, and objectivity. With the invention of silent film and, later, talkies, the camera extended its dominion of objective representation into further dimensions and modalities. Carver reads work by William Empson, William James, W. H. Auden and others to argue that cameras served “not only to make the visible world familiar, as early inventors hoped they might do, but also to make it strange.”

The essay film in the United States has not been thoroughly investigated, even if it has existed in the US cinematic landscape from the earliest years throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Beginning with early theories of the essay film that emerged from Europe, the chapter explores the relationships between American essay film and bordering forms like documentary, art film, and experimental cinema. The final pages of the chapter analyze the contributions of filmmakers belonging to the LA Rebellion and influenced by Third Cinema and conclude with a mention of newer forms like the video essay and desktop documentary.

This chapter provides a partner to Vivien Gardners examination of theatre-going in Chapter 4. It examines the social and economic context of wartime theatre production, considering the ways in which the conflict impacted on theatre and shaped what could and could not be performed. It covers the practicalities of theatre-making during the war considering the enlistment of actors, touring patterns, the repertory system, censorship, military tribunals, and air raids. It positions the war as a period of change, whether in terms of the growth of cinema, the increasing role of women, changing sexual mores, or changing audiences. It shows how managers responded to this change in order to keep their businesses afloat, for example with the introduction of twice-nightly performances. The chapter also emphasises the importance of understanding the value of ‘feel-good’ entertainment, and shows how the interweaving of ‘new drama’ and multi-mode, popular entertainment on the touring circuits was designed to satisfy audience demand. In highlighting the ways in which the constraints of war determined both the format and content of theatrical production this chapter provides an important framework through which to read subsequent chapters.

This chapter considers recent trends in Puccini staging and direction. It notes that Puccini productions have tended to be ‘safe’ compared with the works of composers such as Wagner, inviting audiences to sit back and enjoy rather than sit back and pay attention: Regieoper has tended to avoid Puccini. Recently, however, Puccini’s operas have been subjected to some more unusual and innovative directorial treatment, in productions that are designed to speak to an audience viewing in cinemas and at home as much as in the theatre. Three productions are discussed as case studies. The first is Richard Jones’s 2007 Covent Garden production of Gianni Schicchi, situated in a kitschily decorated mid-twentieth-century British working-class home. The second is Stefan Herheim’s bleak, resolutely unsentimental 2012 La bohème for the Norwegian National Opera, which flips between a contemporary cancer ward and flashbacks using nineteenth-century-style sets long used at the same theatre. The third is Christophe Honoré’s 2019 production of Tosca for Aix-en-Provence, which also intermingles past and present productions, making intertextual reference to the opera’s earlier performance history.

This chapter examines Puccini’s relationship with early film. The composer’s career coincided with nearly the first thirty years of the cinematic art form, and it was a form of technology with which Puccini had an ambivalent relationship. The chapter begins with an account of Puccini’s known thoughts about film and cinema going. There follows an extensive discussion of Puccini’s and Ricordi’s legal efforts to prevent the use of his music as film accompaniment, and of the difficulty in recouping royalties. By the 1920s, however, Ricordi was including a clause about film usage in opera contracts, including that for Turandot. From the 1930s, with the arrival of the ‘talkies’, commercial opportunities became apparent and the company pursued a more liberal course. The chapter also considers how Puccini’s operas were brought to the screen during his lifetime and shortly after – there was a particular vogue for Tosca films – and discusses the ways in which the composer’s works might be considered ‘cinematic’.

Iran pursued many secular reforms during the interwar years. From revamping its educational system to dictating new modes of dress, including unveiling, the first Pahlavi state pushed through sometimes controversial changes that fueled opposition and dissent. America expanded its involvement in Iran’s cultural affairs as these transformations were taking place. Iran celebrated its pre-Islamic past and invited American and other Orientalists to participate in such programs. As American missionary influence in Iran declined, American scholars and diplomats instead became more actively involved in Iranian cultural and educational affairs.

War intensifies conceptions of national identity, generating unifying models of ‘us’ that can be set against configurations of the enemy ‘other’. As enemies change, so too does the model of the nation that confronts them. Yet, while the nation at war is necessarily protean, the pressure to articulate it as a coherent entity increases. This chapter uses the Second World War as a case study of war’s capacity to reimagine the nation and to generate coercive models of belonging and exclusion. Exploring both British film culture and the writing of cooperation and complaint, the chapter draws on diverse examples to map the mutation of the national ideal from a mythological ‘village England’ to an imagined future for a new generation. This transition from the spatial to the temporal encapsulates the difficulty of finding common ‘national’ ground and viable discourses of patriotism in the aftermath of the First World War.

Tracing the many differences made to literary and artistic production more generally by photography, photomechanical reproduction, and cinema, this chapter considers some exemplary cases in the history of the visual arts in America. Considering Alvin Langdon Coburn’s work with Henry James and Ezra Pound, it ponders how canny this photographer was in promoting the photographic arts in relation to the existing pantheon of the arts. Turning to look at the photomechanical mediation of the news, it wonders what difference it made to see mass-reproduced photographic illustrations on a daily basis, and consider it newsworthy – what this change augured for the way writers and artists understood reality itself. Josep Renau’s photomontage work is examined as one example; the work of John Dos Passos another; the photo-essay form yet another. The chapter concludes with a survey of cinematic means of representation and their disintegrative effect on older aesthetic notions of unity, organicism, and consistency.