This chapter prepares the ground for everything that follows. With the advent of photography, ways of seeing static images from earlier eras (paintings, statues, etc.) radically changed. Cinematography further increased, even complicated, traditional understandings of the past in both text and image. New ways of interpreting and appreciating Greek and Roman culture, too, are thus called for. Terms like Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematism and Pierre Francastel’s pre-cinema point to such new ways of approaching arts and literature from the vantage point of our technological media, which show sequences of static images that appear to be moving. Since the era of silent film, numerous directors have expressed the close connections of their medium with antiquity, among them Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, Manoel de Oliveira, Theodoros Angelopoulos, and Eisenstein himself. The chapter also addresses the question of how faithful modern screen versions should or could be to their sources.

The next two chapters deal with key aspects of direct and indirect Ovidianism in film history. Chapter 3 details a particular moment, both Ovidian and cinematic, in the artistic development of Gabriele D’Annunzio, once Italy’s pre-eminent writer, and its far-ranging repercussions for D’Annunzio and all of film history. D’Annunzio saw himself as an artistic and spiritual descendent of Ovid. His poems, especially Alcyone, provide ample evidence. Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel tree in the Metamorphoses prompted D’Annunzio to abandon his earlier disdain for the new medium of cinema and to make film history himself: in his practical involvement with several productions and in regard to the origins of film stardom. D’Annunzio became one of the first formulators of film theory, perhaps the first ever. This chapter also addresses the Ovidian nature of a pre-cinematic apparatus such as the thaumatrope and the impulse that American educators received from early cinema and D’Annunzio. None of this would have occurred the way it did without Ovid in the background.