Greek Myth on the Screen

Abstract

Since Georges Melies made Pygmalion et Galathee ( Pygmalion and Galatea ) in 1898, Greek mythology has afforded filmmakers endless opportunities to display their medium to great public success, if at varying levels of artistic achievement. From short films such as those of Melies at the dawn of cinema to gigantic widescreen and color epics, films set in ancient Greece and Rome have proven most durable for their sheer appeal as spectacles. Critics and historians have come to call them peplums or pepla after peplum , the Latin equivalent of the Greek word peplos (“mantle, cloak ”). But Germans and Italians tend to use an expression that characterizes most of these films even better: Kolossalfilm or il kolossal . Colossal visual pleasures unfolding in splendid if fake-classical architecture and involving invincible heroes, scheming villains, pretty damsels, wily seductresses, and menacing monsters had not been this easily available before. Cinema and its offspring, television, have proven the most fertile ground for reimagining and reinventing antiquity, not least by means of increasing technological wizardry such as computergenerated images. Long-running television series such as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and its spin-off, Xena: Warrior Princess , animated Disney films such as John Musker and Ron Clements’s Hercules (1997) and its sequels, and big-screen extravaganzas such as Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004) all attest to our continuing fascination with ancient myth.