The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries: Epic Film

Abstract

With the popularity of the word as a simple adjective of scale at the end of the twentieth century, the term ‘epic’ has been applied loosely in cinema to describe films of either great duration or spectacular effects or both. The epic film, however, is more than just a blockbuster and, although we will investigate the links between the special effects blockbuster and the epic film, we will be concerned in this chapter with tracing the fortunes of that genre of film that has come to be referred to as epic and with establishing what characteristics accrued to this genre. We will also keep in mind the question of how epic film relates to the literary tradition whose name it borrows.