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Chapter 7 - Varieties of Modernism: Orpheus and Eurydice

from Part IV - Love, Seduction, Death

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2020

Martin M. Winkler
Martin M. Winkler
Affiliation:
George Mason University, Virginia
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Summary

Chapter 7 introduces a new topic, dealt with in three chapters: Ovid as author of erotic literature. Love and seduction, love and death are the two overarching themes. Chapter 7 is on one of Ovid’s most famous tale: the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. An overview of its pervasive presence on screen introduces the chapter, which then examines two postmodern variations in greater detail. Both are modernizations. Helmut Dietl’s film Vom Suchen und Finden der Liebe (its English-release title is rather clumsy: “About the Looking for and the Finding of Love”) is a witty but also bittersweet and partly supernatural retelling of a couple’s doomed love. In a striking role reversal the man dies, and the woman attempts to get him back from the Underworld. By contrast, American writer-director Paul Auster’s The Inner Life of Martin Frost presents a complex narrative with various twists and an indeterminate, if haunting, ending. If, in Dietl’s film, love may (or may not) conquer all, does it even exist in Auster’s?

Keywords

eroticism on screenOrpheus and EurydicepostmodernismVom Suchen und Finden der Liebe (“About the Looking for and the Finding of Love”)The Inner Life of Martin Frost
Type
Chapter
Information
Ovid on Screen
A Montage of Attractions
 , pp. 253 - 270
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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