Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical basis on which the following chapters build and defines adaptations of literature to cinema, television, and other screens as cinemetamorphoses, an allusion to the title of Ovid’s most famous work. Scholars distinguish between foreground and background Ovidianism: the former indicates intentional, the latter unconscious or not immediately obvious affinities between a work or passage by Ovid and allusions to, or echoes of, this source in later literature or the visual arts. Sergei Eisenstein, the great Russian filmmaker and theoretician of cinema, coined the expression montage of attractions for one of the creative principles of film editing; in the present book, his term is applied in an expanded sense: that of indicating the affinities, either close or loose, between Ovid’s works and films based on or taking up various topics, characters, plot situations, and additional aspects, primarily from famous myths in his Metamorphoses, to which Ovid has given definitive shape. A Roman marble relief showing Hermes, Orpheus, and Eurydice illustrates the close ties between text and image through a classical visual work of art. This chapter also provides a preview of the following chapters’ contents. Finally, Chapter 1 gives examples of the kind of background Ovidianism largely excluded from this book.

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?