The ancients have had an even greater impact onscreen. Adaptations of classical myth and theatre have built a pervasive image of “the ancient world” that is as much a product of imaginative Hollywood production design as it is a recovery of the remains of Greece and Rome. For many, the cinema provided their first and most lasting visual encounter with the ancient world, so a study of the visual vocabulary of cinematic representation is essential for twentieth-century classical reception. 

Cinema’s obsession with classical texts has continued in the twenty-first century with a broad interest in using mythology as a vehicle to dramatise the progression of cinema’s technical possibilities. Contemporary cinema, as much as any chapter in art history, is keen to find and push its own limits of representation, and our oldest stories have been the preferred way to demonstrate the spectacle enabled by our newest technologies. 

In addition to films that overtly deal with antiquity, there is also a cinematic tradition of filmmaking that has a different kind of recourse to the classics. Outside of Hollywood, the classics have served as a common platform to excavate contemporary life. For example, Italian auteurs Fellini, Antonioni and Pasolini use montage that mimics the fragmentation of incomplete classical texts to dramatize the fragmented nature of human relationships. 

The expansion of interest in classical reception and the burgeoning growth of the academic study of film continue to necessitate further consideration of the evolving relationship between these two disciplines.