Plays and fragments: Antigone, film, modernity

Within the history of modernity, the tragic shape and ethical concerns of the Antigone myth have made it a touchstone for understanding contemporary cultural and political realities. This essay traces the modernist processes of adaptation, citation, displacement, and revision that have often characterised the relations between filmmakers and this phenomenon. Focussing on those films that subvert the authority of narrative realism and the rules of conventional – ‘classical’ – film language, it traces how particular social contexts and commitments have inevitably constructed different images of Antigone – how the Antigones that emerge in early or ‘silent’ cinema, for example, compare with those from other film and media forms, including television, video and installation art works.