Critic Argues Silent Cinema, Not Christopher Nolan, Best Suits Homer's Odyssey

Key facts

• Christopher Nolan's three-hour adaptation of Homer's Odyssey has provoked a range of opinion, including condemnation by Emily Wilson, whose 2017 translation of the epic has enjoyed a surge in sales.
• The essay argues that The Odyssey would play more strongly as a 1920s silent film, citing Rudolf Arnheim's 1957 study Film as Art on silent cinema's formal purity.
• Fritz Lang's 1924 Die Nibelungen, co-authored by Thea von Harbou, is a five-hour, two-part silent film praised for its synthetic dragon, misted forest, absence of speech and color, and hieratic grandeur.
• Die Nibelungen's visual vocabulary draws on Arnold Böcklin, Caspar David Friedrich, Gustav Klimt, and the Bauhaus, with a symphonic score by Gottfried Huppertz.
• Siegfried Kracauer in 1947 influentially found in Die Nibelungen foreshadowings of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.
• Ludwig Goransson's score for Nolan's Odyssey deploys 35 bronze gongs, scrap metal, synthesizers, and reconstructions of the lyre and aulos, which the author calls generic pseudo-music.
• Jean Sibelius's Four Legends from the Kalevala (1896) is cited as a model of bardic symphonic grandeur, with 'The Swan of Tuonela' rendering the island of the dead.
• A 2012 restoration of Die Nibelungen with Huppertz's score newly recorded by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony is readily available.