Filmic retellings of myth delight in playing games with the audience in terms of time and space. Film editing means that the audience can be transported effortlessly between mortal and divine worlds. In the Harryhausen films the physical demarcation of mortal/immortal space is more clearly defined. The gods are not omnipresent; they choose specific moments to examine (and sometimes interact with) mortals and therefore utilize a viewing portal over the mortal world. In Jason and the Argonauts, for example, it is a pool of water which serves as this viewing screen: Zeus and Hera are both seen gazing into the blue waters of the pool which shows them the action of their chosen hero on earth. In effect the audience sees the action from the gods’ point of view. But the audience is privileged in another way too, since they can observe the gods in action (without the gods’ knowledge) and thereby delight in the knowledge of the gods’ divine plans and machinations before the mortal on-screen heroes do. The cinema audience therefore has the ability both to eavesdrop on the gods and to witness the events of the story from their vantage point.
Similarly, the audience’s conception of time can be stretched and twisted. This is a strong feature of the myth movies, but not of Greek epic tradition per se. While Homer continually establishes temporal connections to unite his poems to the world in which his culture is rooted, concepts of external time and inner time do not exist for him; only physical time matters. He looks only at what happens outside in the bright, visible, concrete, unique, and real world; the notion of abstract time does not occur to him. There is no reference, therefore, to an immortal time, or to a time lapse between the world of the gods and the world of men. The gods, immortal beings, ageless though they might be, do not operate within a separate time sphere; they share the same timescale as men.
In contrast the cinema has been obsessed with distorting time and rendering it convoluted, and cinema’s tricks with time have become an accepted convention: the movies have trained their viewers to follow the most contorted temporal patterns with such ease that it seems ‘‘natural,’’ and even the most routine films skip back and forth between narrative worlds (cross-cutting), and elongate or compress specific moments or even repeat incidents, sometimes from multiple perspectives. The dimension of time is important in any cinematic structure, and even some pop-culture films exploit cinema’s ability to conjure with time with great box-office success. Movies such as Back to the Future (dir. Zemeckis, 1985), Terminator-2 (dir. Cameron, 1984), and Peggy Sue Got Married (dir. Ford Coppola, 1986) effectively play with cinema’s ability to juggle conceptions of time and space.
The myth movies capitalize on the filmic twists of time to great narrative advantage, and one which highlights, moreover, the divergence between man and god. The idea of two parallel timescales running in opposition is highlighted towards the beginning of Jason and the Argonauts. Having appeared (in mortal guise) to King Pelias, and having pronounced his future overthrow by ‘‘a man with one sandal,’’ Hera returns to Olympus where she is chastised by Zeus for interfering with the affairs of mortals. She insists that her patronage is just, and declares:
It will be twenty years before Jason becomes a man. Oh, an instant of time here on Mount Olympus, but a long twenty years for king Pelias [she gazes through the pool of water at Pelias on horseback]. He cautiously travels the roads of Thessaly. Yes, Pelias, you have had years of watching and waiting for the one who must come to kill you. The man with one sandal.
Thus within a minute of on-screen ‘‘real time’’ in Olympus, twenty years fly by for the mortal protagonists of the movie. The same convention is used in The Clash of the Titans, as the voices of the gods are heard in conversation, an on-screen montage shows Perseus growing to his maturity - first as a toddler walking hand in hand with his mother on the sea shore, then as a young boy running and playing, finally as a young man galloping in horseback over the same shoreline. The time it takes Perseus to reach manhood (twenty years it would seem, like Jason) is encompassed within the time span of one brief Olympian tete-a-tete.
This incongruity in time helps explain the fleeting nature of the gods’ interest in mankind: a lifetime’s mortal toil is a moment’s passing among the Olympians. At best prayer is a minor distraction for the gods. This explains Jason’s lament, ‘‘The gods will not answer those who believe, why should they answer me, who doesn’t?’’
World History
