Every generation, cinema comes back to the Odyssey — and every time it chooses, out of twenty-four books, a trial of its own. What a director leaves overboard shows what aches in his time. Let us compare the eight great voyages of the screen — above all the one filmed by Andrei Konchalovsky.
Konchalovsky’s Odyssey (1997): pride and the sea
The two-part television film Andrei Konchalovsky made for NBC at the suggestion of producer Francis Ford Coppola was, on release, the most expensive TV project in the world, and it gathered tens of millions of viewers before the screen. A Russian director, an American studio, filming in Turkey, Malta and Gozo, music by Eduard Artemyev — the crew itself became an “odyssey” between cultures.
Konchalovsky read the poem above all as a story of pride and its price. The film’s axis is our station “The Cyclops”: having won by wit and named himself Noman, Odysseus cannot hold back and shouts his true name from the ship — and so hands himself over to Poseidon. All the voyage that follows is a school of humility: the hero who proclaims his triumph at the start learns, by the end, to keep silent, to wait, to ask. For the symbolic eye it is almost a textbook case: an outer victory without an inner one turns into ten years of trials.
The second mark is the body and the elements. Konchalovsky’s sea is no scenery but a protagonist: the storms are filmed so that you feel the weight of water. The gods are visible and act outright — Rossellini’s Athena guides, Poseidon pursues; the film keeps the epic’s “divine machinery”, which most adaptations bashfully cut away. And the route is travelled with rare completeness: the horse and the fall of Troy, Polyphemus, the bag of Aeolus’ winds, Circe, the descent to Tiresias, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Calypso, the homecoming, the bow and the reckoning with the suitors — nearly the whole map of our journey.
What the film has least of is silence: the television format demands events, and the poem’s contemplative layers (the tale before the Phaeacians as a reckoning with one’s way, the “untold” depth) yield to action. Yet the lesson it carries is Homer’s own: man is small before the elements — and stubborn all the same; what saves him is not strength, but faithfulness to home and the power to humble himself.
Eight voyages of the screen
| Film | What it is | At the centre | What Ithaca means in it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ulysses (1954, M. Camerini; Kirk Douglas) | A classic peplum; Silvana Mangano plays both Penelope and Circe | Oblivion: Odysseus loses his memory — and remembers himself | To remember who you are is already to return |
| The Odyssey (1968, F. Rossi; Bekim Fehmiu) | An Italian television novel in eight parts; connoisseurs call it the screen version truest to the poem’s spirit | The epic itself: the unhurried pace, the bard, Homer’s word | Home as the measure of all things |
| Ulysses 31 (1981, J. Chalopin; DiC · TMS) | A French-Japanese animated series: the Odyssey in the 31st century; a cult opening theme | The gods’ punishment: a crew put to sleep, the way to Earth erased from the star charts | Ithaca is Earth, seen only in dreams |
| Ulysses’ Gaze (1995, T. Angelopoulos; Harvey Keitel) | Contemplative art cinema: a director searches the Balkans of the 90s for three undeveloped reels of the Manakis brothers | Wandering as the search for the first, “innocent” gaze | Ithaca is the lost purity of seeing; the way matters more than the arrival |
| The Odyssey (1997, A. Konchalovsky; Armand Assante) | A two-part NBC television epic; two Emmys; the poem’s full route | Pride and its price; man against the elements | A home to be earned by humility — and won back |
| O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000, the Coen brothers; George Clooney) | A free retelling: 1930s America, escaped convicts, bluegrass | Irony: a small man in Odyssean straits — sirens, a cyclops, “Penny” | The family that even comic heroes come back to |
| The Return (2024, U. Pasolini; Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche) | A chamber drama of Ithaca alone: no gods, no monsters | The wound of the man back from war: will they know you — and will you know yourself? | Ithaca is the people who must learn anew to be near one another |
| The Odyssey (2026, C. Nolan; Matt Damon) | A theatrical epic shot entirely in IMAX; premiered 17 July 2026; Holland as Telemachus, Hathaway as Penelope, Zendaya as Athena | The scale of myth as lived experience: the viewer inside the storm | A fresh premiere — its reading of Ithaca you will name yourself |
Film facts checked against open sources on 21.07.2026; the readings are our own. And a bow to animation behind the screen: the heroine of Miyazaki’s Nausicaä is named after the Phaeacian princess.
The journey’s stations — through directors’ eyes
Our journey runs through twelve stations. Here is the director who served each station best:
Question for the road
Which of the eight readings speaks of you today: the school of humility, memory regained, the search for a pure gaze — or the hard work of being known at home?