Adaptation - Advance Access

Star Trek

Hark, I. R. — 2009-06-30

Adapting Lesbians: Maria Maggenti and the Practice of Lesbian Screenwriting

Hankin, K. — 2009-06-11

Since the mid-nineties, feminist film scholars have increasingly paid scholarly attention to lesbian directors of independent and commercial cinema. The same has not been true for lesbian screenwriters. Given that more women write than direct, their inclusion in feminist film scholarship is long overdue. This essay initiates a discussion about the idea and the possibilities of lesbian screenwriting through an examination of the commercial film The Love Letter (Peter Ho-sun Chan, 1999). Adapted by screenwriter Maria Maggenti from the 1995 book by novelist and literary critic Cathleen Schine, The Love Letter not only retains its lesbian characters but also accentuates their roles, making lesbianism more present in the narrative and more central to its meaning than in the book. Reading the film's use of lesbianism against the novel facilitates a discussion about how the practice of lesbian screenwriting informs not only the adaptation process but also the meaning a film generates.

Jane Austen on Screen--Overlapping Dialogues, Different Takes

Church Gibson, P. — 2009-02-25

This article examines some of the recent essay collections devoted to cinematic and televisual adaptations of Jane Austen's novels, locating them within the ‘Austen on Screen’ discipline. It argues that the area would benefit from more interdisciplinary scholarship as exemplified in one of the particular collections under review. For this reason, the reviewing of the texts is not done in chronological order, so that the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach—and perhaps the difficulties created by a narrow, over-literary approach to Austen adaptations—can be appreciated.

"Ca, c'est moi": The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as Autobiographical Multitext

Heidt, S. J. — 2009-02-13

This essay analyzes Jean-Dominique Bauby’s 1997 memoir of his experience with Locked-In Syndrome and Julian Schnabel’s 2007 film adaptation of that memoir as elements of a Diving Bell and the Butterfly multitext, a multigeneric and multiauthored life narrative that has developed through several now-synchronous and vitally interdependent incarnations. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly offers a particularly vivid work through which to inaugurate a multitextual approach to film adaptations of memoirs and autobiographies: in their central figure and their creative processes, both memoir and film foreground the interpersonally produced and transformative dynamics of self-representational works. Bauby’s canny sense of himself as a figure of mutability permeates and animates his memoir; that memoir, in turn, has brought documentary filmmaker Jean-Jacques Beineix (whose Bauby documentary I discuss briefly) and director Julian Schnabel into very different kinds of communion with Bauby’s text and experience. Schnabel, in particular, has directed the creation of a film (and an autobiographical hero) that often portrays his own autobiographical desires as evocatively as Bauby's experiences. Film adaptations of first-person life writings have received almost no attention from scholars of adaptation. To begin to address this gap in adaptation studies and to understand more fully an increasingly important element of contemporary autobiographical culture, we need to consider what it means for a film's creators to adapt not a fictional text or an extratextual ‘true story’ but a self-textualizing life narrative—and what it means for an actor to claim ‘ça, c’est moi’ on behalf of the subject he embodies.