Adaptation - current issue

Playgrounds of Unlimited Potential: Adaptation, Documentary, and Dogtown and Z-Boys

Johnson, D. T. — 2009-02-20

This article begins with the question, what does it mean to adapt in the realm of documentary? Noting at the outset commentary on this issue from Dudley Andrew and Walter Metz, the essay explores the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, a film about the resurgence of popularity of skateboarding in the United States in the mid-1970s—largely, the film argues, through the "Z-Boys," a group of kids who, in attempting to imitate their surfing heroes, substituted the curves of asphalt for those of breaking waves. The central archivist of this period was an artist and photographer named Craig Stecyk, whose "Dogtown articles," in the recently revived Skateboarder magazine, helped celebrate and promote the Z-Boys's style of skateboarding. It is this essay's contention that Dogtown and Z-Boys is an adaptation of Stecyk's writing and, more importantly, his photographs—and that while neither constitute the only source texts, they are nonetheless central to this adaptation. After establishing its focus, the article discusses Stecyk's background and aesthetics and compares his work to Modernist street photography (notably, the Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo). The article then traces some explicit connections to Stecyk within the film—places where he is, in fact, the direct subject—before illustrating some even more important implicit connections between Stecyk's work and the documentary. Finally, after positing that a traditional adaptation studies approach might have to end at this stage (but also suggesting that adaptation studies has an interest in exploring new areas), the essay considers a notoriously difficult concept in cinema studies, excess, and how approaching documentary as an adaptation might inform critical discussions of that concept. The article ends by suggesting, in fact, that documentary studies and adaptation studies, normally discrete areas of cinema studies, might have more to offer one another than has in the past been the case.

'All the Rest Is Propaganda:' Reading the Paratexts of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Brookes, I. — 2009-02-20

Looking at two early editions of Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, we encounter what looks like two different books. One is the novel's first edition, published in hardback in 1958; the other is the first paperback edition, published in 1960 by Pan as a film tie-in. The literary text inside the covers is in each case the same: what is outside is different. The literary text is presented with certain accompanying productions which constitute what Gérard Genette has termed the ‘paratext’. Such productions include the book's title, its cover, the ‘blurb’ and all the paraphernalia surrounding the text itself. The paratext also includes material surrounding the literary text—such as reviews, interviews, posters, advertisements—which are not materially attached to the text. In both cases, the paratext provides what Genette calls ‘thresholds’ to the text which work to ‘frame’ our experience of it. In this essay I examine the paratexts of these two editions of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to ascertain how and why they assumed their different ‘frames’. Although we traditionally study the literary text itself as the primary focus of investigation, what do we find if we shift our attention to the perimeters of that text? What was happening between 1958 and 1960 to make the same text appear so different? How did the film contribute to the paratextual reconstitution of the paperback, and vice versa?

Cranford, Popular Culture, and the Politics of Adapting the Victorian Novel for Television

Louttit, C. — 2009-02-20

This essay analyses recent trends and patterns in television adaptations of the Victorian novel since about 2005. Focusing closely on Andrew Davies's Bleak House (2005) and Heidi Thomas's Cranford (2007) it reads them alongside wider political, social and economic forces at work in the New Labour period. It argues that, much like the Blairite administration and other refashionings of British culture and heritage at this time, these adaptations seem on the surface to be quite innovative. In other, deeper ways, however, they show continuities with earlier more traditional examples of costume drama, and are quite conservative both in their politics and in their approach to the genre.

Not Fade Away: Adapting History and Trauma in Laszlo Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance and Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies

Hodgkins, J. — 2009-02-20

In his 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance, Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai deploys postmodernist techniques to relate the tale of a small Hungarian town that falls briefly under the spell of a mysterious circus performer known as The Prince, only to have that spell broken in brutal fashion by a newly reconstituted town government. While many have interpreted the novel simply as a fable addressing humankind’s frailties and susceptibility to manipulation, I propose to read the text in a new way: as an allusive and slyly allegorical attempt to contend with the twin specters haunting modern Hungarian history, those being complicity with Nazi Germany during World War II and the subsequent capitulation to/collaboration with the Soviet Union. Through suggestive and symbolically freighted language, Krasznahorkai is able to reflect on these "unrepresentable" traumas and begin the process of healing Hungary's psychic scars. Filmmaker Béla Tarr, in his 2000 cinematic adaptation of the novel entitled Werckmeister Harmonies, continues the process begun by Krasznahorkai, concentrating in particular on the role played by Hungary in the Holocaust. Infusing Krasznahorkai's story with the kind of visceral and affective impact only film can provide, Tarr takes another step toward the "mourning work" necessary for Hungary to overcome its past and move into the future free from history's debilitating effects.

Evelyn Piper's Bunny Lake Is Missing (1957): Adaptation, Feminism, and the Politics of the 'Progressive Text'

Sonnet, E. — 2009-02-20

In 2004, the Feminist Press (CU, New York) selected Evelyn Piper's 1957 novel Bunny Lake is Missing to be part of a series of reissues entitled ‘Femme Fatales: Women Write Pulp’. Piper's best-selling novel was chosen for its place in a lost or forgotten tradition of ‘queens of pulp’. This essay explores what it means for historical pulp fiction written by women to offer the contemporary reader ‘subversive perspectives on the heart of the American century’. Exploring first the feminist reclamation of pulp fiction, a detailed analysis is made of the cultural valency of Piper's narrative of a single mother's desperate search for her missing child. Exploring the ‘conspiracy of disbelief’ that Piper's female protagonist confronts when her child's existence is constructed as delusional, the matter of how a ‘transgressive’ popular fiction—that positions a woman as its active agent—is adapted for the screen is raised through comparison with Otto Preminger's 1965 cinematic adaptation of Bunny Lake is Missing. In its original written form, the subject is a potent one for exposing the ideologically disruptive figure of the unstable single mother within the patriarchal confines of 50s urban America while Preminger's film might be read as a repudiation of the political value to feminism of the ‘progressive popular text’.

Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Numbers 1.1, 1.2 (Intellect), Richard J. Hand and Katja Krebs, eds

Palmer, R B. — 2009-02-20