Adaptation - recent issues

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

A Necessary Signifier: The Adaptation of Robinson's Body-image in 'The Jackie Robinson Story'

Raengo, A. — 2008-08-27

The essay singles out The Jackie Robinson Story, as an iconophiliac adaptation driven by the authorizing and authenticating presence of Robinson's body on screen, which functions as both the ‘source material’ and its ‘adaptation’. It argues that the film needs to be appreciated within a larger nexus of texts indicated as ‘The Jackie Robinson Story,’ revealing a larger process of embodiment of the integration drama grafted onto Robinson’s body-image in the years preceding and following the release of the film. Read in the context of Robinson’s presence in post World War II visual culture as emblem of the successful realization of its color blind utopias, ‘The Jackie Robinson Story’ appears to participate in the process of visual accommodation that brought the assimilationist imagination to elect Robinson’s body as the signifier of yet another adaptation process: the incarnated visuality of the integration drama itself.

Adaptation, the Genre

Leitch, T. — 2008-08-27

Instead of considering film and television adaptations in the context of the source texts they are adapting, this essay proposes another context for their reception and analysis: the genre of adaptation itself. Focusing on the Hollywood traditions of masculine adventure and feminine romance associated respectively with adaptations of Alexandre Dumas père and fils, it identifies four genre markers common to both traditions that make it more likely a given adaptation will be perceived as an adaptation even by an audience that does not know its source, and one anti-marker associated with adaptations in the tradition of the younger Dumas but not the elder. The essay concludes by proposing adaptation as a model for all Hollywood genres.

'Humanity must perforce prey upon itself like monsters of the deep': King Lear and the Urban Gangster Movie

Griggs, Y. — 2008-08-27

Since the 1940s there has been an ongoing and fertile intertextual relationship between cinema's popular gangster genre and the ‘high art’ works of Shakespeare. However, whilst consideration of films that lend a gangster twist to Macbeth and Richard III have become part of the critical landscape, little work has been undertaken in relation to the cinematic appropriation of King Lear as gangster movie, despite its thematic and ideological parallels with a certain type of gangster film. This article examines the textual transactions taking place between Shakespeare's King Lear and the gangster genre; it explores not only the ways in which Lear's story is shaped in accordance with the cinematic codes and conventions of the gangster genre, but how the gangster genre has evolved in response to the mythical Lear narrative.

Hamlet Smokes Prince: 101 Reykjavik on Page and Screen

Hopkins, L. — 2008-08-27

Hallgrímur Helgason's novel 101 Reykjavik, first published in 1996, was made into a film directed by Baltasar Kormákur in 2000 and subsequently translated into English by Brian Fitzgibbon. In one sense, both novel and film are adaptations, in that while the film is clearly based on the novel, the novel in turn insistently patterns itself on Shakespeare's Hamlet, with one of its central jokes being that its hero, unemployed 33-year-old Icelander Hlynur Björn Hafsteinsson, is both extraordinarily like Hamlet in temperament and situation and yet, in a way that the novel itself presents as part of the essence of Hamletism, also so self-obsessed that he refuses to register open awareness of the fact. Instead, he drifts through a series of Hamletesque situations thinking only of how they affect himself, without ever registering either that others are also involved or that his ‘self’ is in fact constructed and conditioned by external powers and precedents. By the end of the book, however, it is clear that Hamletism is not, as it was for Chekhov, a badge of doom, but actually a condition which can be outgrown and survived, as Hlynur Björn finally starts to take an interest in someone other than himself, his infant son/brother.

FILM REVIEW: Atonement--The Surface of Things

Childs, P. P. — 2008-08-27

Introduction to Adaptation

Cartmell, D., Corrigan, T., Whelehan, I. — 2008-03-01

Phantom adaptations: Eucalyptus, the adaptation industry and the film that never was

Murray, S. — 2008-03-01

Since the 1950s, adaptation studies has almost invariably adopted a methodology of comparative textual analysis. This has obscured an alternative method for analysing adaptations derived from sociology and political economy disciplines. Such an alternative approach focuses not upon individual texts but upon the adaptation industry as a whole: the institutional, commercial and legal machinery through which book-screen adaptations move on their way from author to audience. This article adopts such a political economic methodology to analyse the ill-fated 2005 film adaptation of Australian author Murray Bail's prize-winning novel Eucalyptus (1998). The scuppering of the Eucalyptus film project in acrimonious circumstances just days before shooting was due to commence throws light upon complex issues of how to cultivate national culture in an adaptation industry based around globalized English-language flows. Moreover, the fact that there is no film for adaptation scholars to compare with Bail's novel directs overdue critical attention to the mechanics of the adaptation industry itself and the factors which facilitate or—in this case—stymie the production of book-to-screen adaptations.

Gothic--Film--Parody

Elliott, K. — 2008-03-01

Gothic, film, and parody are all erstwhile devalued aesthetic forms recuperated by various late twentieth-century humanities theories, serving in return as proof-texts for these theories in their battles against formalism, high-art humanism, and right-wing politics. Gothic film parodies parody these theories as well as Gothic fiction and films. As they redouble Gothic doubles, refake Gothic fakeries, and critique Gothic criticism, they go beyond simple mockery to reveal inconsistencies, incongruities, and problems in Gothic criticism: boundaries that it has been unwilling or unable to blur; binary oppositions it has refused to deconstruct, like those between left- and right-wing politics; and points at which a radical, innovative, subversive discourse manifests as its own hegemonic, dogmatic, and clichéd double, as in critical manipulations of Gothic (dis)belief. The discussion engages Gothic film parodies spanning a range of decades (from the 1930s to the 2000s) and genres (from feature films to cartoons to pornographic parodies).

Team Films in Adaptation: Remembered Stories and Forgotten Books

Strong, J. — 2008-03-01

This article identifies common features of a neglected formula, the team film, in which the films invariably overtake the sourcetexts as the dominant form. Surveying adaptations, such as The Great Escape, The Italian Job, The Professionals and The First Great Train Robbery, the article demonstrates how in the team film, particular textual elements are consistently used, re-used and modified in a fashion akin to genre.

Becoming literary, becoming historical: the scale of female authorship in Becoming Jane

Burt, R. — 2008-03-01

Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads

Leitch, T. — 2008-03-01