Film Adaptation Theory

This study focuses on Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Lionel Shriver's epistolary novel We Need to Talk About Kevin and argues that the film should be seen as an example of feminist horror that subverts and challenges cultural mother myths. It considers the impact of feminist psychoanalytic approaches to horror before exploring the emerging genre of feminist horror films and the revised theoretical approaches to horror that the genre demands. The analysis of We Need to Talk About Kevin centres on the film's feminist representation of motherhood. The film's internal landscape and intimate exploration of Eva's fractured, unreliable memories has wider resonance and acknowledges the simple feminist truth that patriarchy would rather sweep under the carpet: mothers do not always bond with their children.

Second volume of co-edited series (w. Ludovic Cortade) on Literature and Cinema, Film Cultures, Peter Lang Deuxième volume d’une série co-éditée avec Ludovic Cortade dans la collection Film Cultures de Peter Lang sur les relations entre Littérature et Cinéma The operation that consists in assigning to cinema and literature inherent properties, even an ontology, is a spatial operation: it is indeed a question of distinguishing, and often, of opposing, the word and the image, in the manner of Lessing who endeavors to demonstrate in his Laocoon the prevalence of the respective limits of poetry and painting. However, to think the specificity of the literature and the cinema in the measure of the notion of "limit" separating these modes of expression leads to a dead end, so much the image - and later the cinema - inhabits the very process of literary creation. The relationships between literature, cinema and space may be considered in terms, not of border, but of threshold. The limes divides spaces and poses the limit separating the civilization and the territories of the ennemy. In contrast, the limen designates the pivot allowing hospitality, exchanges and dialogue. The limes and the limen allow us to think about the relationship between space, literature and cinema from three perspectives: poetics, aesthetics and geopolitics. L’opération qui consiste à assigner au cinéma et à la littérature des propriétés inhérentes, voire une ontologie, est une opération spatiale: il s’agit bien de distinguer, et souvent, d’opposer, le mot et l’image, à la façon de Lessing qui s’attache à démontrer dans son Laocoon la prégnance des limites respectives de la poésie et de la peinture. Pourtant, penser la spécificité de la littérature et du cinéma à l’aune de la notion de « limite » séparant ces modes d’expression aboutit à une impasse, tant l’image – et plus tard le cinéma – habite le processus même de la création littéraire. Les relations entre la littérature, le cinéma et l’espace se pensent sur le mode, non de la frontière, mais du seuil. Le limes tranche l’espace et pose la limite séparant la civilisation et les territoires ennemis. Par contraste, le limen désigne le pivot permettant l’hospitalité, les échanges et le dialogue. Le limes et le limen permettent de penser les rapports de l’espace, de la littérature et du cinéma selon trois perspectives: la poétique, l’esthétique et la géopolitique. Couverture/Cover : Agnès Varda, La Pointe courte (photographie de 1954). Sommaire/Summary Introduction - Ludovic Cortade & Guillaume Soulez Première partie - Géographies critiques du texte et de l’image 1. Écrire au futur et filmer au passé : la Lune à proximité - Emmanuelle André 2. Geographic Metafiction. Parodying the Spatial Archive in Speculative Literature and Film - Antje Ziethen 3. Espace et posthumanisme: Le Monde sur le fil de R. W. Fassbinder et La Possibilité d’une île de Michel Houellebecq - Carlos Tello 4. For a Spatial Poetics of Ethics - Robert Harvey 5. The Crisis of Anthropocentric Space. Thinking the Politics of the Zone with Andrey Tarkovsky’s Stalker - Jeanne Etelain Deuxième partie - Stratigraphies en mouvement: lacunes et métamorphoses 6. One Down, One Up: Narrativity and Scalar Value - Derek Schilling 7. Du théâtre à la télévision: Alfred Jarry, Jean-Christophe Averty et la (dé)spatialisation du monde - Barbara Laborde 8. The Spatiality of Film and Literature : L’Eden et après and Topologie d’une cité fantôme by Alain Robbe-Grillet - Julia Dettke 9. L’espace de la lecture. Reading and Meaning - Guillaume Soulez 10. Passages de la poésie et du cinéma: pour une perspective géomédiatique à l’ère du numérique - Mathias Kusnierz 11. Entre cercle et boîte: les voyages immobiles d’Olivier Smolders - Philippe Met 12. Espace à conquérir: approches de la rue Vilin par Robert Bober et Georges Perec - Maylis Laureti Troisième partie - Géographies de contact 13. La ville intermédiaire: Nantes, Julien Gracq et Jacques Demy - Marc Cerisuelo 14. Landscape Theory in Post-War Japanese Cinema: Fūkeiron in Adachi Masao’s A. K. A. Serial Killer - Becca Voelcker 15. Une relecture transculturelle de l’espace du roman: de Thérèse Raquin d’Émile Zola à In Secret de Charlie Stratton - Elise Cantiran 16. Politique de la surface: La Noire de... d’Ousmane Sembène - Nicolas Estournel 17. Cartographies du théâtre comme lieu commun: Wajdi Mouawad et Edouard Glissant - Aurélie Chatton 18. De pages en plages: Agnès Varda, Gaston Bachelard et le paysage marin - Nathalie Mauffrey Biographies des contributeurs et éditeurs Index

The Chilean-French avant-garde filmmaker and self-styled spiritual teacher Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film, The Holy Mountain (1973), is often referred to as a ‘surrealistic’ exploration of Western Esotericism, and was a pivotal cinematic moment for what Christopher Partridge (2004, 2005) has termed ‘occulture’. It is often claimed in secondary literature and informally online that the film is based on the unfinished novel Mount Analogue (1952) by Rene Daumal, French writer and follower of the esotericist G.I. Gurdjieff. The Holy Mountain is thus a clear candidate for testing theories about the cultural production of ‘Gurdjieffian’ film adaptations. A closer reading, however, shows that the two texts share few ideological or even structural elements. In the wake of the film’s reception and Jodorowsky’s growing cultural importance, this article maps the congruence of the film to the novel by focusing on the role played by the eponymous mountain as the only invariant symbol in both. Some of the biographical contours of the two artists’ relationship to Gurdjieffian and wider occultural esoteric discourses will also be traced to reveal the pre-critical and largely self referential narrative of the film adaptation in the secondary literature as a species of academic urban legend-making.

The present study looks at the impact of Charles Dickens’ work in early film adaptations, and considers in detail David Aylott’s film The Boy and the Convict (1909). The influence of Charles Dickens’ literature in the evolution of the cinema is undeniable. He is not only one of the authors more widely adapted to the screen, but the narrative structure of his novels has inspired the process of ‘narrativization’ of the motion pictures. Just during the silent era, around one hundred films were adaptations of his literature. Specifically, this research focuses on the earliest attempt at reshaping Great Expectations, a one-reel British production titled The Boy and the Convict (1909). The film was largely ignored by researchers until 2001, when Graham Petrie recognized it as a partial reworking of Dickens’ novel. We aim to analyse both the narrative discourse and the film style of this motion picture in the belief that it will shed some light on the origin of film adaptation. Key-words: ...