Novel to Film Adaptation

Not only is Double Indemnity 1944) one of the most important films in the history of cinema, but the wake of its influence can be traced back to this day. For Woody Allen, this is the best film ever made by anyone. In any case it was a decisive work for all film noir filmed during the end of the Era of the Great Studios. This first noir film by Billy Wilder introduced something really new in American cinema: the criminals were no longer professional criminals, nor did they belong to the mafia; they were normal, middle-class people, swept away by sexual ambition and passion.

Perhaps the really unusual thing about this film is that, seven decades later, it still keeps its power of seduction intact. If Double Indemnity continues to fascinate not only by the adaptation work that turned the novel's unconvincing and banal plot into a script of complex scaffolding, rich in punching dialogues and endowed with a rhythm of jazz dyes, but also because Wilder was able to orchestrate the brilliant performance of his cast with an immersive staging, endowed with a rich and suggestive imagery

The article considers the structural differences between Il giorno della civetta and Una storia semplice. I track the evolution of Sciascia's pessimism by looking at his language and at the film adaptations of his two books. I finally propose in Il campo del vasaio, Camilleri is paying homage to his fellow Sicilian colleague.

For almost a century, Virginia Woolf has enchanted readers all over the world with her novel about the gender fluid and time travelling character Orlando. British director Sally Potter adapted Orlando into film in 1992, and her adaptation has since gained immense fame and a continuous presence in world cinema. Potter's Orlando has been the object of a great deal of scholarly interest. However, previous research has predominantly focused on questions of gender and sexuality. Considerably underdiscussed is the film's fascinating conception of time and space. This thesis therefore sets out to analyze Sally Potter's Orlando in order to demonstrate how time and space is shaped in the film.

Theories developed by George Bluestone and André Bazin form the theoretical framework of this thesis. Through a close reading of the film, this thesis demonstrates that Potter establishes an unconventional temporality and spatiality through constructing a nonlinear, often contradictory temporality conveyed through contrasts between the organic and the fantastic, the real and the fictitious. Furthermore, the analysis finds that spatiality in Potter's Orlando is presented as multidimensional, allowing certain characters the possibility to inhabit a "fluid spatiality". Through presenting the past and the present as fused, Potter's Orlando can be understood through the optics of Bluestone's concept of "the flux of time" and Henri Bergsons la durée réelle. Simultaneously, breaks in the narrative presented through intertitles can be read as representing Bergsons idea of l'étendu, while also establishing a tangible spatiality.

Although student-driven film adaptations of literary works require a substantial amount of classroom time, careful scaffolding, and access to specific electronic resources, these projects can promote active learning, meaningful collaboration, and media literacy among students.
The published version can be found here:
Kelley, James B. "Creating Short Film Adaptations in the American Literature Classroom." Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice 11.4 (Spring 2021): 51-58. https://www.cpcc.edu/sites/default/files/2021-10/taltp-spring-2021_0.pdf

In this paper, I will advance a critical perspective of some methodologies on appraising Indigenous films, in terms of their aesthetic as well as their cultural value. In doing this,
I propose a cultural and textual approach that gives the films a context for which they can be critically understood. With a heavy emphasis on the political content of many Indigenous films, here I argue for a more critical pedagogical evaluation that considers
the challenges of Indigenous films and problems that arise when we ignore to discuss them as ‘cinema’. Through surveying a number of recent Indigenous films, and the criticism that surrounds them, I concentrate on how they can be better used as texts to
enhance the study of world cinema and cultural issues of Aboriginality.

Ottlik-adaptáció a kultusz jegyében-Dömölky János: Hajnali háztetők / 231 230 / Sághy Miklós légköre, mely a búcsúztatón résztvevő emberek gesztusaiból, egy-mást figyelő bizalmatlan tekintetükből olvasható ki. De korhor-gonyként, szakszerűbben: referenciális horgonyként értelmezhető még ugyanebben a jelenetben például az is, hogy Nagy elvtárs teát-rálisan, már-már ünnepélyesen fogyaszt el egy akkoriban krónikus hiánycikknek számító déli gyümölcsöt: egy banánt (2. kép). S mivel a film alapját adó Ottlik-szövegben ilyen Halász elvtársat búcsúz-tató eseménysor nem szerepel, felmerülhet az értelmezőben, hogy ennek a jelenetnek a beiktatása valójában a valóságreferenciák megerősítését, s így a történet világszerű olvasásának lehetőségét igyekszik elősegíteni. (1-2. kép) Az első jelenet alapján megfogalmazott feltevésünket a film folytatása messzemenőkig igazolja. A fekete-fehér expozíció után a film színesre vált, s egy olyan jelenetet ábrázol, melynek során Bébé a nagyon is hangsúlyosan jelen lévő, ötvenes éveket idéző "kordokumentumok" közt éppen hazafelé tart (3. kép). A karakter háttéréül szolgáló városkép ugyanis hemzseg a korabeli jelmon-datoktól-mintha valami állami ünnepre készülnének éppen-, s a diegetikus (vagyis a történeten belüli) zene is a bemutatott kor mozgalmi dalait és indulóit eleveníti fel. (3. kép) Az '50-es évek gyanakvással teli, diktatórikus légkörét idézik a Bébé hazatérését kísérő apróbb események is. A lépcsőházba érve ugyanis a festőt megszólítja egy kisfiú, aki elmondja neki, hogy ma néhányunkat bevittek a térről, mindazonáltal megnyugtatja Bébét, A Hajnali háztetők című filmet, melyet Dömölky János rendezett, 1987-ben mutatták be a Magyar Filmszemlén, s a korabeli kritikák tanúsága szerint meglehetős csalódást okozott. Sőt, a javában tom-boló Ottlik-kultusz kellős közepén inkább fanyalgást, mint bármi-féle csodálatot váltott ki elemzőiből, akiket elmarasztaló vélemé-nyük megfogalmazásában az sem különösebben befolyásolt, hogy társ-forgatókönyvíróként maga az idős mester, Ottlik Géza jegyzi a művet. 2 A film nyitójelenetében, még a főcím előtt egy fogadást látunk, melyet a párt rendez a Párizsba készülő Halász Péter tiszteletére (ti. Péter, a befutott festő Párizsban készül kiállítani) (1. kép). A kézi ka-merával rögzített, fekete-fehér jelenet, melynek bemutatása során a felvevőgép mechanikus berregését is halljuk, azt a hatást idézi elő, mintha a megfigyelt eseménysor egy dokumentarista eljárás-sal készült, talált tekercs volna, amolyan kordokumentum az öt-venes évekből. Ez a technikai eljárás meglehetősen hangsúlyosan a történet hátterét adó korban igyekszik lehorgonyozni a később bemutatásra kerülő eseményeket. A filmkészítési technika mellett az ábrázolni szándékozott '50-es éveket idézheti még a gyanakvás 1 A tanulmány a Bolyai János Kutatási Ösztöndíj támogatásával készült. 2 Az adaptáció létrejöttének körülményeiről és fogadtatásáról alapos és informatív összefoglalást olvashatunk Kelecsényi László Az Ottlik-mozi című írásában ("Csinálj vele, amit akarsz, édes öregem!", szerk. sághy Miklós, Savaria UP, Szombathely, 2009, 23-29.).

The journal "English Literature: Theories, Interpretations, Contexts", published at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari, invites scholars to send article proposals on the topic of  “Literature and cinema: the dynamics of a complex and fruitful relationship”.
We’ll be happy to consider essays on all aspects of the relationship between English literature/American literature/Literatures in English and cinema, both from theoretical perspectives (for instance: adaptation; translation of codes; fidelity-transposition issues; transcultural issues; etc.) and as applied criticism (specific film adaptations of literary works; collaboration between writers and directors; screenplaying; directors’ use of, or relationship with, literary works; literary authors or works inspired by cinema; etc.)  for their publication in the December 2018 issue of the journal.
The deadline for sending a proposal is *August 1st*, 2018.

Abstract
This research provides a comparative study between Hilary Kilpatrick's English translation and Tawfiq Saleh's film adaptation ʾ Al-Makhduʿun ( The Duped) of Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun. Drawing on Narrative and Appraisal theories, this research investigates the ideological disparity between Kilpatrick and Saleh's approaches to Kanafani's text by examining their respective attitudinal stance and patterns of narrative (re)framing in relation to three dimensions: politics, religion, and culture. The research, thus, accentuates the ways in which the translator's identity, with its nexus of associated values, can reshape and reconfigure both narratives and reality by producing hegemonic or resistant translations. In doing so, the study, from a postcolonial perspective, aims to redirect the attention toward the ‘vertical’ power dynamics in and of translation, in addition to exposing the varying, often subtle, levels of negotiation, manipulation and intervention such politically loaded narratives, especially contested narratives, experience in translation. In fact, combining literary translation with adaptation reveals how narratives of the same objet d'art are creatively interpreted and re-negotiated differently when the translation medium involves visuals.

En este trabajo se propone atender a un aspecto poco transitado en los estudios sobre transtextualidad: el tránsito de un texto literario a uno fílmico (El secreto de sus ojos) y la relación que establecen con un remake (El secreto de una obsesión), adoptando una tipología que contempla las categorías de la readaptación, el remake simple y la adaptación compuesta o mixta. Se incide para ello en la representación de la violencia, de acuerdo con la distinción postulada por Steven Pinker (que sigue a Thomas Hobbes) sobre las causas del conflicto humano, y se considera, por una parte, la construcción de los personajes, y por otra, la forma en que se muestran las imágenes. De este modo, se analizan los necesarios reajustes que se llevan a cabo en dos contextos muy distintos: la etapa previa a la Dictadura Militar Argentina de 1976 (término en el que se mueven de forma variable la novela de Sacheri de 2005 y la película de Campanella de 2009) y la hipervigilancia antiterrorista tras los atentados del 11-S (en la versión de Billy Ray de 2015).

The role of a screenwriter in an adaptation is not just to condense and capture the essence of the novel; s/he writes for many readers. The role of the cinematographer is not just to frame the image and get the exposure right; s/he visualises the internal. The role of a director is not just to captain the ship and guide the crew to create her/his vision; s/he collaborates and listens. Each plays a similar role in the making of film, to translate and interpret the words of one medium, the novel and/or screenplay, into the cinematic language of another, screenwriting and/or the moving image. Each step along the adaptation of novel to screen informs and influences the next stage.
Lawrence Venuti, in his paper, Adaptation, Translation, Critique, proposes that the 'interpretant' is a 'third term' in what he sees as the 'competing discourse of fidelity and intertextuality' in adaptation theory (Venuti 2007, 31). Using his critical framework, this paper analyses the process of a screenwriter/director and her/his cinematographer as they adapt a novel to the screen, acknowledging how each is an 'interpretant' contributing, collaborating, and influencing the next phase of production.
The work of the late screenwriter/director, Anthony Minghella CBE (The English Patient (1996), The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), Cold Mountain (2003), and his collaborator, Australian director of photography, John Seale ACS ASC is used to contextualise this paper.

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.

In Vera Caspary’s Laura, Laura Hunt is a fully developed character - a complex woman with a career ignited by and sustained through personal ambition. Otto Preminger’s 1944 film adaptation of the novel, however, portrays Laura as a “cute career girl” (Caspary), through the emphasis on Laura’s appearance and through Laura’s prioritization of her career over the personal with a lack of inner motivations.

This essay examines the adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights (1847) by film director Andrea Arnold (Wuthering Heights, 2011). My main goal is to characterize the film style of this adaptation within the frame of a tendency in contemporary cinema in which the haptic and phenomenal appeal of human bodies and the landscape provide a new configuration of the materiality of the story world through the senses and experiential immersion of film spectators.

Jókai regényei és az azokból készült filmadaptációk többszörösen (esztétikai, funkcionális, mediális, kereskedelmi szempontból) a magasművészet és a tömegkultúra metszéspontjában állnak, aminek megragadásához a tanulmány Clement Greenberg "avantgárd" és "giccs" ellentétpárját alkalmazza.

Adapting E. M. Forster to the Page, the Stage, and the Screen
PowerPoint presentation for the course based on the paper Fordoński, Krzysztof. 2020. “Inspiration, Influence, Dialogue. E. M. Forster and His Oeuvre in Contemporary Culture”, Language and Literary Studies of Warsaw, 10, 11-45 (available from Academia website) with some new data collected during 2021.
The course was presented for the first time at the University of Turku, Finland, in September 2021.

Part 1 - Literature
Part 2 - The Radio
Part 3 - The Theatre and Television
Part 4 - Movies
Part 5 – Movies and Shorts
Part 6 – Opera and Other Musical Inspirations

This paper explores some of the key Australian 'filmic parables of reconciliation' (Lydon 2004) released in post-reconciliation years - 2001 onwards. It does so in order to see what visions of reconciliation are being produced by filmmakers in Australia. In particular it seeks to explore some of the gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people's visions and understandings of the process of reconciliation. It does so in the hope of providing a productive reading of both the fit and mis-fit between Indigenous and non-Indigenous stories. To this end the focus is on texts that have opened themselves up to the idea of acknowledging the injustices of the past and envisaging improved future relations,. The key films analysed are 'The Proposition' (2005), 'Jindabyne' ( 2005), 'The Tracker' (2002), 'Beneath Clouds' (2002) 'Rabbit Proof Fence' (2002) and 'One Night the Moon' (2001).

"Louis Daquin’s Ciulinii Bărăganului (1957): Film Adaptation as Panait Istrati’s Conditional Rehabilitation" in:
Dana Radler, Aurora Băgiag, Teodora-Anca Şerban-Oprescu (eds.), Panait Istrati. Littérature et société. Panait Istrati: Literature and Society, Bucharest, Editura ASE, 2021, 179-194.

A literatura tem servido de pano de fundo para as produções cinematográficas, as quais, têm veiculado principalmente textos do chamado cânone ocidental. Deste rol de textos considerado clássicos, este trabalho, inserido no domínio da Literatura Comparada em diálogo com o Cinema, elenca o romance de formação O Vermelho e o Negro, de Stendhal e a sua versão cinematográfica de 1954, dirigida por Claude Autant-Lara, um dos nomes vinculados à chamada tradição de qualidade francesa. Para a análise comparativa, optamos pela cena do julgamento de Julien, e a hipótese que desenhamos é a de que há uma verve anticlerical no filme.

Through the voice of his first-person narrator Ed Gentry, James Dickey ends his 1970 novel, Deliverance, with a series of musings on how the Cahulawassee River has become a part of him, a force which allows him to carry on living his suburban life: “The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to me, a personal, private possession, as nothing else in my life ever had. […] The river underlies, in one way or another, everything I do. It is always finding a way to serve me, from my archery to some of my recent ads to the new collages I have been attempting for my friends.”
The final scenes of British filmmaker John Boorman’s 1972 adaptation paint a hauntingly different picture, one that calls into question Slotkin’s theory of regeneration through violence and forces the spectator to rethink the links between violence, the wilderness, and American identity in the tumultuous mid-Vietnam 1970s.

“Ask me things.”
—Carol to Therese in Carol

Carol, like its central character and the woman who plays her, is an utterly self-possessed retelling of Patricia Highsmith’s lesbian classic The Price of Salt (1952). The novel, which Terry Castle once called “an exquisite, gobsmacking, pussy-tingling treat,” was published during the heyday of torrid lesbian pulp fiction, and eventually republished under Highsmith’s real name in 1990 with its new title, Carol. For scriptwriter Phyllis Nagy, Highsmith’s friend during the last decade of her life, shepherding the adaptation to the screen was a shitfight of over twenty years. Carol finally went into production under the direction of cult auteur Todd Haynes, who, in Far From Heaven (2002), Mildred Pierce (2011), and now also Carol, brings a queer sensibility to the American 1950s, the ...

Read More:

http://liftedbrow.web.29.io/article/56dbf41eada6e272e060e96f/visual_and_other_pleasures

Easy A (2010) is the last significant box-office success in the high-school teen movie subgenre and a film that has already been deemed a ‘classic’ by many cultural commentators and popular film critics. By applying interdisciplinary insight to a relatively overlooked movie in academic discussion, Easy A: The End of the High-School Teen Comedy? is the first in-depth volume that places the movie within several key contexts and concepts of intertextuality, gender, genre and adaptation, and social discourse.

Through the unpacking of a complex narrative that draws its plot from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and shares affinities with John Hughes’ paradigmatic films from the 1980s and key films from the 1990s, this volume presents Easy A as a palimpsest for the millennial generation.

Clear and comprehensive, the book argues that Easy A marks the end of the commercially successful high-school teen comedy and discusses the reasons through a comparative synchronic and semi-diachronic historical comparison of the film with contemporary cinematic texts and those of the 1980s and 1990s.

How can transcultural adaptation be seen as the Reception of a foreign literary work? This is the focus of my paper, which is presented at this interdisciplinary workshop on modern Iranian literature. The workshop was organized by the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) at Phillips Universitaet Marburg.

The article examines Stanley Kubrick's horror film "The Shining", showing how the director took Stephen King's storyline, then considerably developed the plot by introducing other material.  These include:
(1) reworking the storyline with reference to gothic tales by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, and Shirley Jackson, as well as taking signature horror themes from Gothic literature generally;
(2) deliberately employing Sigmund Freud's and Bruno Betelheim's theories of "the uncanny";
(3) using motifs suggested by the French film "Last Year at Marienbad" to construct the "The Shining" visually as a set of interlocking labyrinths. 
The article separates developments Kubrick made pre-production, when shaping the script with his co-author Diane Johnson, from a later set of creative decisions taken by the director alone during shooting, then editing the film. 
8pp.