“Hell [is] a pretty place, too”: The Ecology of Horror in the Film Adaptation of Beloved

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 752-776
Author(s):  
Addie C. Booth
Keyword(s):  
Film Adaptation

‘Wheels have been set in motion’: Geocentrism and Relativity in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liliane Campos
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Frames Of Reference ◽  
Quantum Uncertainty ◽  
Galilean Relativity ◽  
Modern Physics ◽  
20Th Century Physics ◽  
Time Specific ◽  
Do So

By decentring our reading of Hamlet, Stoppard’s tragicomedy questions the legitimacy of centres and of stable frames of reference. So Liliane Campos examines how Stoppard plays with the physical and cosmological models he finds in Hamlet, particularly those of the wheel and the compass, and gives a new scientific depth to the fear that time is ‘out of joint’. In both his play and his own film adaptation, Stoppard’s rewriting gives a 20th-century twist to these metaphors, through references to relativity, indeterminacy, and the role of the observer. When they refer to the uncontrollable wheels of their fate, his characters no longer describe the destruction of order, but uncertainty about which order is at work, whether heliocentric or geocentric, random or tragic. When they express their loss of bearings, they do so through the thought experiments of modern physics, from Galilean relativity to quantum uncertainty, drawing our attention to shifting frames of reference. Much like Schrödinger’s cat, Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are both dead and alive. As we observe their predicament, Campos argues, we are placed in the paradoxical position of the observer in 20th-century physics, and constantly reminded that our time-specific relation to the canon inevitably determines our interpretation.

Becoming Present, Becoming Absent: Movement and Visual Form in the Film Adaptation of Comédie

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-180
Author(s):  
David Foster
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Visual Form ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Basic Framework ◽  
Global Movement ◽  
Local Movement

This article examines the use of movement and visual form in the film adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Comédie (Marin Karmitz, 1966). The article broaches the kinetic elements of the work through addressing the manner in which the diegetic motion of the film can be seen to reflect extra-diegetic cinematic processes. The sense of movement that is created through Comédie's montage is then considered at length, making use of work on this theme by two quite different (though tangentially related) theorists: Sergei Eisenstein and Jean-François Lyotard. The article then charts the film's different manifestations of formal movement, and a basic framework is proposed to explain the manner in which the film creates moments of intensity, through what is termed the ‘local movement’ of the montage, and the manner in which the film manifests an overall curve of intensity, through what is termed the montage's ‘global movement’. It is argued that each form of montagic motion is reflected in the other, and that ultimately these movements might be seen to dramatise a human drive towards, and a concomitant flight from, an impossible state of ontological totality.

DRAMATIC ELEMENTS IN DASHNER’S MAZE RUNNER NOVEL AND FILM ADAPTATION

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-88
Author(s):  
Anggia Putria ◽  
Muizzu Nurhadi
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

The research aims to reveal how the application of dramatic elements of Dashner’s Maze Runner is transformed into its film adaptation. To achieve the purpose, the researcher analyzes seven dramatic elements by Gustav Freytag’s Pyramid which consist of exposition, inciting moment, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement. This research uses the descriptive qualitative method. The results of this research are the differences of the dramatic elements in the novel and film adaptation are not significant because only the scenes of exposition and rising action are not similar.

‘...Insured against the tyranny of time’.Knut Hamsun’s last play and an unknown Russian film script

2018 ◽  
pp. 76-102
Author(s):  
T P. Lonngren
Keyword(s):  
Film Adaptation ◽  
State Archive ◽  
Short Summary ◽  
Russian State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theatrical Play ◽  
Russian Film

After a short summary of the story behind K. Hamsun’s play In the Grip of Life [Livet i Vold], its plot and stage history in Russia, the article proceeds to tell about an unknown film script. Cinematic adaptations of Hamsun’s books have always dominated Norwegian literature, while none of his dramatic pieces have made it to the screen. However, a film script was uncovered, an adaptation of In the Grip of Life: a play specially written for a Russian theatre. The script was found in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, among the documents of Evgeny Sergeevich Khokhlov. Based on the history of filmmaking and relevant filmography, Khokhlov’s film script is not just the only attempt at film adaptation of a Hamsun play, but the first ever project based on a theatrical play in Russian cinematic history. Written almost 100 years ago, the script is far from perfect in the modern understanding of filmmaking; nonetheless, it has certain merits in the eyes of contemporaries. The very attempt to interpret the play by means of a nascent artistic genre may be considered a proof of its relevance to Russian audiences at the time.

Materializing Ulysses

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Perceived Power

This chapter compares the reception of Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses with that of Joseph Strick’s 1967 film adaptation of the novel. Although Ulysses had been legally publishable in England for decades, Strick’s film still encountered censorship from the British Board of Film Censors. The chapter argues that Joyce’s novel, for all its obscenity and provocation, mitigated its threat by foregrounding its own printedness, allying its fate to the waning power of print as a bearer of obscenity. Strick’s film, by contrast, activated the perceived power of film. The contrast of the two versions of Ulysses, which are often identical in language, thus offers a valuable window on how obscenity changed across media through the twentieth century. In making this argument, the chapter surveys print strategies of censorship, including the asterisk, and how these strategies operated in a range of works.

Little Shop of Horrors

2019 ◽  
pp. 203-227
Author(s):  
Jonas Westover
Keyword(s):  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Movie Industry ◽  
Critical Success ◽  
Broad Understanding

This chapter examines the movie adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors. The musical was a huge success Off-Broadway and it would have been natural to move it to a larger, Broadway theatre. But David Geffen, who had underwritten the musical’s move from its original, ninety-eight-seat Off-Off-Broadway theatre, the WPA, to the Off-Broadway Orpheum, was now working in the movie industry, developing projects for Warner Bros., thus providing lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken with the unusual opportunity to develop a film adaptation of Little Shop. The film reconciles a broad understanding of what made the show work on the stage (by not allowing the landscape of the movie to become too large) with the need to accommodate a different medium (songs were dropped and new ones added). The movie was a huge success, showing how the behind-the-scenes decision to move to film rather than a Broadway theatre (as happened with the Off-Broadway Hair, for example) sustained Little Shop’s commercial and critical success.

‘Their Voices Ring in My Ears’: Laura, the Fugue, and Adaptation

Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret A Toth ◽  
Teresa Ramoni
Keyword(s):  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Adaptation Studies

Abstract This essay analyzes Vera Caspary’s novel Laura (1943) and the 1944 film adaptation (Preminger) in order to demonstrate an approach to adaptation studies we call fugal. If a fugue is a composition based on a ‘subject’ or short melodic phrase and its various ‘answers’—in other words, variations that maintain elements of the melody but also play with and revise it—how might we position the film as a variation on, rather than a reproduction of, Caspary’s novel? To explore this question, we analyze the sonic register of both the novel and film. Caspary doesn’t want us to merely read her novel; she wants us to listen to the voices that narrate it and the tunes that populate it. Similarly, listening to the film—not simply the dialogue but also the voiceover narration and David Raksin’s groundbreaking score—allows us to identify content not overt in, and sometimes at odds with, the visuals. When we listen critically and carefully, we can distinguish nuances that get lost in a strict fidelity approach; in particular, we can identify both works’ feminist content, especially their attempts to decentre patriarchal hard-boiled conventions and to confound notions of a singular truth.

Settler Colonial Disease and Dis-Ease in August: Osage County

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-78
Author(s):  
M. Elise Marubbio
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Physical Health ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
American People ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Place ◽  
Mental And Physical Health ◽  
American Racism ◽  
Osage County

AbstractTracy Letts’s screenplay, August: Osage County (2013), and John Wells’s film adaptation (2013) offer a compelling critique of American racism towards Native Americans which demands that viewers consider their own inculcation into ongoing settler-nation colonialism. The film layers the history of place (Oklahoma) with the Cheyenne character Johnna, whose Indigenous heritage is negotiated throughout by liberal academics, conservative rural matriarchs, and Johnna herself. The role is small but essential to the film’s allegorical analysis of settler-colonialism and racism. The Weston family’s secrets, addictions, and dysfunction starkly contrast with Johnna’s health and stability. Through Johnna, the film questions the toll colonialism takes on the mental and physical health of the American people. This paper analyzes the metanarrative association of the Weston family’s dysfunction and racism with ongoing colonialism that results in disease of the settler-colonial space as it emerges in the screenplay and film.

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