This article focuses on Orson Welles’s filmic adaptation of Othello (1951) with attention to how the filmic form interacts with the historical background of post-war Italy. The country where the director first took refuge after being virtually blacklisted from Hollywood did not seem to welcome his controversial style either. Taking the hint from the biased responses of most Italian critics to Othello, the article explores Welles’s revision of Shakespeare’s tragedy in relation to the early-1950s Italian landscape. I shall analyse how the visual techniques of the film create a challenging style that ensnares and engages the audience. The dominant imagery of entrapment can have a meta-cinematographic effect that disturbs the mimetic function of the screen. The resulting formal inconsistency and disunity of the film defies a totalizing notion of the work of art and invites the viewers to question and go beyond ideologically biased interpretations of the sociopolitical scenario it springs from. My aim is to show that Othello offers an intellectual engagement that goes beyond the webs of ideology which trapped the Italian post-war situation and leads to a more complex confrontation with the most urgent issues in the country.
{"title":"Beyond the webs of ideology: Orson Welles’s Othello in post-war Italy","authors":"S. Parisi","doi":"10.1386/jafp_00052_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jafp_00052_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on Orson Welles’s filmic adaptation of Othello (1951) with attention to how the filmic form interacts with the historical background of post-war Italy. The country where the director first took refuge after being virtually blacklisted from Hollywood\u0000 did not seem to welcome his controversial style either. Taking the hint from the biased responses of most Italian critics to Othello, the article explores Welles’s revision of Shakespeare’s tragedy in relation to the early-1950s Italian landscape. I shall analyse how the\u0000 visual techniques of the film create a challenging style that ensnares and engages the audience. The dominant imagery of entrapment can have a meta-cinematographic effect that disturbs the mimetic function of the screen. The resulting formal inconsistency and disunity of the film defies a\u0000 totalizing notion of the work of art and invites the viewers to question and go beyond ideologically biased interpretations of the sociopolitical scenario it springs from. My aim is to show that Othello offers an intellectual engagement that goes beyond the webs of ideology which trapped\u0000 the Italian post-war situation and leads to a more complex confrontation with the most urgent issues in the country.","PeriodicalId":41019,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90713132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Leveraging Carol Clover’s influential Men, Women, and Chain Saws, this article attempts to situate the A&E television series Bates Motel as a progressive prequel to Psycho. Through a close reading of the series’ formal and narrative components, vital distinctions are clarified between Psycho and Bates Motel, arguing that the latter achieves a unique mode of spectatorial address. This unique address is accomplished via three devices: a shift in genre away from the horror/slasher film to re-situate the backstory of Norman Bates within the melodrama ‐ a genre traditionally geared to a female spectator; by playing Norman as an active investigative protagonist rather than the prototypical psycho-killer devoid of psychological complexity; and by opening up the narrative to dual protagonists via the inclusion of Norma Bates. Taken together, Bates Motel emerges as an adaptation of the iconic Hitchcock film whose very success is dependent on intentionally altering its mode of spectatorial address.
{"title":"Psycho-killer: Shifting spectator address from Psycho to Bates Motel","authors":"D. Dubois","doi":"10.1386/jafp_00051_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jafp_00051_1","url":null,"abstract":"Leveraging Carol Clover’s influential Men, Women, and Chain Saws, this article attempts to situate the A&E television series Bates Motel as a progressive prequel to Psycho. Through a close reading of the series’ formal and narrative components, vital\u0000 distinctions are clarified between Psycho and Bates Motel, arguing that the latter achieves a unique mode of spectatorial address. This unique address is accomplished via three devices: a shift in genre away from the horror/slasher film to re-situate the backstory of Norman Bates\u0000 within the melodrama ‐ a genre traditionally geared to a female spectator; by playing Norman as an active investigative protagonist rather than the prototypical psycho-killer devoid of psychological complexity; and by opening up the narrative to dual protagonists via the inclusion of\u0000 Norma Bates. Taken together, Bates Motel emerges as an adaptation of the iconic Hitchcock film whose very success is dependent on intentionally altering its mode of spectatorial address.","PeriodicalId":41019,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80589381","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mike Bartlett’s Albion (2017) is a highly sophisticated and illuminating instance of the diversity and complexity of adaptation. Although declaring no explicit relationship to informing source texts, amongst myriad intertextual allusions Albion manifests an engagement with Chekhov’s drama that abundantly affords adaptation’s pleasures. As well as deploying the principal hallmarks and strategies of Chekhovian dramaturgy, Bartlett reconfigures in Brexit Britain scenarios, characters and relationships from The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard. Moreover, demonstrating the thoroughness with which the English have appropriated and naturalized Chekhov, Bartlett implicitly challenges cardinal assumptions of that domestic tradition, through his nuanced subversion of both the ‘country-house’ and ‘state-of-the-nation’ play. Consequently, he reveals adaptation as a richly dialogic process, in which source and adapted texts shed light on each other. The politics of dramatic form(s) and of cultural adaptation and appropriation, to which Bartlett’s revision of a preeminent part of English dramatic heritage points, deftly parallel, and function as an analogue for, the conservative heritage enterprise that Albion portrays. Highlighting the longstanding association of the countryside and landscape with English cultural identity, the protagonist’s project of restoring an historic country garden to its former grandeur is laden with especial significance at this contemporary moment of national crisis.
{"title":"The state of the British garden: Mike Bartlett’s Albion and its Chekhovian scions","authors":"Stuart Young","doi":"10.1386/jafp_00054_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jafp_00054_1","url":null,"abstract":"Mike Bartlett’s Albion (2017) is a highly sophisticated and illuminating instance of the diversity and complexity of adaptation. Although declaring no explicit relationship to informing source texts, amongst myriad intertextual allusions Albion manifests an engagement\u0000 with Chekhov’s drama that abundantly affords adaptation’s pleasures. As well as deploying the principal hallmarks and strategies of Chekhovian dramaturgy, Bartlett reconfigures in Brexit Britain scenarios, characters and relationships from The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard.\u0000 Moreover, demonstrating the thoroughness with which the English have appropriated and naturalized Chekhov, Bartlett implicitly challenges cardinal assumptions of that domestic tradition, through his nuanced subversion of both the ‘country-house’ and ‘state-of-the-nation’\u0000 play. Consequently, he reveals adaptation as a richly dialogic process, in which source and adapted texts shed light on each other. The politics of dramatic form(s) and of cultural adaptation and appropriation, to which Bartlett’s revision of a preeminent part of English dramatic heritage\u0000 points, deftly parallel, and function as an analogue for, the conservative heritage enterprise that Albion portrays. Highlighting the longstanding association of the countryside and landscape with English cultural identity, the protagonist’s project of restoring an historic country\u0000 garden to its former grandeur is laden with especial significance at this contemporary moment of national crisis.","PeriodicalId":41019,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87723403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Picture of Dorian Gray, Tamara Harvey (dir.) (2021), UK: Barn Theatre, Lawrence Batley Theatre, The New Wolsey Theatre, Oxford Playhouse and Theatr Clwyd","authors":"Tom Ue","doi":"10.1386/jafp_00047_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jafp_00047_5","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41019,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76722035","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Review of: Adaptation in the Age of Media Convergence, Johannes Fehrle and Werner Schäfke-Zell (eds) (2019)Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 232 pp.,ISBN 978-9-46298-366-3, h/bk, €99.00ISBN 978-9-04853-401-2, e/bk, €98.99
{"title":"Adaptation in the Age of Media Convergence, Johannes Fehrle and Werner Schäfke-Zell (eds) (2019)","authors":"Francesca Forlini","doi":"10.1386/jafp_00046_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jafp_00046_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Adaptation in the Age of Media Convergence, Johannes Fehrle and Werner Schäfke-Zell (eds) (2019)Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 232 pp.,ISBN 978-9-46298-366-3, h/bk, €99.00ISBN 978-9-04853-401-2, e/bk, €98.99","PeriodicalId":41019,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance","volume":"106 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75749511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review Essay: ‘A Grande Vaga de Frio (‘The Great Frost’): The transmigration of Orlando into Portuguese’","authors":"A. Macedo","doi":"10.1386/jafp_00048_7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jafp_00048_7","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41019,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81475944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
From fidelity discourse, through medium specificity discourse, to intertextuality and remediation approach, adaptation studies have dynamically evolved and recently have responded with particular flexibility to the advent of the digital era. Even adaptations of classical literary texts, confronting the authority of their hypotexts, have daringly broken away from their fidelity constraints and ventured onto paths facilitated by the development of new media. This article discusses Robert Zemeckis’ 2007 adaptation of Beowulf and examines this film’s potential for illustrating the manifestations of digitality in adaptation discourses. A film that did not make it (in)to the box office, and an adaptation that makes literary fans cringe, it is still a fascinating cultural intertext: a radical reinterpretation of the Old English heroic poem, a star-studded special-effect cinematic extravaganza of an adventurous director, an illustration of adaptation going remediation and an inclusive transmedia hybrid.
{"title":"Adaptation in the digital era: The case of Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf","authors":"M. Cieślak","doi":"10.1386/jafp_00041_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jafp_00041_1","url":null,"abstract":"From fidelity discourse, through medium specificity discourse, to intertextuality and remediation approach, adaptation studies have dynamically evolved and recently have responded with particular flexibility to the advent of the digital era. Even adaptations of classical literary texts,\u0000 confronting the authority of their hypotexts, have daringly broken away from their fidelity constraints and ventured onto paths facilitated by the development of new media. This article discusses Robert Zemeckis’ 2007 adaptation of Beowulf and examines this film’s potential\u0000 for illustrating the manifestations of digitality in adaptation discourses. A film that did not make it (in)to the box office, and an adaptation that makes literary fans cringe, it is still a fascinating cultural intertext: a radical reinterpretation of the Old English heroic poem, a star-studded\u0000 special-effect cinematic extravaganza of an adventurous director, an illustration of adaptation going remediation and an inclusive transmedia hybrid.","PeriodicalId":41019,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance","volume":"252 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75843142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Adaptation in Poland: A paradigm shift","authors":"J. Fabiszak, Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak","doi":"10.1386/jafp_00038_2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jafp_00038_2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41019,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89323720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Heart of Darkness, due to its semantic complexity, interpretative openness and universal thematic interests, has been frequently intersemiotically adapted in a variety of media, encompassing radio broadcast, films, opera, graphic narratives and video games, as well as rewritten in the form of interlingual translations and refracted, with refractions including reviews and critical assessments, but also textual versions radically different from the source text. This article considers selected reinterpretations of Conrad’s text and comments briefly on how in each case the adaptation illustrates a fusion of Conrad’s vision with that of the adapter, hence (trans)fusion, and how this may give a new life to the source text via interpretative shifts. The article presents case studies: the film adaptation ‐ Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Tarik O’Regan’s one-act chamber opera (both the United Kingdom in 2011 and the US staging in 2015), the graphic narrative by Catherine Anyango and David Zane Mairowitz (2010) and Jacek Dukaj’s Polish language version Serce ciemności (2017). This selection is governed by the variety of media and by the dissimilar approaches of the adapters to their source text. What is evident based on these variants is the role of the adapter as a creative participant in the process of transmitting the ideas of the original text, often updating them to make them relevant to new recipients of various cultural backgrounds. Additionally, reinterpretations and recontextualizations of the novella result directly from adaptive strategies specific to a given medium.
{"title":"(Trans)fusions of Conrad’s darkness: Selected adaptations of Heart of Darkness","authors":"Ewa Kujawska-Lis","doi":"10.1386/jafp_00043_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jafp_00043_1","url":null,"abstract":"Heart of Darkness, due to its semantic complexity, interpretative openness and universal thematic interests, has been frequently intersemiotically adapted in a variety of media, encompassing radio broadcast, films, opera, graphic narratives and video games, as well as rewritten\u0000 in the form of interlingual translations and refracted, with refractions including reviews and critical assessments, but also textual versions radically different from the source text. This article considers selected reinterpretations of Conrad’s text and comments briefly on how in each\u0000 case the adaptation illustrates a fusion of Conrad’s vision with that of the adapter, hence (trans)fusion, and how this may give a new life to the source text via interpretative shifts. The article presents case studies: the film adaptation ‐ Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse\u0000 Now (1979), Tarik O’Regan’s one-act chamber opera (both the United Kingdom in 2011 and the US staging in 2015), the graphic narrative by Catherine Anyango and David Zane Mairowitz (2010) and Jacek Dukaj’s Polish language version Serce ciemności (2017). This\u0000 selection is governed by the variety of media and by the dissimilar approaches of the adapters to their source text. What is evident based on these variants is the role of the adapter as a creative participant in the process of transmitting the ideas of the original text, often updating them\u0000 to make them relevant to new recipients of various cultural backgrounds. Additionally, reinterpretations and recontextualizations of the novella result directly from adaptive strategies specific to a given medium.","PeriodicalId":41019,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84490606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Liminality is inherent in the adaptation process situated ‘in-between’. Proposing the ‘biological’ concept of symbiosis, David Cowart distinguishes between the ‘host’ and the ‘guest’ text. Symbiosis as a shape-shifting concept involves a two-directional adaptation process, an ‘epistemic dialogue’, where interest is in how the later text’s meaning is produced in relation to the earlier and how the overall production of meaning is affected by the hypertext. To obliterate the lines of influence, temporal distance, privilege and importance, it is possible to conceive of the relation between hypotext and the hypertextual ‘attachment’ as rhizomatic and thus to locate the ‘hypertext product’ in a region where historical genealogies either no longer matter or need to be seriously reconceptualized The article discusses the hypotext‐hypertext relations in a selection of modern and postmodern adaptations by Maurice Baring, Gordon Bottomley, WTG and Elaine Feinstein and Linda Bamber, as ‘symbiotic attachments’ or rhizomatic developments whose relationship with the Shakespearean text, or rather ‘aggregate’ can be variously defined in narrative terms. I argue that texts located in the position of prologues, epilogues or separately published ‘letters’ ‐ defined as prequels, sequels or gap-fillers and often pointing to an ontological or temporal elsewhere ‐ can be variously defined as elements of the main text, metatexts masquerading as paratexts or framing borders and that they function as generators of meaning.
{"title":"Liminal hypotext‐hypertext relations in selected Shakespearean prequels, sequels and gap-fillers","authors":"Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak","doi":"10.1386/jafp_00044_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jafp_00044_1","url":null,"abstract":"Liminality is inherent in the adaptation process situated ‘in-between’. Proposing the ‘biological’ concept of symbiosis, David Cowart distinguishes between the ‘host’ and the ‘guest’ text. Symbiosis as a shape-shifting concept involves\u0000 a two-directional adaptation process, an ‘epistemic dialogue’, where interest is in how the later text’s meaning is produced in relation to the earlier and how the overall production of meaning is affected by the hypertext. To obliterate the lines of influence, temporal distance,\u0000 privilege and importance, it is possible to conceive of the relation between hypotext and the hypertextual ‘attachment’ as rhizomatic and thus to locate the ‘hypertext product’ in a region where historical genealogies either no longer matter or need to be seriously\u0000 reconceptualized The article discusses the hypotext‐hypertext relations in a selection of modern and postmodern adaptations by Maurice Baring, Gordon Bottomley, WTG and Elaine Feinstein and Linda Bamber, as ‘symbiotic attachments’ or rhizomatic developments whose relationship\u0000 with the Shakespearean text, or rather ‘aggregate’ can be variously defined in narrative terms. I argue that texts located in the position of prologues, epilogues or separately published ‘letters’ ‐ defined as prequels, sequels or gap-fillers and often pointing\u0000 to an ontological or temporal elsewhere ‐ can be variously defined as elements of the main text, metatexts masquerading as paratexts or framing borders and that they function as generators of meaning.","PeriodicalId":41019,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86646013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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