Cristian Tiu

Anglo-American Studies I

Reading Notes Portfolio

CHAPTER 1

THE PREHISTORY OF FILM AND LITERATURE

- From illuminated manuscripts and religious iconography to sixteenth-century verbal and visual exercises
for memory, from the construction of Renaissance theaters as the visual forum to elaborate dialogue to the
storytelling amusements of camera obscuras and other precursors to the camera, the pre-cinematic
relationships between seeing and saying would be debated and practiced as central arguments about
knowledge, identity spiritual truth, pleasure, politics and the meaning of culture.

Public and cultures

- The fascination with the visual promotes immense scientific and cultural development of new mechanisms
for reproducing images, theatrical spectacles, and optical toys.
- The various and cultural and scientific inventions and amusements, not surprisingly, stir continual debates
among literary men and women about the two media and the place of literature in a culture that, even I the
early nineteenth century, seem to be coming more and more under the spell of fascinating images rather
than the discriminating power of crafted words.

Nineteenth-century realism and melodrama

- Foreshadowed by earlier movements toward more realism, the scientific developments in photography in
the 1830s mark a ajor shift in the discussions of painting, literature, theater, and other arts.
- At the center of the separate practices of film and literature, new blends and composite works appear:
magic lanterns project scenes of Walter Scot novels and other literary narratives, and, as J. Hillis Miller has
noted, serial novels become a compelling blend of the drawn or photographic illustrations and narrative
storytelling supported by lithographic images or, after 1880, even halftone photo-engravings.
- Melodramatic plots and situations become a dominant chord in much of the respected literatures of the age,
but they appear in their most transparent forms in the popular entertainments that were outlining the
beginnings of cultural place for cinema.

CHAPTER 2

FILMING LITERATURE. From early film and literature to classical form, 1895-1925

The attraction of the literary

- There are 3 important dimensions to film practice in these early ears: 1, film practice and its connection
with literature follow the social and aesthetic directions and developments established in the nineteenth
century, especially the demands for realism and a class-oriented fascination with spectacle; 2, early cinema
tends to find its formal literary precedents in the staged perspectives of the theater and less in narrative
traditions; 3, even at this early stage, film turns to literary materials of all kinds for subject matter.

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D.W.Griffith and the birth of classical cinema from literature

- while he directly or indirectly adapts the formal figures, character types, or references from the nineteenth-
century novels, other literary forms are equally influential in the transition to classical film form.

- although in touch with his theatrical background, Griffith is one of the irst filmmakers to recognize, through
his explorations of longer narrative literature, the power of freeing the image from its theatrical position as a
stationary point of view, watching action as if it took place on a stage.

- unlike stock characters found in melodramatic and comic plays and unlike epic characters defined by physical
actions, film characters like the characters of nineteenth-century novels gradually develop a psychological depth
of fears and longings that serve to motivate the action of a film.

CHAPTER 3

TESTING AND EXPANDING THE VALUE OF FILM AND LITERATURE, 1915-1940

Model Images and social imperatives

- The modernist interface between film and literature produces movies from a variety of countries and in
numerous aesthetic shapes, commercial and noncommercial, narrative and non-narrative, poetic and
theatrical.
- Aesthetic experiment with film and literature are also political and social reevaluations of the relationship
between art and culture.
- Yet, in the USA commercial and political pressures intended to assure certain middle-class values at the
movies would largely temper the movement toward formal experimentation and social realism.

Hollywood, the Code, sound, and literature

- Throughout these times, the relationship between the theater world and the film world is especially lively,
as elements of the theater once again emerge to counterpoint the forces of narrative realism in the cinema,
- Theater and film develop particularly strong financial ties as they compete for and exchange literary
materials.
- Despite the remarkable number and quality of film adaptations of literature in the 193s, at the end of the
decade there are signs of strain and unease.
- - at a moment when narrative and dramatic histories are growing and spreading rapidly as the myths of the
movie screen, Wests novel sounds a note of suspicion and warning about the nature and truth of that
cinematic literature, a warning that clearly anticipates the next decade.

CHAPTER 4

PENS, PULP, AND THE CRISIS OF THE WORD, 1940-1960

Film exploring literature

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- Two important films that adapt cultural masterpieces and memories to address the trauma of history are
Carnes Children of Paradise and Laurence Olivers Henry V (1944). The first tells the story of the
theatrical world of nineteenth-century Paris when the culture of classical theater and the popular boulevard
entertainments of mimes and other street performers interact.
- With Oliviers film, too, much of the appreciative analysis that has surrounded it seems fully justified, not
simply for its inventive stylistic and structural engagements with Shakespeares play, but also in how those
formal features index critical historical shifts in the relationship between film and literature.

Reauthoring film

- The idea that the movie camera can be used like a writers pen becomes one of the most suggestive and
inspiring metaphors for alternative film practices in this decade, both as a vehicle for a more personal
cinema and as a part to more and more complex arguments for a language of the cinema comparable to a
literary language.
- Situated between the deauthorization of literature and the reauthorization of themselves as authors, many
other merging and independent cinemas use language as a model for film, not, however, simply to
underling the expressive possibilities of film but to expand its connections with the other languages of
society, especially popular culture.

CHAPTER 5

ACADEMIC CINEMA AND INTERNATIONAL SPECTACLES, 1960-1980

The subversive power of literature as film

- contemporary literature becomes an invigorating source for a film culture dissatisfied with the status quo
and mainstream.
- A contributing factor and an inevitable result of this outbreak of a new and subversive breed of literary
adaptations Is the revision of the MPAA rating system to allow more flexibility and experimentation with
the matter and manner of movies.

Collaborative enterprises

- One striking tendency in the late fifties that continues via the 1960s was an increasing number of literary
and film collaborations not only on the subject matter of the movies but also with a foregrounding of the
metaphor, tropes, perspective, and structural organization the film.
- More than the exchange of themes, characters, and stories, and more than a logic according to which film
would simply transfer the structures o literature to the screen, now film and literature offer each other
textual and formal systems whose languages were compatible enough to create an intertextual dialogue on
robles of representation and interpretation.
- Much of this energy and creative movement between film and literature during these decades is a
consequence of an evolving audience for the cinema. By the early 1970s, American, European, and many
Asian film cultures could assume an audience saturated from childhood via college with television and

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movies, and this audience is both more casually and more seriously familiar with media culture than ever
before.

CHAPTER 6

BOOKS AND MOVIES AS MULTIMEDIA, Into the new millennium

Multimedia conglomerates, blockbusters, and home viewing.

- Movies have been a commercial, industrial enterprise practically since their inception at the end of the
nineteenth century; literature too, since at least the eighteenth century, has been inescapably connected to
the economics and industry of publishing or theatrical production.
- The restructuring of the film industry via conglomerate and media giants has major consequences for film
and literature: 1, conglomerates encourage a continued transformation of literature into commodified
spectacles than typically tends to reduce the importance of narrative and character; 2, sharing the same
spreadsheets, books now must compete commercially within the corporate marketplace meaning that fewer
and fewer risky or experimental works of literature find their way via publishing houses.

The return of the classics: choosing a version

- There are four ways to view the widespread return of literary classics: 1, as a reaction against contemporary
filmmaking trends to diminish traditional plot and character; 2, as a conservative or at least therapeutic turn
from the cultural complexity of the present; 3, as a reflection of contemporary film audiences and their
increasing concern with manner over matter; 4, as the vehicle to reexamine and reinvent new political or
cultural perspectives within traditional narratives.

Literature, film, and digital convergence

- The present and future intersections of film and literature are thus about more than just movies and books.
The evolving relationship tells us not only about individual works of film and literature but also about how
each, as part of changing cultural, economic, and technological environment works to change the others
meaning and value as part of complex historical ratios.
- One of the effects of this digital revolution, specifically as it impacts the exchanges between literature and
film, is the potential transformation of age-old hierarchies about authorship and textual authority.

CHAPTER 7

Andre Bazin, ADAPTATION, OR THE CINEMA AS DIGEST

- The theory of adaptation comes with the following warning; that one not confuse prose style with
grammatical idiosyncrasies or, more generally still, with formal constants.
- The problem of adaptation for the audience is much more evident in the case of radio. Radios has created
an atmospheric culture that is as omnipresent as humidty in the air.

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- The clichd bias according to which culture is inseparable from intellectual effort springs from a bourgeois,
intllectualist reflex.
- Adaptation is aesthetically justified, independent of its pedagogical and social value, because the adapted
work to a certain extent exists apart from what is wrongly called its style in a confusion of this term with
the word form.

CHAPTER 8

Dudley Andrew, ADAPTATION

The sources of film

- The broader notion of the process of adaptations has much in common with interpretation theory, for in a
strong sense adaptation is the appropriation of meaning from a prior text.
- - such speculations may encourage a hopelessly broad view of adaptation, there is no question that the
restricted view of adaption from known texts in other art forms offer a privileged locus for analysis.

Borrowing, intersecting, and transforming sources

- Borrowing is the most frequent mode of adaptation, the artist employs, more or less extensively, the
material, idea, or form of an earlier, generally successful text.
- The analyst needs to probe the source of power in the original by examining the use made of it in
adaptation, where the main concern is the generality of the original, its potential for wide and varied appeal.
- The most frequent and most tiresome discussion of adaptation concerns fidelity and transformation, it is
assumed that the task of adaptation is the reproduction in cinema of something essential about an original
text.

The sociology and aesthetics of adaptation

- Bazin pointed to an important instance of this in the immediate postwar era when adaptations from the
stage not only developed new ways for the cinema to be adequate to serious theater, but also developed a
kind of discipline whose consequences go far beyond the production of Macbeth.
- Filmmaking is always an event in which a systems used and altered in discourse
- Adaptation is a peculiar form of discourse but not an unthinkable one
- The job of theory in all this is to keep the questions clear and in order.

CHAPTER 9

Robert Stam, BEYOND FIDELITY, The dialogics of adaptation

The chimera of fidelity

- The notion of the fidelity of an adaptation to its source novel does contain its grain of truth
- When we say an adaptation has been unfaithful to the original, the term gives expression to the
disappointment we feel when a film adaptation fails to capture what we see as the fundamental narrative,
thematic, and aesthetic features of its literary source.

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From essence to specificity

- A variation on the theme of fidelity suggests that an adaptation should be faithful not so much to the source
text, but rather to the essence of the medium of expression.
- This approach assumes that every medium is inherently good at certain things and bad at others
- A cinematic essence is posited as favoring certain aesthetic possibilities and foreclosing others.

Translations and transformations

- The trope of adaptation as translation suggests a principled effort of intersemiotic transposition, with the
inevitable losses and gains typical of any translation
- Adaptation theory has available a whole constellation of tropes like translation, reading, diazotization,
cannibalization, transmutation, transfiguration, and signifying.

Adaptation as intertextual dialogism

- In this sense, an adaptation is less an attempted resuscitation of an originary word than a turn in an ongoing
dialogical process
- The concept of intertextual dialogism suggests that every text forms an intersection of textual surfaces and
all texts are tissues of anonymous formulae, variations on those formulae, conscious and unconscious
quotations, and conflations and inversions of other texts.
- Intertextuality helps us transcend the aporias of fidelity
- Paratextuality, refers to the relation within the totality of literary work, between the text proper and its
paratext
- Hypertextualiry, is perhaps the most suggestive, it refers to the relation between one text, to an anterior text
called hypotext.

The grammar of transformation

- Central to the transformational grammar of adaptation are permutations in locale, time, and language.

Transmutations of plot and character

- Characters can also be subtly changed
- Film adaptations usually make temporal changes as well
- There is also the complex question of point of view, does the film adaptation maintain the pov and the
focalization of the novel? Who tells the story in the novel and in the film? Who focalizes the story?

CHAPTER 10

Lawrence Venuti, ADAPTATION, RANSLATION, CRITIQUE

Communicative vs hermeneutic models

-the communicative model on which the practice depends can also be detected in studies that pay closer and
more sophisticate attention to aspects of film form

- the literary texts that are usually considered in studies of film adaptations, are assigned a greater value that
reflects not only the assumption of a romantic concept of original, self-expressive authorship and hence the
marginalization of second-order creations like adaptation, but also the disciplinary sites to which film studies
was most often affiliated in its emergence, particularly academic departments and programs of literature

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- subsequent developments in film studies have abandoned the communicative model by considering adaptation
as essentially a form of intertextuality

Adaptation as translation

- The choice of translation theory as a source of concepts for adaptation studies is far from arbitrary
- The analogy between adaptation and translation frequently recurs in the literature but it is usually applied
without comment, rarely examine din any detail
- Translation and adaptation are carefully distinguished by publishers and translators, filmmakers and
screenwriters, even if copyright law classifies both cultural practices as derivative works.
- Translation enacts an interpretation, because it is radically decontextualizing.
- The interpretative force of a translation also issues from the fact that the source text is not only
decontextualized, but recontextualized.

The interpretant

- The inrepretatants can be either formal or thematic

- Formal interpretants may include a relation of equivalence, such as a semantic correspondence based on
dictionary definitions or philological research, or particular style, such as a lexicon and syntax
characteristic of genre
- Thematic interpretants are codes: an interpretation of the source text that has been articulated independently
in commentary; a discourse in the sense of a relatively coherent body of concepts, problems, and arguments
linked to a genre and housed in a social institution; or values, beliefs and representations affiliated with
specific social groups.

Aesthetics of production and reception

- The interpretants deployed in a film adaptation may be complementary, mutually reinforcing an overall
interpretation inscribed in the prior materials, or disjunctive, resulting in opposing and even contradictory
interpretations that may in turn be perceived differently by different audiences
- - the viewers interpretant becomes a central factor in assessing the significance of an adaptation, raising the
question of whether an academic critical discourse can or should take precedence over other, more popular
forms of reception

Adaptation as critique

- The application of an interpretant in establishing the new context is never simply interpretive, but
potentially interrogative: the formal and thematic differences introduced by the translation or adaptation,
the move to a different language and culture or to a different cultural medium with different conditions of
production, can invite a critical understanding to the prior materials as well as their originary or subsequent
contexts
- The source text can be seen as equally abusive of the translation.
- A comparison between them will always uncover shifts or deviations that indicate the limitations of the
translation, not merely of its mimetic aim, but of the interpretation that it inscribes during the
recontextualizing process

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CHAPTER 11

Thomas Leitch, TWELVE FALLACIES IN CONTEMPORARY ADAPTATION THEORY

1. There is a thing as contemporary adaptation theory

- This is the founding fallacy of adaptation studies, and the most important reason they have been so largely
ineffectual, because they have been practiced in a theoretical vacuum, without the benefit of a presiding
poetics
- Several fundamental questions in adaptation theory remain unasked, let alone unanswered
- The movies are a collaborative medium, but is adaptation similarly collaborative, or is it the work of a
single agent, the screenwriter or direct?

2. Differences between literary and cinematic texts are rooted in essential properties of their respective media
- The study rests upon the assumption that each medium has a specific nature which invites certain kinds of
communications while obstructing others

3. Literary texts are verbal, films visual

- This is the most enduring and pernicious
- The more general principle that literature and film are distinguished by essential properties of their
presentational media has at least come for lively debate by theorists.
- It is obviously untrue not because literary texts are not verbal, but because films are not strictly speaking
visual
- They have not been purely visual for at least 75 years.

4. Novels are better than films

- The tenacity of the prejudice in favor of novels and against films I due no doubt in part to the impossibility
of returning it
- It takes less time for most audiences to sit via most feature films tan it does for them to read most novels,
films, as many commentators realized long ago, can contain quite as many telling details as novels.
- Since there is no prima facie reason why novels should be assumed to be better than movies, the question to
ask is not why this assumption is wrong but why it is so stoutly, albeit tacitly, maintained.

5. Novels deal in concepts, films in percepts

- These terms are derived from Bluestones observation that where the moving image comes to us directly
via perception, language must be filtered via the screen of conceptual apprehension

6. Novels crate more complex characters than movies because they offer more immediate and complete
access to characters psychological states
- The ability to enter the minds of fictional characters directly is of course one of the glories, as it is one the
constitutive distinctions, of prose fictions- the only medium whose conventions allow third-person
sentenced beginning she thought- and it is indeed hard for movies to compete with novels in this regard

7. Cinemas visual specification usurps its audiences imagination

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- The assumption amusingly manages to invert the assumption that novels ability to present thought directly
makes their characters potentially deeper and richer than movie characters while still condemning movies
as inferior.
- In fact, the argument often urged against cinemas over specification would make more sense if it were
directed against novelists, since the details movies are compelled to specify- the shape of the settee on
which two lovers are sitting, the distance between them, the color of the wallpaper behind them- are often
inconsequential, whereas the thoughts going through their minds, which novels are much more likely than
films to specify with great precisions, are crucial.

8. Fidelity is the most appropriate criterion to use in analyzing adaptations

- Fidelity to its source text-whether it is conceived as success in re-creating specific textual details or the
effect of the whole- is a hopelessly fallacious measure of a given adaptations value because it is
unattainable, undesirable, and theoretically possible only in a trivial sense.
- Given the indefensibility of fidelity as a criterion for the analysis of adaptations, why has it maintained
such a stifling grip on adaptation stud?
- The assumption of fidelity is really an appeal to anteriority, the primacy of classics over modern texts
which are likely to come under suspicion by exactly the teachers train in literary studies

9. Source texts are more original than adaptations

- The basis for the assumption that literary texts are to be valued for an originality that adaptations lack is
clarified by considering the apparently exceptional case of Shakespeare, nearly all of whose plays are
adaptations, often to a new medium, of earlier material from sources.
- A primary reason that adaptation study remains obsessed with fidelity as a criterion for evaluation is that
adaptation raise questions about the nature of authorship that would be difficult to answer without the
bulwark of fidelity

10. Adaptations are adapting exactly on text apiece

- It seems commonsensical to assume a one-to-one correspondence between film adaptation and their literary
sources
- But as a novel may serve as the vehicle for over a hundred adaptations, each individual adaptation invokes
many precursor texts besides the one whose title it usually borrows.

11. Adaptations are intertexts, their precursor texts are simply texts
- This is the assumption that underlies the last two assumptions about original and the one-to-one congruence
adaptions are widely held to betray
- An adaptation is assumed to be a windows into a text on which it depends for its authority, and the business
of viewers and analysts is to look via the window for sings of the original text
- The texts themselves are assumed to be not windows but painting that invite readers to look at or into them
than through them

12. Adaptation study is a marginal enterprise

- This is the only one of the 12 fallacies that is actually true.

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- The broad implication of this idea is that adaptation study has sought a separate place less for aesthetic or
theoretical than for institutional reasons: to defend literary works and literature against the mass popularity
of cinema, to valorize authorial agency and originality in a critical climate increasingly opposed to either,
and to escape from the current orientation of film theory and from theoretical problems in general.
- In other words, adaptation study has been marginalized because it wishes to be.

CHAPTER 12

Vachel Lindsay, PROGRESS AND ENDOWMENT

- The moving picture goes almost as far as journalism into the social fabric in some ways, further in others
- With local journalism will come devices for advertising home enterprises
- The motion pictures will be held in public schools to stay
- Sooner or later we will have as straight-out capture of a complete film expression by the serious forces of
civilization.
- There also endowment already in existence that will no doubt be diverted to the photoplay channel
- The scientific museums distribute routine pamphlets that would set the whole world right on certain points
if they were but read by said world
- The plays could be acted by the group who, season after season, have secured the opera house for the
annual amateur show
- The use of the scientific film by established institutions like schools and state governments has been
discussed during years

CHAPTER 13

Kristin Thompson, NOVEL, SHORT STORY, DRAMA, The conditions for influence

- As films grew longer, the status of the individual film on a program changed
- Initially, eight or so short films might fill a 20-minute slot in a vaudeville program of several hours
- As a consequence, no individual film was expected to stand by itself due to the overall emphasis on variety
- In the early years, films had competed only with other vaudeville acts for a place on a program in an art
form that had an established audience
- The feature film, on the other hand, offered a more expensive often lengthier evenings entertainment, one
directly comparable to that offered by a play, and entrepreneurs showed early features in legitimate theaters
with prices based upon live-drama admissions.
- To a considerable extent, raising the quality of films to attract consumers of short fiction novels, and plays
required drawing directly or indirectly upon these other arts.
- Novels were relatively easy to sell but took more time to write
- Also, short stories were so popular at that time that a payment for a single story often was a great as the
total royalties on a novel
- In order to make narrative films on a regular, efficient basis, producers began to use the detailed division of
labor.
- The possibility for influence from the short story, then, came in part from the contact with writers who sold
stories in both the magazine and film markets.

CHAPTER 14

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Hugo Munsterberg, THE MEANS OF PHOTOPLAY

- We have reached the point at which we can know together all our threads, the psychological and the
esthetic ones
- We recognized that the photoplay, incomparable in its respect with the drama, valve us a view of dramatic
events which was completely shaped by the inner movements of the mind
- We saw that every shade of feeling and emotion which fills the spectators mind can mold the scenes in the
photoplay until they appear the embodiment of our feelings
- If this is the outcome of esthetic analysis on the one side, of psychological research on the other, we need
only combine the results of both into a unified principle.

CHAPTER 15

Sergei Eisenstein, DIKENS, GRIFFITH, AND THE FILM TODAY

- The esthetic growth from the cinematographic eye to the image of an embodied viewpoint on phenomena
was one of the most serious processes of development of our Soviet cinema in particular;
- Our cinema also played a tremendous role in the history of the development of world cinema as a whole
- One the less enormous was the role of Griffith also in the evolution of the system of Soviet montage; a role
as enormous as the role of Dickens in forming the methods of Griffith
- Dickens played an enormous role in heightening the tradition and cultural heritage of preceding epochs

CHAPTER 16

Walter Benjamin, THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF ITS TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

III. in even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art- its
unique existence in a particular place
- The here and now of the original underlies the concept of its authenticity and on the latter in turn is founded
the idea of a tradition which has passed the object down as the same, identical thing to the present day

IV.
- The way in which human perception is organized- the medium in which it occurs- is conditioned not only b
nature but by history
- The Aurea is a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may
be. To follow with the eye- while resting on a summer afternoon- a mountain range on the horizon or a
branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch.

V.
- the uniqueness of the work of art is identical to its embeddedness in the context of tradition
- The tradition itself is alive and extremely changeable
-the secular worship of beauty, which developed during the Renaissance and prevailed for three centuries,
clearly displayed that ritualistic basis in its subsequent decline and in the first severe crisis which befell it.

VI.
- Art history might be seen as the working out of a tension between two polarities within the artwork itself,
its course being determined by shifts in the balance between the two

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- It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity
that has fixed place in the interior of a temple
- - seriousness and play, rigor and license, are mingled in every work of art, though in very different
proportions
- This implies that art is linked to both the second and the first technologies

VII.
- In photography, exhibition value begins to drive back cult value on all fronts
- Cult value does not give way without resistance

VIII.
- The Greeks had only two ways of technologically reproducing works of art: casting and stamping Bronzes,
terrat cottas, and coin were the only artworks they could produce in large numbers
- All others were unique and could not be technological reproduced

IX.
- The 19th century dispute over the relative artistic merits of painting and photography seem misguided and
confused today
- The dispute was in fact an expression of a world-historical upheaval whose true nature was concealed from
both parties

X.
- to photograph a painting is on kind of reproduction, but to photograph an action performed in a film
studio is another
In the first case, what is reproduced is a work of art, while the act of producing it is not

XI.
- In the case of film, the fact that the actor represents someone else before the audience matters much less
than the fact that he represents himself before the apparatuses
- What matters is that the actor is performing for a piece of equipment-or, in the case of sound film, for two
pieces of equipment

XII.
- The representation of human beings by means of an apparatus has made possible a highly productive use of
the human beings self-alienation
- The nature of this use can be grasped via the fact that the film actors estrangement in the face of the
apparatus, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before ones appearance in a mirror
- Naturally, the screen actor never for a moment ceases to be aware of this.

XIII.
- It is inherent in the technology of film, as of sports, that everyone who witnesses theses performances does
so as quasi-expert
- Anyone who has listened to a group of newspaper boys leaning on their bicycles and discussing the
outcome of a bicycle race will have an inkling of this.
- For centuries it was in the nature of literature that a small number of writers confronted many thousands of
readers

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- This began to change toward the end of the past century with the growth and extension of the press, which
constantly made new political religious, scientific, professional and local journals available to readers, an
increasing number of readers- in isolated cases, at first- turned into writers
- All this can readily be applied to film, here shifts that in literature took place over centuries have occurred
in a decade

CHAPTER 17
Mark A. Reid, LITERAY FORCES ENCOURAGING THE USE OF BLACK WRITERS

A Raisin in the Sun

- One of the earliest major examples of a black family film that was written by a black scenarist and
independently produced for a major studio is the David Susskind and Philip Rose Production of A raising in
the Sun
- The film was directed by Daniel Petrie, and Hansberry adapted her original play for the screen
- The content of Raising seemed to be far different from the content of plays made by whites about blacks

Textual dialogue in A Raisin in the Sun

- It is problematic to assert that an imaginative work like Raisin reflects the collective voices of working-
class Black America
- The working film script generates a dialogic language that empowers a black working-class family in a
particular region and at a particular time- post WWII Chicago
- The movie attempts verbally and visually to affirm Afro-American working-class interests, especially via
the two white male characters who interact with Walter Lee and the Younger Family.
CHAPTER 18
Sarah Cardwell, LITERATURE ON THE SMALL SCREEN, Television adaptations

Practices, perceptions, and prejudices: film versus television adaptations

- The strong generic or group intended of television classic-novel adaptation has led, to pejorative judgments
from scholars and critics; as Jon Caughie notes, academic television criticism. has treated the classic serial
with a certain disdain
- However, televisions predilection for generically consistent classic-novel adaptations is not on its own
sufficient evidence to uphold an accusation of a lack of imagination or enterprise
- This is not to underplay the creative and commercial connections and correlations that can be found
between television and film adaptations, as selected historical instances reveal

Classic-novel adaptations
- They are often termed classic serials though this is a less accurate name, as there are some programmers
that fit within this genre which are not serials, and it is not the serials themselves that are necessarily
regarded as classic, but here courses
- The programmes mostly tend to draw upon well-known literature of the 19 th century and sometimes of the
18th and early 0th centuries
- Some critics have alleged that all classic-novel adaptations look broadly the same, and that they iron out the
significant difference between the source novels

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The roots of televisions adaptation: early television to the 1970s

- The technologies, institutions, ad ideals of early television shaped classic-novel adaptations, and the impact
of these factors lingers today within the genre

The impact of medium-specific technologies on aesthetic practices

- The technologies of television have always affected the stylistic choices that could be made by practitioners
- Early television had to contend with several technological limitations in comparison with contemporary
film
- Modes of performance were also influenced by these medium-specific conditions, leading to distinctively
different methods of portraying characters from those found in film.

The impact of institutions and ideals on aesthetic practices

- Many of the stylistic conventions of classic-novel adaptation shave their roots in televisions early history
and technology: sedate camerawork; and emphasis on words and on detailed mise-en-scene, as a means for
attaining fidelity; and careful exploitation of the possibilities of seriality.

Consolidating and expanding the genre: classic-novel adaptation from the 1980s to 2000s

- By the 1980s, television had grown into what may be regarded as a multi-channel environment
- Improvements in televisions technology, and the rise of videotapes and the DVDs, broadened televisions
aesthetic potential and meant that programme makers could foresee endurance, even longevity, for their
work.
- In addition, the opening up of the television market had a positive impact upon the development of
television adaptations

Scholarship
- Lez Cooker, for example, lumps together costume drama and classic-novel adaptations from the mid-1990s,
at exactly the point at which the genre becomes more varied- with the justification that these programmers
are all a part of the heritage export which makes British programmes like these so popular in other
countries
- Frequent and persistent recourse to notions of heritage also limits understanding of classic-novel
adaptations
- The heritage debate has long appealed to critics and theorists.

CHAPTER 19

Alexandre Astruc, THE BIRTH OF A NEW AVANT-GARDE, La camera-stylo

- The cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the other arts have been before it,
and in particular painting and the novel

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- It must be understood that up to now the cinema has been nothing more than a show, due to the basic fact
that all films are projected in an auditorium
- The idea of the cinema expressing ideas is not perhaps a new one
- Cinema is now moving towards a form which is making it such a precise language that will soon be
possible to write ideas directly on a film without even having to resort to those have associations of images
that were the delight of the silent cinema
- The fundamental problem of the cinema is how to express thought; the creation of this language has
preoccupied all the theoreticians and writers in the history of the cinema, from Einstein down to the
scriptwriters and adaptors of the sound cinema
- - one of the fundamental phenomena of the last few years has been the growing realization of the dynamic,
significant, character of the cinematic image
- Another idea implies that the scriptwriter directs his own scripts; or rather that the scriptwriter ceases to
exist, for in this kind of film-making the distinction between author and director loses all meaning

CHAPTER 20

Peter Wollen, THE AUTER THEORY

- The auter theory grew up rather haphazardly; it was never elaborated in programmatic terms, in a manifesto
or collective statement
- As a result, it could be interpreted and applied on rather broad lines; different critics developed somewhat
different methods within a loose framework of common attitudes
- In time, owing to the diffuseness of the original theory, two main schools of auter critics grew up: those
who insisted on revealing a core of meaning, of thematic motifs, and those who stressed style and mise en
scene.
- This case for the auter theory is provided by the work of Howard Hakws, Why Hakws, rather than, say,
Frank Borzage or King Vidor
- Hawks achieved by reducing the genres to two basic types: the adventure drama and the crazy comedy
these 2 types express inverse views of the world, the positive and negative poles of Hawksian vision
- The term avant-garde savors of the surrealist and so-called abstract films of the 1920
- The term was trying to create a specific domain for the cinema; we on the contrary are seeking to broaden it
and make it the most extensive and clearest language there is

CHAPTER 21
Jack Boozer, THE SCREENPLAY AND AUTHORSHIP IN ADAPTATION

Classical Hollywood and the adapted screenplay

- The major studios for classical Hollywood provided directors with all the information the needed, like
synopses
- - studio directors didnt have to actually read their sources for adaptation, especially in the rush to produce
the many films demanded by the studios exhibitors prior to 1948

New Wave auteurism and the new Hollywood aftermath

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- The French New Wave critics and filmmakers, who began work in the middle of the 1950s and continued
on via the 1960s, considered film a kind of extension of creative literary authorship that used the camera
instead of the pen
- The notion of equivalency in adaptation calls attention to cinemas particular need to do certain thing
differently in the trans mediation from literature
- Furthermore, the auteurists central attack was not on adaptation in general so much as on its frequent
tendency toward a complacent style and passive allegiance to literary sources

Theories of structuralisms and the disappearing author

- the influence of the auteur theory began to wave with the academic rise of semiotics and structuralism
- Semiotics declared the centrality of the sign and sign systems that could be applied to visual media as well
as written language.
- Poststructuralism has emphasized rather the gaps and fissures that are a part of the subject and the artist,
and the multivocality of influences that shape both
- In the Hollywood filmmaking contexts and constraints of rights and contracts, institutional structures of
production and branding, and the assignment of screen credits, creative talent can ultimately choose either a
lazy approach of audience exploitation via cultural clichs, spectacle and commercial reification or look
instead toward a careful cultural observation, uniqueness of expression, and cultural engagement

CHAPTER 22
Andre Bazin, THEATER AND CINEMA

The concept of presence

- at this point certain comments seem called for concerning the concept of presence, since it would appear
that it is this concept, as understood prior to the appearance of photography, that the cinema challenges
- Can the photographic image, be likened to other images and in common with them be regarded as having
an existence distinct from the object?
- The 19th century with its objective techniques of visual and sound reproduction gave birth to a new category
of images, the relation of which to the reality from which they proceed requires very strict definition

Opposition and identification

- A member of a film audience tends to identify himself with the films hero by a psychological process, the
result of which is to turn the audience into a mass and to render emotion uniform
- the cinema calms the spectator, the theater excites him
- The analysis of this phenomenon might indeed be undertaken from a psychoanalytic point of view

Behind the dcor

- the human being is all-important in the theater
- The drama on the screen can exist without actors
- There can be no theater without architecture, whether it be cathedral square, thee arena of Nimse, the
palace of the Popes, the trestle stage on a fairground etc.

The screen and the realism of space

- the realism of the cinema follows directly from its photographic nature

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- Not only does some marvel or some fantastic thing on the screen not undermine the reality of the image, on
the contrary it is most valid justification
- It is perhaps an overstatement to say all reality because it is difficult to imagine a reconstruction of space
devoid of all reference to nature.
- In fact it is the secondary details, apparently aesthetically at odds with the rest of the work which give it its
truly cinematic quality

CHAPTER 23
Leo Braudy, ACTING, Stage vs. Screen
- Acting in Europe and America has been historically defined by the varying interplay of the heightened and
the normal, the theatrical and the nonchalant, in the conception of the role.
- Acting on stage had necessarily developed a tradition of naturalness as well
- Our ability to learn what films can tell us about human character has suffered not only from preconceptions
derived from the novel of psychological realism, but also from assumptions about acting that are drawn
from the stage
- - the character in sound film especially was not so much deficient as it was elusive
- Film preserves a performance that is superior to the script, whereas stage performances and plays are
separate realities, with the performance often considered second best
- Filmmaking is a discontinuous process, in which the order of filming is influenced more by economics than
by aesthetics.

CHAPTER 24

George Bluestone, THE LIMITS OF THE NOVEL AND THE LIMITS OF THE FILM

The two ways of seeing

- Because novel and film are both organic- in the sense that aesthetic judgments are based on total ensembles
which include both formal and thematic conventions- we may expect to find that differences in form and
theme are inseparable from difference in media
- the moment the film went from the animation of stills to telling as troy, it was inevitable that fiction would
become the ore to be minted by story departments
- The film becomes a different thing in the same sense that a historical painting becomes a different thing
from the historical event which it illustrates

The modes of consciousness

- It is a commonplace by now that the novel has tended to retreat more and more from external action to
internal thought, from lot to character, from social to psychological realities.
- The rendition of mental states- memory, dream, imagination- cannot be as adequately represented by film
as by language
- On the other hand, the film image, being externalized in space, cannot be similarly converted via the
conceptual screen

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Chronological time

- The novel has 3 tenses: the film as only one

- From this follows almost everything else one can say about time in both media
- the ranges of chronological time for reader and viewer are rather fluid, yet more or less fixed by
convention, where a novel can be read in anywhere from 2 to 50 hours, a film generally runs for one or two

Psychological Time

- we speak of psychological time here in at least 2 roughly define ways

- the first suggests that the human mind is capable of accelerating and collapsing the feel of time to the point
where each individual may be said to possess his own time-system.
- The second suggests, beyond this variability in rate, the kind of flux which, being fluid and interpenetrable,
and lacking in sharp boundaries, can scarcely be measured at all

Psychological time: the time flux

- As soon as we entered the realm of time-in-flux, we only broach all but insoluble problems for the novel
but we also find a sharp divergence between prose and cinema
- The transient, sequential, and irreversible character of language is no longer adequate for this type of time
experience
- In the flux past and present lose their identify as discrete sections of time
- The present becomes specious because on second glance iti is seen as fused with the past obliterating the
line between them

CHAPTER 25

Judith Mayne, READERSHIP AND SPECTATORSHIP

- The illusion of seeing and hearing: such a description of those well-beloved works brought to the screen
suggests and interesting parallel between the itineraries of reading and viewing
- The reading process represented in the film is of a special type
- Memory is essential to the way in which the itineraries of reading and viewing are intertwined in the film
- Not any individual life is impenetrable, but the life of an individual who has become a public figure
- It is suggested that the evolution of spectatorship is tied to the function of readership in a different way by
the presence of characters who function primarily as spectators within the film.
CHAPTER 27

Timothy Corrigan, THE ESSAY FILM, On thoughts occasioned by Michel de Montaigne and Chris
Marker

- The essayistic describes the many layered activities of a personal point of view as a public experience
- Against a historical background, the essayistic has become increasingly the object of theoretical and
philosophical reflections and self-reflections, starting especially in the early 0 th century.
- Essayistic thinking becomes a conceptual, figural, phenomenological, or representational remaking of a self
as it encounters, tests, and experiences some version of the real as a public elsewhere

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- Essayistic thought becomes the exteriorization of personal expression, determined and circumscribed by an
always varying kind, quality, and number of material contexts in which to think is to multiply ourselves.
- The tension and dialogue between the verbal and the visual becomes particularly pronounced in the 19 th
century in ways that adumbrate the rise of the essayistic and film representation more generally
- The three relations to thought of the movement image occur in this way: 1, forces thinking and thinks under
thought (critical thought); 2, with a second movement or spiral between intellectual cinema and and
sensory thought or emotional intelligence (hypnotic thought) and 3, identity of concept and image or the
externalization of man (action thought)

CHAPTER 28

Evelyn Tribble, WHEN EVERY NOISE APPALLS ME, Sound and fear in Macbeth and Akira Kurosawas
Throne of Blood

Listening to Shakespeare in Throne of Blood

- Ever since the silent film gave way to the talkie sound has interfered with the image- and at the same time
this flood of sound has become largely meaningless
- The relationship between sound and image is never natural, thought it may seem that way
- Throne of Blood is rich in acousmatic sounds, those heard without seeing their source
- Kurosawa exploits this hermeneutic, but with far more complexity.
- The most striking visual image in the film may be the shots of the moving Cobweb Forest, which seen from
above, roughly from the pov of Washizu, and punctuated by dep percussion underscore, this sequence is an
extraordinary visual crescendo as the disorienting exterior space of the forest approaches the castle.
- It is important listening to Shakespeare, attending both to the technologies and conventions of sound
available in the early modern theatre, and to the very different technologies and conventions of sound
production in the cinema
- Studying sound as a crucial element of adaptation forces us to see that sound is neither a natural nor a
transparent phenomenon.

CHAPTER 29

Courtney Lehmann, OUT DAMNED SCOT, Dislocating Macbeth in transnational film and media culture

Taking the high (land) road

- Macbeth may be known as the Scottish play, but the Scottish film is decidedly not Macbeth nor,
paradoxically, is it Scottish
- this could have been my city, it is significant that this line is uttered as voice-over, for, as Joan Copjec
argues, voice-over issues from an uncanny off-screen space, the space of the bitemporal voice that cannot
be situated in nor subject to the ravages of- time or place
- - this resolutely intemporal place is the locus of the real Scotland, however much it may initially suggest
the spectral appearances of Birgadoon

Something is rotten in the state of Scotland

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- The fact that Braveheart and Rob Roy have been commercially more successful than film such as Shallow
Grave and Trainspotting is not due to production values alone; rather it is their contrasting ideological
values, masked as differences of genre, which constitute the geopolitical gap between the Scottish film and
the Scottish film.
- The range f possible articulations of drive in these films is as broad as the ideological expanse that
separates the enabling heterogeneity of the Scottish clans from the oppressive singularity to the Scottish Ku
Klux Klan

Macbeth meets Mad Max, or, the persistence of (Mel Gibsons) memory
- After Macbeth encounters with the witches, the scenery that begins in the province of the wide open
spaces of the western shifts almost exclusively to interiors- large, vacant, post-industrial spaces that once
served as the urban playground of film noir, which in the noir western, have become a metaphor for the
dark corners of unexamined conscience.
- The problem with this assertion as critics of globalization have made clear is that not everyone is involved
equally in this system, just as drive cannot enter into equilibrium with desire but instead only displace it

Taking the low road: Shakespeare does Scotland

- Location as it appears resonates as a naught pun, since nothing in the film- from the castle interiors to the
alfresco flicking in the open air- signifies a place that is specifically Budapest other than the thick eastern
European accents and swarthy, Magyar look Scotland- the land dislocated from the historical fiction.

When in Scotland, do as the Bohemians do

- In the Flesh is particularly fascinating for thaw y in which it updates Shakespeares Scottish play to further
its own ideological enterprise
- The conspicuous absence of Malcolm- along with Lady Macduffs children and Banquos son Fleance-
underscores the fact that dynasties are irrelevant in the world of non-procreative and nomadic sexual
relations

Macbeth, the comedy: from Luke Skywalker to Walker Shortbread

- Offering a variation on the dark comedy that constitutes the American high-school experience, the film
features an attractive, athletic-looking Macbeth being defeated by glasses-wearing, semi-preppy nerds
- Following a slew of lightsaber fencing, the rather awkward Skywalker character, Macduff, presents an
African-American Malcolm with Macbeths head in a backpack
- Following the triumphant finale wherein the student cast is spliced into film footage of Star Wars itself in
order to receive their rewards from a pimply-faced Princess Leia the scene suddenly cuts away to Macduff
and Malcolm back at school enjoying a Coke in front of the soda machine

Conclusion: If it isnt Scottish its crap Mike Myers

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- Given the extent to which the horizon of reception has changed in the wake of the digital diaspora, the
temptation has never been greater to retreat further into the private jouisance of our personal entertainment
units
CHAPTER 30
Hilary Schurz; EMMA, INTERRUPTED, Speaking Jane Austen in fiction and film

Opening gambits
- The novel version of Emma opens with a calm, collected, ironic voice describing its heroine the film
version opens with a sphere spinning in space, pictures of people and places, and a woman with a clear,
elegant English accent telling us of the world of Highbury
- The narrator, is there before the novel, for the novels famous first sentence places us squarely in the voice
of its narrator- and one of the real achievements of the McGrath adaptation is to ask a very novelistic
question: just how much are we to truth that voice, or the voice of anyone telling us a story?
- Thus, the novel encourages us, subtly, to distrust our distrust of Emma
- It teaches us, perversely, as Mrs. Weston announces early, that there are limits to her foolishness.

Hearing voices: from free indirect discourse to voice-over

- The filmmaker faces a particular problem in his adaptation: how to show the play of voices which makes
up the world of Emma, while keeping viewers focused on the problems of knowledge that the novel
highlights and keeping them particularly focused on what Emma Woodhouse knows and how she knows it.
- The use of characters voices to disrupt filmic coherence seems particularly appropriate for adapting Jane
Austen, since the integration of voice, particularly via the technique literary critics have come to fall free
indirect discourse, was one of the chief innovations Austen brought to the novel.

Hearing film

- McGraths use of voice as a sign of character is if anything more striking

- Characters voices routinely enter rooms before they do
- A line of speech serves as a transition from one scene to another
- Voices proceed from space, only to have the body of the speaker emerge from a chair or from around a
corner

Bridging the social gap

- The film adaptation of Emma uses voice in three interesting ways: when the narrator speaks directly to us,
at the films beginning and end; when characters speak over scenes, forming the narratives transitions or
providing ironic commentary and when Emma Woodhouse, in several different ways and to different ends,
talks to herself

The technology of privacy

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- When Emma Woodhouse speaks to herself of romantic love, she writes in a diary, she brushes her hair, she
sits in her garden, she prays- she in all ways behaves like a literary heroine
- Ecstasy, of course, before it was associated purely with romantic love was also an out-of-body experience;
to be ecstatic is to be beside the self, outside the self
- Emmas voice-overs suggest repeatedly that her romantic dreams are far less important to her than her
desire for understanding, her wish to see more of the world, to see outside of herself, to obtain some
omniscient perspective.
- Emmas scenes of introspection offer a similar blend of the technologically sophisticated and the naively
self-expressive; in keeping with the pattern stressed via this reading of the film, they accentuate the act of
writing so as to give even greater emphasis to the act of speaking, but their need to negotiate so many
filmic boundaries between linguistics acts lends Emmas most impassioned moments of expressiveness a
significantly self-reflexive quality.

CHAPTER 31

William Galperin, ADAPTING JANE AUSTEN, The surprising fidelity of Clueless

- Fidelity as some have argued, remains a quaint or outdated concept in discussing film adaptation, given the
strain that any signifying practice, much less an intermedial one, necessarily exerts on the integrity or truth
of a given representation
- The problem is compounded further, Robert Stam has recently argued, by the fact that neither the novel nor
the cinema is generically predisposed to a single truth or essence which could readily be transferred form
one medium to the other as an originary core or a kernel of meaning or even a nucleus of events.
- The novel is primarily a narrative of upward mobility, centering on the rise of the initially impoverished
Fanny, who goes to live with the family of her wealthy uncle Sir Thomas Bertram, who happens also to
own a plantation in the West Indies.
- Rozem and other adaptors seem generally to believe, that Jane Austen necessarily feared change or was
unequipped to deal with I tin any way apart from one that was class-based and conservative
- The more conventional cinematic adaptations of Emma treat the novel very differently of course, sticking
to a sense of it based on a single reading
- Adhering strenuously to the main plot, in which Emmas matchmaking comes off as a meddling that only
threatens the happiness of the young woman shes trying to help, the adaptations b McGrath and Gavies not
only follow a storyline that repeats itself over and over.

CHAPTER 32

Simone Murray, MATERIALIZING ADAPTATION THEORY

- IN TAKING ADAPTATION STUDIES TO TASK FOR ITS UNCIRTICAL ADHERENCE TO TEXTUAL

ANALYSIS AS A GOVERNING METHODLOGY, I AM NOT SUGGESTING THAT ADAPATION

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STUDIES HAS BEEN DEVOID OF INNOVATION, ONLY THAT SUCH PRIOR waves of innovation as
have occurred have experimented within severely confided limits.
- Having sketched the background of extant adaptation studies and note diets methodological lacunae, I want
to proceed to examine in further detail how lack of attention to production contexts has compromised
current understanding of adaptation
- In seeking of debunk this myth of isolated authorial creation, I am not denying that a clear difference in
organizational and financial scale exists between the writing of, for example, a battle scene in a novel and
the filmic realization of its equivalent
- The articles key aim is to rethink adaptation, not as an exercise in comparative textual analysis of
individual books and their screen versions, but as a material phenomenon produced by a system of
institutional interests an actor
- -the third cognate methodology proposed here, history of the book, traces its own complex disciplinary
history from French historical studies, sociology, literary studies, bibliography, and the history of ideas to
coalesce as an academic discipline from late 1970s.
- Compelling as is political economys materialist conceptualization of contemporary media industries, on its
own it provides an inadequate schema for understanding the adaptation industrys role in brokering cultural
value.
- The present articles conceptual framework for a new model of what has been termed the adaption
industry derives from the circuit models prominent in book history that chart the circulation and flow of
print communications among various book industry stakeholders
- Belated reformulation of adaptation theory to account for the industrial dimensions of adaptation in
contemporary media cultures tends to benefit multiple constituencies,
- For academic adaptation studies, such an innovation would shake off the enervating sense of a discipline
sunk in the doldrums, and would productively reconnect the field to cognate areas in cultural analysis,
hybridizing its methodology and adding theoretical nuance to its governing models.

CHAPTER 33

Linda Hutcheon, HOW? (AUDIENCES)

- The creation and reception of adaptations are inevitably going to be intertwined-and not only in commercial
terms; because audiences react in different ways to different media- thank to social and material
differences- the possible response of the target audience to a story is always going to be a concern of the
adapter
- When either to voice-over narrator or the protagonist addresses the audience, a kind of negotiation is set up
between the text and our knowledge of it and its garrulous narrating biographer
- Known adaptations obviously function similarly to genres; they set up audience expectation via a set of
norms that guide our encounter with the adapting work we are experiencing.
- Telling, showing and interacting with stories differ in the kind and manner of engagement of the reader
- Adapters know his, so too do those who market adaptation
- Even within a single mode of engagement, there are once again major distinctions to be made, especially
with performance media

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- All three modes of engagement can be considered immersive: the act of reading a print text immerses us
through imagination in another world, seeing a play or film immerses us visually and aurally, and
interacting with a story in a videogame or in a theme park adds a physical, enacted dimension.

CHAPTER 34

Henry Jenkins, SEARCHING FOR THE ORIGAMI, The Matrix and transmedia storytelling

- - the film needed not be well made, but it must provide resources consumers can use in constructing their
own fantasies: In order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge
it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship to the whole:
- And the cult film need not be coherent: the more different directions it pushes, the more different
communities it can sustain and the more different experiences it can provide, the better
- By the standards of classical Hollywood storytelling, such gaps as the failure to introduce The kid or to
explain where Niobe came from, or excesses such as the reference to the last transmission of the Osirirs
confuse the spectator
- The old Hollywood system depended on redundancy to ensure that viewers could follow the plot at all
times, even if they were distracted or went out to the lobby for a popcorn refill during a crucial scene.
- Media conglomeration provided a context for the Wachwski brothers aesthetic experiment- they wanted to
play with a new kind of storytelling and use WBs blockbuster promotion to open it to the largest possible
public
- If all the they wanted was synergy, they could have hired hack collaborators who could crank out the
games, comics, and cartoons.
- The Wachowski brothers built a playground where other artists could experiment and fans could explore
- For this to work, the brothers had to envision the world of The Matrix with sufficient consistent that each
instalment is recognizably part of the whole and with enough flexibility.
- If creators do not ultimately control what we take from their transmedia stories, this does not prevent them
from trying to shape our interpretations,
- Neil Young talks about additive comprehension

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