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- Volume 11, Issue 1, 2018
Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 11, Issue 1, 2018
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Queer strangers: Alfred Hitchcock’s fidelity to Patricia Highsmith
More LessAbstractIn the growing interest of Alfred Hitchcock adaptations, this article discusses not necessarily why the director chose to adapt Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel, Strangers on a Train (1950, 1951), but how he adapted her. While this dualistically reveals much about the creative process of both the director and the novelist, it further begins to pay some due to the ways in which Hitchcock’s film is indebted to Highsmith’s structure, miasma and characters. Notwithstanding the acclaim to which Highsmith’s novel is now held within the fields of crime writing and the writer’s oeuvre, notable scholars writing on the film have been too quick to dismiss the novel as a rough plot for what Hitchcock developed to become the finished film. This article will go some way towards challenging this assertion.
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Slow burn: James M. Cain, slow cinema and György Fehér’s Szenvedély
More LessAbstractFew novels have proven as alluring to filmmakers as James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which since its publication in 1934 has been adapted to the screen seven times in six different countries. This article focuses on one such adaptation – a film that has to date received little critical attention: György Fehér’s Szenvedély (or Passion) from 1998. More precisely, it positions Szenvedély as a work of ‘slow cinema’, arguing that Fehér’s film draws heavily on the aesthetic practices of this emergent genre in its creative engagement with Cain’s story of lust and murder, its engagement with the affective economy generated by Cain’s text, and the intensities this fosters. With an emphasis on affect and lived time over narrative momentum and causality, Szenvedély’s affords viewers a temporally engrossing, viscerally arresting cinematic experience that – in its own distinctive, insinuative manner – is downright Cainsian in its power to move and shock.
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Cultural continuity and national emasculation: Werner Herzog’s and Dariush Mehrjui’s cinematic adaptations of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck
By Daniel KoppAbstractTaking the example of German dramatist Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, this article presents several arguments to differentiate an influential discourse on film adaptations: the discourse of fidelity – the idea that adaptations are evaluated by their close translation of an original work of literature to the cinematic screen. After having criticized this discourse in terms of the textual and editorial status of Büchner’s drama, the article provides a comparative case study contrasting two adaptations of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck to differentiate the issue: Werner Herzog’s approach Woyzeck (1979) and Dariush Mehrjui’s transcultural adaptation Postchi (Postman) (1972). While Herzog’s film is often considered a faithful adaption, it not only provides interesting transformations of Büchner’s drama but, as will be argued, Herzog chose his specific, theatricalized approach to make the film relevant to German audiences of the 1970s by recreating a lost connection to Germany’s cultural heritage. The supposed faithfulness of his adaptation has to be considered in this specific context. Mehrjui’s transcultural adaptation, in contrast, transposes Büchner’s Woyzeck to an Iranian context, making it relevant for specific historical and societal issues in Iran in the 1970s. Büchner’s Woyzeck, in which the theme of the eponymous character’s impotence plays an important role, becomes an allegorical story of national emasculation in Mehrjui’s adaptation. As different as Herzog’s and Mehrjui’s cinematic approaches and intentions may be – creating national cultural continuity versus creating a story of national emasculation – they both develop highly creative adaptations of Büchner’s Woyzeck.
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Translatorial and editorial paratexts in the twentieth-century Polish Hamlets
More LessAbstractTranslatorial and editorial paratexts found in the twentieth-century Polish editions of Hamlet reveal a variety of socio-political and historico-literary contexts vital for the play’s reception and explaining its crucial position in the canon of Shakespearean translations. The article presents an analysis of introductions, prefaces, afterwords, notes, essays, commentaries and footnotes or endnotes that accompany the published versions authored by various translators between 1913 and 1997 and discusses the diversity of their content and functions with the aim of establishing a range of aspects that have been shaping the reception of this play in Poland.
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Was the 2005 Doom film ‘Doomed from the beginning?’: First-person shooters, subjective cameras and intertextuality in the critical reception of the film adaptation Doom (2005)
More LessAbstractIn 2005 the first-person-shooter computer game Doom was adapted into a film. As the defining characteristic of the game, a first-person-shooter sequence was included as a key section of the Doom film. This sequence is one of the most commented about aspects of the film. The majority of reviews mention it and have a definite opinion about it; although the consensus is divided. The first-person-shooter genre of computer game and this sequence in the Doom film can both be understood in relationship to the subjective camera shots used in cinema. However, I will demonstrate that the same technique had fundamentally different meanings to the audience because of the different relationships to narrative and character in films and video games.
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Retranslating Strindberg: Adaptation, (re)location and site-related performance
More LessAbstractThis article offers a practitioner’s perspective on the experience of adapting, devising and co-producing A Dream Play for a northern British audience at an art café during the Manchester Festival Fringe in 2015. It explores how the process of re-versioning A Dream Play provides insights that might be of relevance to the fields of adaptation and translation studies. Starting from the position that translation is ‘rewriting’ – an ‘active form of interpretation whose cultural impact is extensive’ – the article argues that the adaptation of August Strindberg’s text to a devised, site-related performance amplified that ‘cultural impact’ through its ‘retranslation’ to a non-traditional theatre site. In shaping the responses of cast and audience to the physical performance space, the production created a ‘poetics of the collective’, which permitted a new engagement with Strindberg’s canonical text. The piece concludes with some reflections on the constraints of the writer-adaptor in the re-visioning, particularly in an iconic text such as A Dream Play.
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Reviews
Authors: Pavel Drábek and Laurence RawAbstractAdapting Translation for the Stage, Geraldine Brodie and Emma Cole (eds) (2017) London and New York: Routledge. 298 pp., ISBN: 9781138218871, h/bk, £110.00; ISBN: 9781315436814, e/bk, £35.99
The Translator on Stage, Geraldine Brodie (2018) New York: Bloomsbury. 208 pp., ISBN: 9781501322112, h/bk, £96.00; ISBN: 9781501322105, p/bk, £23.99; ISBN: 9781501322136, e/bk, £25.99
Writing for Radio, Christopher William Hill (2015) London: Bloomsbury, 163 pp., ISBN: 978-1-408-13983-7, p/bk, £16.99
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Editorial
Authors: Richard Hand and Katja Krebs
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