Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Polish Perspectives on Adaptation, Mar 2021

Romeo i Julia z Saskiej Kępy (‘Romeo and Juliet from Saska Kępa’) is a Polish film from 1988, which showcases the idea(l) of true love in late-communist Warsaw. He (Leopold) is an alcohol-wasted, promising painter, she (Sabina) comes to Warsaw from the country and finds employment as a domestic help. They find their love space in a boiler-room in a ruined tenement house in the prestigious and elitist district of Saska Kępa in Warsaw. The film is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play of sorts; although there are references to Shakespeare’s tragedy and parallels are more or less detectable, the film rather addresses the status of the play in the Polish culture of the late 1980s, in the context of the drab reality of Poland just before the transition in 1989 (not that it anticipates it). Thus, it can be possibly classified as what Sanders (2006) views as appropriation. Our aim is to explore the functioning and role of the Romeo and Juliet myth in the (popular) culture of decadent communist Poland and its treatment in Skórzewski’s film: how certain motifs from the play, especially those associated with the myth of ideal love, were developed in a modernized version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, thus reflecting certain topical problems, which the director addresses appropriating this myth. Rather than showing love between the two figures impossible due to the rivalry between two families/opposing groups, Skórzewski finds obstacles for such love in the drab reality of the late 1980s and social differences between the two lovers. The director makes them mature people, neither are they stunningly beautiful, nor living a comfortable life.

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.

This article is an attempt at analysing Hollywood remakes and their British originals in terms of constructing and articulating their shared identity and their difference. Although the source films are considered British, they are often UK/US co-productions, made at the time of Hollywood’s active involvement in the domestic film scene during the so-called ‘Hollywood England’. This complicates neat labels not only in terms of nationality and geography but also original versus copy and points to the existence of transnational and transcultural flows already in evidence in the original works. The article focuses on genre and casting in a selection of British films from the 1960s/70s and then their Hollywood remakes in the new millennium as an example of such cross-pollination with remakes and their originals seen as hybrid works existing between two cultures and film traditions that can be accessed from both directions.

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.

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.