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- Volume 14, Issue 2, 2021
Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2021
Volume 14, Issue 2, 2021
- Editorial
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- Articles
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Easy Rider and Thelma & Louise revisited, or on experimental film remakes of the road movie
More LessAlthough remakes and road movies are particularly endemic to Hollywood cinema, experimental filmmakers have also embraced the road movie tradition and reproduced existing material for new audiences to retell, readdress and rearticulate the prior story, exploring the dialectics between repetition, differentiation and genre. Interestingly, however, while the remake, seen mostly as a genre phenomenon, has received some critical attention, remaking in the avant-garde film scene has been rarely explored by adaptation theory and practice. To somewhat fill in this gap, the article situates two recent avant-garde films, James Benning’s Easy Rider (2012) and Jessica Bardsley’s Goodbye Thelma (2019), within the framework of remake and adaptation studies and proposes that both works function as acknowledged and transformed remakes of the classic road movies, in which the outcome radically differs from the original story and crosses the temporal and spatial boundaries of the genre. In doing so, the projects fit in with the broader tradition of cinematic reworking and recycling as they continuously reference and exploit earlier films by creating their alternative versions as well as a strong sense of place and movement.
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Psycho-killer: Shifting spectator address from Psycho to Bates Motel
By Derek DuboisLeveraging 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.
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Beyond the webs of ideology: Orson Welles’s Othello in post-war Italy
More LessThis 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.
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Michael Winterbottom’s The Claim (2000) as a transnational and transcultural adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge
More LessIn this article, we will be focusing on issues of transnational and transcultural film adaptation using as a case study a particular screen adaptation of the novel The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy entitled The Claim (Michael Winterbottom 2000). The article aims to analyse the film in relation to these issues, taking into account notions of transcultural adaptation and transnational film productions, as well as mobility and migration in the context of a nineteenth-century film text. It is not only a text that relocates Hardy’s narrative into a new geographical/cultural dimension, but also it is itself a transnational production. Moreover, in the case of The Claim, there seems to be a clear understanding of processes of intercultural community construction that are particularly productive to look at. The article establishes a link between the particular transcultural perspective raised in this film and Michael Winterbottom’s oeuvre, taking also into account other adaptations of Hardy’s novels by the same director and the Western genre that underlies this film production.
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The state of the British garden: Mike Bartlett’s Albion and its Chekhovian scions
By Stuart YoungMike 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.
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- Practitioners’ Perspectives
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- Book Review
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Studying Shakespeare Adaptation: From Restoration Theatre to YouTube, Pamela Bickley and Jenny Stevens (2020)
More LessReview of: Studying Shakespeare Adaptation: From Restoration Theatre to YouTube, Pamela Bickley and Jenny Stevens (2020)
The Arden Shakespeare, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 264 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-35006-864-3, h/bk, £65.00, p/bk, £19.99
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 17 (2024)
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Volume 16 (2023)
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Volume 15 (2022)
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Volume 14 (2021)
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Volume 13 (2020)
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Volume 12 (2019)
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Volume 11 (2018)
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Volume 10 (2017)
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Volume 9 (2016)
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Volume 8 (2015)
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Volume 7 (2013 - 2014)
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Volume 6 (2013)
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Volume 5 (2012)
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Volume 4 (2011)
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Volume 3 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 2 (2009)
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Volume 1 (2007 - 2009)
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Editorial
Authors: Richard Hand and Katja Krebs
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