Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2013

The article argues that the violence of rhetoric pertaining to fidelity in adaptation – e.g., that the adaptation ‘destroys’ or ‘mutilates’ the adapted text – may at times be symptomatic not of displeasure, but of sadomasochistic pleasure in adaptation. As readers, viewers and listeners develop fantasmatic relationships to texts, they identify with narrative structures, characters and style. Reading, viewing or listening to an adaptation as such can thus be seen as a way of fantasizing both the adaptation and the adapted text, and particularly of fantasizing the latter’s wholeness of meaning and/or form. Guy Maddin’s exemplary Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary in 2002 is analysed in terms of its ‘dismemberment’ of the ballet on which it is based. While ballet is usually conceived as an art form that communicates through dancers’ whole bodies, Maddin’s film obscures parts of the frame through picture distortion and ‘cuts off’ parts of the bodies through framing and editing techniques in order to elicit sadomasochistic pleasure. The conception of a sadomasochistic form of adaptation is not, however, restricted to film adaptations of ballet, and the article briefly discusses other possible applications of the theory.

This article examines the atypical narrative structure director Oliver Stone and co-scenarist Ron Kovic employed to create a screenplay and cinematic incarnation of the latter’s memoir, Born on the Fourth of July (Kovic, 1976). The eponymous film (Stone, 1989) is exceptional from other screen war biographies in that it adeptly incorporates a triptych and elongated five-act structure to punctuate the transformation of a gung-ho marine into a committed political activist. The article’s main purpose is to expand on the foundations of narrative theory that have been applied to Fourth of July and create a new perceptual lens (via Freytagian criticism) for other avenues to examine how the text cultivates an antiwar discourse. Stone’s structural choices are motivated by a political agenda. It is argued that via the theoretical application of Gustav Freytag’s pyramidal five-act structure to Fourth of July’s narratological makeup, I demonstrate how Stone presents a series of significant signs and signifiers through several scenes which effectively depict Kovic’s evolving maturation and growth. Although Freytag’s pyramid has historically played an important role in the analysis of modes such as drama and film, I propose to bring it to bear on Stone’s film in order to reframe existing critical and popular discussions of the film.

This article explores the challenges of adapting modern short stories, using as a case study Away From Her (2006), Sarah Polley’s cinematic adaptation of Alice Munro’s ‘The bear came over the mountain’. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s adaptation theory, the article asks whether some common assumptions concerning the constraints of film can be sustained in relation to adaptations of short stories. Focusing specifically on the issue of Weltian ‘mystery’ that has become associated with the form, the article considers Polley’s claims to textual fidelity and her handling of the many tensions inherent in Munro’s elliptical story. The article pays particular attention to Polley’s treatment of the story’s silences and absences and highly ambiguous ending. It considers Polley’s manipulation of dialogue and visual and aural cues and argues that she ultimately compromises the story’s mystery through the elaboration of narrative structures favoured by Hollywood: the love story and the discovery story.

This article assumes a position that sees translation – the interlingual transposition of languages – and adaptation – the (sometimes) interlingual (and sometimes) intersemiotic textual practice as one process despite their separate histories, theories and fields of study. The notion of adaptation is invoked all too often by those commissioning translations as a pejorative, a slur on a (target) text’s authenticity and integrity while for the commissioners of adaptations, translation remains a moniker for either interlingual transposition or a metaphor for supposed one-to-one correspondences of words, scenes, ideas and themes. Jazz, like translation, remains a minority interest, something that operates on the fringes of its more mainstream twin (popular music/literature). But its true power lies in its ability to subvert, invert, move, adapt, but always move forward and change. In this sense, it provides a convenient and creative way to view translation – as a performance on a source, and more specifically a certain kind of performance – jazz. In seeing the relationship between the source and the target, the original text/s and its/their newly forged resultant whole, as essentially dialogic and responsive, adaptation and translation can be viewed as performances on their sources. Just as actors might seek to engage with a text, find a connection with it, and perform it in a personal way that reflects their creative response to that text, so too we can begin to see the work of translators and adaptors beyond the world and scope of theatre practice.

When Dennis Potter adapted his award-winning 1978 BBC television miniseries Pennies from Heaven into an MGM musical, it failed at the box office and subsequently received scant critical attention for its innovations. Both productions probe the border between fantasy and reality, signified by the generic juxtaposition of melodrama and the musical as characters pursue dreams mediated by popular song. Both shift modes between naturalism and stylization, notably in Potter’s signature device, in which the actors lip-sync and dance to 1930s recordings. Yet while both versions of Pennies offer disruptive hybrid forms, they accomplish significantly different ends. The BBC series elides fantasy and reality to explore character, suggesting the interpenetration of these oppositions in the characters’ consciousnesses. Herbert Ross’s film, however, serves as an anti-musical by putting the genres and modes on collision course. In a close comparative reading of the two versions of Pennies, especially of select musical sequences, the article argues that the film shifts the discourse’s meanings from a psychological and sociological study to an ideological critique of the musical as a cinematic form.

This article will examine the directorial approaches in Othello’s Revenge, directed by George Rodosthenous, in order to provide an insight to the adaptation process. The ‘framing’ of Iago, leading to his and Othello’s revenge, will be discussed in juxtaposition to K. McLelland’s bisexual reading of Othello in 2011 and I. Karremann’s evaluation in 2003 that ‘the play reads either as the tragic failure of a heterosexual love or as the tragic failure of a homosocial desire’. The different forms of sexual, homosocial and bisexual love will be explored in relation to the main characters in this production and demonstrate how Cassio, the only survivor of this emotional and physical catastrophe, was in fact the main axis for the narrative.

In/Fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation, David L. Kranz and Nancy C. Mellerski (eds) (2008) Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 251 pp., ISBN: 9781847184023, h/bk, £34.99

The Radio Drama Handbook, Richard J. Hand and Mary Traynor (2011) London and New York: Continuum, 227 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4411-4743-1, p/bk, £14.95.