Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2014

Through a film adaptation of the anonymous Internet novel, Beijing Story, Stanley Kwan normalizes a male gay relationship against the backdrop of political unrest in 1980s and 1990s China. Choosing to de-emphasize the political and cultural context in Lan Yu (2001) reduces the visible complexity of the politics of homosexuality in China and between the two main characters, Chen Handong and Lan Yu. Nevertheless, Kwan’s decision to normalize the gay relationship creates gaps between the source text and adaptation that viewers, in the absence of an overt message, may choose to interpret politically. This article focuses on three areas in which these gaps are most obvious and open to political interpretation: money and politics, family structure and traditional values, and science and religion.

In recent years, adaptation studies has emerged as a field of urgent scholarly importance and, having moved past outdated presuppositions and prejudices, has revealed adaptation as a crucial form of dialogue between and among different media, texts and social–historical contexts. The proliferation of new technologies and new media, theorized as the digital post-cinematic era, but encompassing more than what Costas Constandinides calls the ‘post-­celluloid’ (2010: 3), has arguably deepened this importance, implicating adaptation in previously unconsidered cultural arenas. In their common emphasis upon post-millennial cinema, all four articles in this dossier are based in the recognition that it is no longer possible to conceive of filmic adaptation as a straightforward movement from page to screen; that therefore we must turn our attention to the role new media technologies play in processes of dialogic mediation and identity formation, in the production (and elision) of inter-subjective and cultural difference, in the shaping of cultural memory, and in the very question of defining cinema in the early twenty-first century.

This article explores the phenomenon of metareference within two recent adaptations, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) and The Adventures of Tintin (2011), each of which adapts a body of work already adapted across a wide range of media. This article argues that by employing metareference, a self-reflexive strategy that seeks to engender an awareness of media properties among audiences, these films self-reflexively address cinema’s potential as a medium for adaptation. However, rather than marshalling these films in an assertion of cinema’s superiority, this article suggests that they explore anxieties over cinema’s changing position in the media landscape, ultimately reflecting broad shifts in our perception of film adaptation.

This article addresses the ways in which two recent works of digital cinema, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006) revive classical (photochemical) cinema through what is termed ‘nostalgic remediation’. Rather than seeing nostalgia as ironic, ahistorical pastiche, as in Fredric Jameson’s description of postmodern nostalgia films, this article asks: how can we understand nostalgia as part of our own lived, affective experience of film within today’s new media ecology? To answer this question, it draws on theories of post-celluloid adaptation and remediation to demonstrate the ambivalent relationships between historical and current media platforms seen in digital cinema. These ambivalences, it is argued, reflect the broader anxieties and aspirations that arise in times of technological and social transition, such as the changes brought about by the digitization of media at the turn of the twenty-first century. Hugo and Paprika perfectly illustrate the delicate tension of nostalgic remediation, which shifts between transcending celluloid cinema and longing for its return; between the recovery and loss of cinema’s historical memory; and between the concepts of old and new media themselves.

Through a case study of The Avengers (2012) and other recently adapted Marvel Entertainment properties, it will be demonstrated that the reimagined, rebooted and serialized intermedial text is fundamentally fan oriented: a deliberately structured and marketed invitation to certain niche audiences to engage in comparative activities. That is, its preferred spectators are often those opinionated and outspoken fan cultures whose familiarity with the texts is addressed and whose influence within a more dispersed film-going community is acknowledged, courted and potentially colonized. These superhero franchises – neither remakes nor adaptations in the familiar sense – are also paradigmatic byproducts of an adaptive management system that is possible through the appropriation of the economics of continuity and the co-option of online cultic networking. In short, blockbuster intermediality is not only indicative of the economics of post-literary adaptation, but it also exemplifies a corporate strategy that aims for the strategic co-option of potentially unruly niche audiences.

As unique examples of the contemporary, transnational art film, Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn’s Atanarjuat (2001) and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006) are stylistically distinct, their formal differences traceable to each film’s provenance as an adaptation of a specific type: Atanarjuat adapts an Inuit myth; The Journals of Knud Rasmussen sections of the ethnographer’s actual journals. At the same time, as remediations of radically different media forms, these films can be read according to the categories outlined by Jan Assmann, respectively, embodying ‘the normative and formative values of a community, its “truth”’, answering the questions ‘Who are we?’ and ‘What shall we do?’. These films also correspond to Astrid Erll’s categories of memory-productive and memory-reflexive film, respectively, reflecting formally and thematically upon Inuit cultural memory in the digital era. This article explores the myriad implications for cultural memory of this marriage of cutting-edge digital video technology with ancient themes and folkways, in effect a pre-literate ‘oral’ culture translated seemingly wholesale to the screen. I consider these Inuit films in terms of the question of cultural memory as it becomes trans-cultural, and national cinema as it becomes trans-national, while the local and ‘indigenous’ find representation at a level of global legibility.

Peter Sellars is one of the most celebrated directors of opera, theatre and festivals in the contemporary West. He is well known for his adaptations of classic works in response to the political, social and economic conditions at the time of staging, while his activist politics and lack of reverence for hierarchical institutions frequently polarizes response to his work. In a spirited interview, conducted by academic and critic Karen Fricker in July 2013 as part of the Leverhulme Olympic Talks on Theatre and Adaptation, Sellars discusses his background in puppet theatre, his early career at Harvard University and the American National Theatre, and several of his important productions including Ajax (an adaptation of Sophocles by Robert Auletta, American National Theatre, 1986); Children of Herakles (Euripides, premiered at the Ruhr Triennale, 2002); and Desdemona, a music theatre piece created with writer Toni Morrison and singer Rokia Traoré in 2012.

The present interview is a discussion about Oreet Ashery’s diverse body of work with a focus on the most recent work Party for Freedom. It offers a clear trajectory of the artist’s early stages of work till the present and gives an account of certain creative strategies that Ashery has developed through her practice. What becomes obvious is an emphasis on the principles of appropriation and re-appropriation to counteract mis-appropriations that exist in dominant discourses. Appropriation and re-appropriation constitute not only creative strategies, but also survival techniques in a globalized world.

Ambition in adaptation sometimes pays off. The following is an edited transcript of a public interview conducted by journalist Aleks Sierz with two British playwrights, Dennis Kelly (born 1910) and Alexandra Wood (born 1982) at the ICA in London on 4 May 2012. Kelly has adapted Roald Dahl’s popular 1988 children’s novel, Matilda, into the musical Matilda the Musical (2010) for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Wood created a stage version, for the Young Vic, of Jung Chang’s 1991 bestselling Wild Swans, a non-fiction account of three generations of a Chinese family spanning the era of the Communist Revolution. The interview examines the process of adaptation, starting with the adaptor’s first encounter with the source work, their original versions of the text, the changes made during the process of collaboration and the final fine tuning of the result. Both playwrights stress the support of their theatre companies and especially of their directors, in the case of Matilda the Musical this was director Matthew Warchus and musician Tim Minchin, and in the case of Wild Swans it was Sacha Wares. In both of these adaptations, a key preoccupation was that of storytelling, that is adapting the literary mode of storytelling to be found in the source texts, whether children’s novel or family biography, into a stage story, where temporal, visual and musical elements are at least as important as, and sometimes even more constraining than, the words of spoken dialogue. In both cases this process required similar skills: narrative economy, clarity of representation and emotional engagement. In terms of politics, both playwrights have focused on the personal politics of change, asking whether it is possible for individuals to change the life story that they have been born into, as nurtured by their parents, and then exploring the emotional costs of such changes.

Rubén Szuchmacher is an award-winning Argentinian stage and film actor, teacher, director of theatre, musical theatre and opera, choreographer, programmer, dramaturge, translator (including collaborations with Lautaro Vilo) and writer, who has made performance and taught since the 1970s in Argentina and internationally. This interview is based on a conversation that took place between Szuchmacher and Catherine Silverstone on 22 May 2012 in the Film and Drama Studio at Queen Mary University of London as part of the Leverhulme Olympic Talks on Theatre and Adaptation. The interview addresses four key aspects of Szuchmacher’s career in relation to adaptation: (1) shifts in his professional roles (e.g. actor, director), (2) adapting to making work under and after Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976–1983), (3) adapting Shakespeare and (4) adapting autobiographical material in performance. It concludes with a consideration of Szuchmacher’s upcoming projects and ‘the future’. The interview reveals aspects of Szuchmacher’s directorial and performance strategies. In particular, it identifies his commitment to narrative clarity and finding solutions to the challenges of making and adapting work for particular spaces, institutional structures and audiences in the context of sometimes difficult political and personal circumstances.

Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama, Neil Verma (2012) Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 296 pp., ISBN: p/bk 978-0226853512, £21.50, h/bk 978-0226853505, £63.00

Science Fiction, Film, Television, and Adaptation: Across the Screens, J. P. Telotte and Gerald Duchovnay (eds) (2012) London and New York: Routledge, 212 pp., ISBN 9780415887199, h/bk, Price £88.99