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- Volume 7, Issue 3, 2014
Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 7, Issue 3, 2014
Volume 7, Issue 3, 2014
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Zhang Yimou’s Blood Simple: Cannibalism, remaking and translation in world cinema
More LessAbstractZhang Yimou’s A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop (2009) remakes the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple (1984) in a way that re-imagines the earlier film in a Chinese setting, adapting and recreating the narrative, but the film cannot be regarded as being aimed solely at a Chinese audience, as it was also released in the United States and United Kingdom. Drawing from translation studies and film studies, this article analyses how Zhang’s film adapts its source material, particularly its tendency to make explicit elements that were left implicit in the source text. The idea of cannibalization, from Brazilian modernist theory, helps explain the ambiguous orientation of the remake as both homage to and localization of the source text. This hybridity was not well received by American audiences and shows how the movie’s connection to both Zhang and the Coens leads to a dual voice in the film. The analysis demonstrates how translation and cross-cultural adaptation enrich ideas of world cinema.
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‘Scenes of marvellous variety’: The work-in-progress screenplays of Maurice
More LessAbstractThis article examines the work-in-progress screenplays of Maurice by Ivory (1987), which was adapted from E. M. Forster’s novel, published posthumously in 1971. The article examines the creative processes revealed in the writers’ treatment, and three manuscripts of the screenplay, held at King’s College, Cambridge, all of which differ from the film as it has subsequently been released in cinemas and on DVD. Writers James Ivory and Kit Hesketh-Harvey restructured the narrative order of the story in several different ways, before the film was eventually edited to follow (almost) the chronology of the novel. The screenplay was also significantly shaped through the collaborative assistance of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who is not credited as a writer for the film. This article charts these hitherto hidden creative and authorial processes, and argues that the narrative’s journey from page to screen was not a straight trajectory, but instead constituted a move away from mainstream narrative genres, such as the Bildungsroman and the love story, and then a recommitment to them in the film’s ‘final’ cut. The multiple versions of the screenplay add to the palimpsetuous inscriptions of this already multi-layered, in-flux narrative, which was revised repeatedly by E. M. Forster over a 45-year period, and has also been reworked through new book editions, a re-release of the DVD that includes deleted scenes as ‘extras’, and fan activity on the Internet.
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Authorship in stage adaptations of ‘inherited tales’: A survey approach
More LessAbstractFor a range of reasons, there is a dearth of empirical work on stage adaptations of ‘inherited tales’, both individually and in general; this is in contrast to work on film adaptations. This article starts by exploring epistemological and methodological reasons for this, and then proposes an alternative: analysis of bodies of texts about stage adaptations. To exemplify this, I report a survey in which I explore representations of authorship in stage adaptations in ‘Theatre’ entries in the 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme. In this large body of short texts, while authors of ‘sourcetexts’ are referred to occasionally, and titles of the sourcetexts frequently, in many cases there is no direct acknowledgement that the production is an adaptation of an ‘inherited tale’, and hence no direct mention of an ‘original’ author or title. I look at contextualized reasons for this in terms of creative and marketing considerations and of the wider ‘event’ itself (in particular, fringe productions at festivals), and at implications for understandings of ‘authorship’ in theatre.
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Reviews
Authors: Laurence Raw, Christophe Collard and Laurence RawAbstractLast Tape on Stage in Translation: Unwinding Beckett�s Spool in Turkey, Bur� Idem Din�el (2012) Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 131 pp., ISBN: 9781443835145, h/bk, �34.99
Bastard or Playmate? Adapting Theatre, Mutating Media, and the Contemporary Performing Arts, Robrecht Vanderbeeken, Christel Stalpaert, David Depestel and Boris Debackere (eds) (2012) Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 264 pp., ISBN: 9789089642585, p/bk, �21.99
The Adaptations of the Mind: A Reply to Patrick Cattrysse
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Editorial
Authors: Richard Hand and Katja Krebs
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