Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Current Issue

This article explores the adaptation of Peter Henisch’s novel Die kleine Figur meines Vaters made by Wolfgang Glück. The film produced by three (Austrian, West German and Hungarian) television companies focuses on conversations between father and son that relate to the Nazi past of the latter. What initially was planned as a biographical novel, in the end, became an intermedial work drawing on literature, a magnetic tape containing a recorded oral testimony, photography and film. In this article, I examine the film’s narration and reception to demonstrate that it was one of the first Austrian movies to deal directly with the ambiguous role ordinary Austrians played in National Socialism, which in fact preceded the political debate on Austria’s past generated by the election of Kurt Waldheim to the president’s office in 1986. The analysis of the film was possible thanks to the research conducted in the Austrian National Library in Vienna and the Archives of the Bavarian Television (BR) in Munich.

This article examines Mahasweta Devi’s literary work ‘Rudali’ alongside Kalpana Lajmi’s cinematic adaptation Rudaali from the perspective of Derek Attridge’s views on literary instrumentalism and literariness. It attempts to tease out the literary elements and explore the shifting dynamic of the instrumental and the literary. The article looks at how the focus on the literariness in the two works facilitates an opening out towards the ‘other’ and an inclusivity that an instrumental approach may negate. The article also analyses the representation of the stereotype of the sex worker as prostitute and whore in the story and the film vis-à-vis the dynamics of openness to otherness and alterity. As a comparative analysis of the text and its adaptation in film, the article studies the contrast and complementarity of these works in text and film and finally examines how the features particular to the specific medium bring to bear on the instrumental approach, literariness, stereotypes and inclusivity.

This article discusses three adaptations of the novel Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (The Diary of a Chambermaid) by Octave Mirbeau, published in 1900, by Jean Renoir in 1946, by Luis Buñuel in 1964 and by Benoît Jacquot in 2015. It examines the effect of the time and, to some degree, the places where these films were made, on the representation of the characters and stories adapted by the respective directors. It is particularly interested in the transformation of the main character, Célestine, her labour and her sexuality, and the gender dynamics in the respective films, as reflection of the dominant discourses about gender roles pertaining to the times these films were made. It devotes most attention to the most recent film, due to the heaviest intertextual baggage which it carries and also given this adaptation has the most relevance to contemporary issues about women’s work and social position.

This article uses the self-performances of characters in Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon to advance four propositions about the novel and its three screen adaptations: that Brigid O’Shaughnessy, the novel’s most often remarked role-player, is joined by Sam Spade and most of its other characters in self-performance; that the novel and its first two screen adaptations, Dangerous Female and Satan Met a Lady, treat Spade’s self-performance in three different ways; that Spade’s theatricality in the first two of these adaptations cannot be attributed to Brigid’s behaviour because it predates his first meeting with her; and that the characters’ inveterate habit of self-performance in all versions of Hammett’s story have important implications for the status of adaptations as performances of the texts they adapt.