Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Current Issue

The aim of this article is to investigate the additional layer of text on screen present in Eugene Kotlyarenko’s Spree (2020) and explore the translator’s perspective on the incorporation of such elements. The article discusses the participatory chat messaging systems accompanying live video of today and attempts to place them within an existing framework of text on screen as understood in audiovisual translation (AVT) and media accessibility (MA) studies as well as previous screen productions. The relationship between audience involvement and presence of modes of AVT is then explored to better highlight the importance of translation in audience reception. The authors characterize dynamic chat elements in the analysed movie to point to potential implications that further incorporation of elements of massive chat into filmic narratives might have for conventional modes of AVT, in particular for subtitling.

American film remakes have enjoyed growing academic attention over the past 50 years. Together with prequels, sequels, reboots and spin-offs, they have been often viewed as exponents of contemporary recycling culture, symptomatic of Hollywood’s recent creative exhaustion and commercial risk aversion. In our article, we adopt a diachronic quantitative perspective to analyse and interpret the available metadata on 986 Hollywood remakes produced between 1915 and 2020. Our quantitative research shows the number of American remakes produced every year, their ratio in the total number of feature films produced annually, the percentage of remakes in the top most watched movies among the users of IMDb, as well as remake recency and percentage of remakes with titles recognizably linked to the original over the years. We find that popular convictions concerning the remarkable derivativity of contemporary American cinema stem from availability bias (accessibility of statistics concerning recent productions and relative neglect of historical data) and systemic differences in the function and prestige ascribed to feature film remakes by Old and New Hollywood filmmakers.

The year 2021 marked the seventieth anniversary of the publication of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and the sixtieth of what is to date the only film adaptation of the novel. In 1961 the 22-year-old Krzysztof Zanussi made from behind the Iron Curtain, a short film entitled Holden, which referred directly to the novel’s characters and events. He did this despite Salinger’s ban on any form of adaptation of his work. The film, although faithful to the source novel, had a perversely Polish flavour. This article takes a translation studies approach to the discussion of how the specific sociopolitical circumstances in which the adaptation was made resonate in Zanussi’s picture. The focus is on the ways in which the concept of an imaginary America, so vivid and emotionally powerful among the Polish youth of the 1960s, determined the film’s narrative and domesticated the source text.

Led by Thomas Leitch’s (2011) deployment of the Hollywood vampire as a multifaceted analogy for the larger, equivocal practice of adaptation, the self-reflexive trope of monstrosity emerging in the past decade anticipates what Kamilla Elliott (2020) has recently labeled as the need for conceptualizing adaptation as adaptation rather than via other disciplines. While Julie Grossman (2015) defines vampires, zombies and Frankenstein’s creature as canonical monsters, this article instead examines the figure of the non-western cannibal as a distinct analogy for assimilative adaptation. In order to establish the basis of cannibal adaptation’s productive indifference to questions of originality, fidelity and influence, I examine the history of the cannibal and the Latin American origins of cultural anthropophagy. The movement’s multiple revivals across different political moments and artistic genres illustrate its relevance for macroscopic studies of transmedial adaptation. Simultaneously appropriative and assimilative, the cannibal offers an alternative ethics for the process of adaptation.

Review of: Viral Shakespeare: Performance in the Time of Pandemic, Pascale Aebischer (2021)

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 75 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-10894-796-1, p/bk, £15.00