Film Adaptation Research Articles

Characters in Search of an Ending in Laura Wade’s Stage Adaptation of Jane Austen’s The Watsons

This article proposes to consider the notion of transmission in relation to the process of adaptation since adaptations, whatever form they take, bring a text—transmit a text—to a new audience while submitting the text to a process of transformation and appropriation. Jane Austen’s relatively small body of work has given rise to countless television or film adaptations, stage adaptations but also narrative expansions and continuations that all revisit Austen’s characters and plots. The intermedial adaptation under consideration here is that of a fragment written by Austen in 1805, The Watsons, by English playwright and screenwriter Laura Wade in 2018. The aim of this article is to examine how Wade’s play establishes and reflects on its own status as an adaptation in the twenty-first century while tackling the issue of authenticity inevitably raised by adaptation and continuation. Following a few remarks on the adaptation of unfinished texts, I will examine the metafiction and metatheatricality at work before focusing on the issue of the ending.

Youssef Chahine's Al-Ard: Film Adaptation

Youssef Chahine's Al-Ard: Film Adaptation

Spontaneous transmedia co-location: Integration in memory

Abstract The unanticipated product of a survey involving 190 non-professional readers, this first-report paper looks at the way memories from different source media overlap, along with the potential consequences of this phenomenon for existing approaches to reader behaviour. The paper begins with a focus on how everyday readers articulate their recollection of literary works, in particular those moments they found most memorable. We identify a common situation in which participants ‘mix up’ recollections of a book's content with memories of their respective film or TV adaptations. We offer the term spontaneous transmedia co-location to describe this form of effortless recall involving memories of literary texts which spontaneously trigger memories of other, visual media. We outline five preliminary modes of spontaneous transmedia co-location (STC) and explain what they consist of. Finally, we elaborate how STC ties into wider theories of how readers and other consumers interact with media, and how they tend to remember and otherwise connect them in a transmedia space.

A Multimodal Grammar Study of Film Adaptations of Traditional Literature in the Information Age

Abstract By analyzing the multimodal grammar of films, the deeper concepts that the designers want to express can be better conveyed to the audience, and the expectations of the moviegoers can be enhanced. Therefore, based on the analysis of the classic Zhang Delu’s comprehensive theory of multimodal discourse, the article proposes the multimodal discourse analysis framework used in this paper to explore the ideologies implied in the text and images of movie subtitles and the images they construct and the inspirational meanings they draw from. It is found that among the 150 clauses in the corpus analysis, 28% are material processes, 22% are mental processes, 12% are verbal processes, 14.67% are relational processes, 17.33% are behavioral processes, and 4.67% are existential processes. Through multimodal grammar analysis, the discourse tendencies of the traditional culture-adapted movie can be effectively grasped.

Hospice Words. Text Mining and Visualizations in Ken Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest and Hauben & Goldman’s Movie Script

Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest film adaptation released in 1975 captures the essence of Ken Kesey’s novel, additionally making some remarkable “European” differences to match the medium of the long picture format. The movie adaptation was made during a time of significant social and cultural change in the United States and finally put in front of the public something that nobody dared to touch in the industry. From a digital perspective, not many Romanian scientific articles have cobbled together and used data mining tools for textual analysis of distributions, recurrences, and term stylometry criteria to highlight information about the characters, attributes, the fundamental or secondary themes of a literary work. With this aim, and with the help of data synthesis and visual representations offered by Voyant Tools, we tried to quantitatively mark how, both in the book and in the film script, the quickly extracted data can comparatively highlight the main protagonists, themes, correlations and other attributes of the novel and the script. For the corpus analysis, we used the movie script available on DailyScript, and the 50th Anniversary Edition of the book, printed by Viking, Penguin Group, in 2012.

ЗАКАТ ЭСТЕТИКИ БУДУАРА. СОВЕТСКИЙ СУБЪЕКТ В ЛАБИРИНТЕ ДЕКОРАТИВНОЙ ИСТОРИИ И КУЛЬТУРНАЯ РЕВОЛЮЦИЯ 1990-Х ГОДОВ В РОССИИ

Thearticle examines the Russian television series “Queen Margot” and “Comtesse De Montsoreau” in the context of socio-cultural changes that took place in Russia in the 1980s –1990s. The artistic style of these TV projects is studied in comparison with the French and Soviet traditions of film adaptations of works by A. Dumas. French cinema and television in the second half of the twentieth century was characterized by a movement from light semi-comedy productions to deep reconstruction, immersing the viewer in the historical context of the era. In the Soviet Union, there was a special artistic style of film adaptations, to the detriment of historicity, emphasizing the elements of theatrical decorativeness inherent in the writer’s work. These techniques, like the “Aesopian language” of Soviet literature, successfully helped film and television figures to circumvent the taboos and prohibitions that existed in Soviet culture. In the 1990s, there was a revolution-like change in the functional tasks of domestic television. Despite the preservation of inertial motion in the same stylistic direction for some time, as evidenced by the above-mentioned television series, there is a gradual disintegration of the foundations of the Soviet visualization model. Russian television has increasingly become a part of the cultural industry, while losing its former distinctive features.

Verbal and non-verbal means of creating time and space in the film narrative (on the material of the film adaptation of J. K. Rowling's novel of the same name «Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire» by M. Newell)

Verbal and non-verbal means of creating time and space in the film narrative (on the material of the film adaptation of J. K. Rowling's novel of the same name «Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire» by M. Newell)

Synaesthesia of Sergei Parajanov’s Works (a Director’s Musical and Artistic Consciousness)

The article focuses on the possibilities of examining the works of Soviet director Sergei Parajanov in the aspect of synaesthesia — a phenomenon studied by musical psychology, the re-expression of information received through one perceptual channel (such as, for instance, the visual) into information actualized through another channel (such as, for instance, the auditory). Making use of a methodology that incorporates biographical and comparative analysis, interpretation and intertextuality, the author aims at drawing the attention of synaesthesia analysts of different types of art towards Parajanov’s most representative works: the feature films The Flower on the Stone, The Color of Pomegranates, Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors, The Legend of the Suram Fortress, and Ashik Kerib. The system of argumentation of the article is founded on statements by of the director himself as well as materials presented in, Kora Tsereteli’s monographic study, Parajanov’s scripts for feature and documentary films that have never been released (Miracle in Odense based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, Intermezzo based on the short story of the same name by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Pectoral, and The Demon based on Mikhail Lermontov’s poem), as well as the libretto for the unrealized ballet The Mother. The author’s special focus is on Parajanov’s short story Swan Lake and the film with the same name by Yuri Ilyenko, based on it. A comparative analysis of the verbal source and its film adaptation reveals how the creators work with the dominant colors — white and black — for both the story and the film. The author of the present study discerns in these particular objects of verbal discourse and screen art a kind of reverberation of the ballet Swan Lake by Pyotr Tchaikovsky.

Faktografija i fikcija - ogledavanja u romanu Vreme smrti Dobrice Ćosića

The subject of this paper is the analysis of Dobrica Ćosić's novel A Time of Death I-IV (1972-1979), primarily from the perspective of possible worlds theory. One of the most important Serbian novels about the First World War, which critics have frequently defined as an epic novel, was inspiring for our research for at least two reasons: the first lies in the fact that historiographic metafiction is still the most prominent literary current in Serbian novelistic production, and the second is that contemporary readers have returned to Ćosić through intensive film adaptations in the recent years. The analysis and survey of the relationship between the factographic and fictional is precisely what led to the illumination and better understanding of the contemporary readers' attitude towards the so-called NEO-historical novel, which, according to Tihomir Brajović, began with Dobrica Ćosić. An interpretation of the characters in terms of possible worlds theory is at the center of attention, particularly the function of extratextual narrative identities of military leaders, statesmen, politicians, and warriors (Nikola Pašić, Aleksandar Karađorđević, Radomir Putnik, Stepa Stepanović, Živojin Mišić, Petar Bojović, Apis, and Stanislav Vinaver, among others). The specific aim of this paper is to understand the creative process whereby the characters were transformed and shaped as they made the transition from fact to fiction and, in this context, to analyze the documentary and artistic function of different types of texts that are incorporated into the narrative fabric of the novel. In particular, the author's auto-poetic comments are deemed particularly relevant to unlocking the process of metamorphosis of the historical into the fictional. Two more questions are addressed as separate research challenges: (1) the importance of the specific way in which the author constructs the so-called historical characters to form national identity in the novel; and (2) the more general issue of historical truth, with particular regard to the nature of historiographic narrative. The methodological starting point for the interpretation of the characters is provided by the tenets of postclassical (cognitive) narratology, with priority given to Hilary Dannenberg's typology of transworld identities.

소설과 각색영화의 메시지 해석 : 〈파이트 클럽〉은 폭력을 옹호하는가?

소설과 각색영화의 메시지 해석 : 〈파이트 클럽〉은 폭력을 옹호하는가?

Transcultural Film Adaptations as Cross-Cultural Dialogue

This article explores a transcultural film adaptation, offerinf new avenues for discussing cross-cultural dialog. The article analyzes the transcultural adaptation of Doctor Zhivago, written by Boris Pasternak. The book was adapted in 1965 by British director David Lean, who cooperated with one of the largest American film studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. This work considers the changing meaning of the text, which enters a new national culture, and explores how Pasternak’s novel was changed to fit the new audience. Lean’s adaptation of Doctor Zhivago is analyzed as a dialogue of different cultures, which involve the “Hollywoodization” of Russian literature. The author emphasizes the intertextual and cultural dialogism of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago and David Lean’s 1965 film adaptation. The film adaptation inserts the novel into much broader dialogic relations, for example, with movies of a specific era, their cinematic technics, and ideologies.

De la rencontre de l’Autre à la perte de soi. Les réécritures filmiques de "L’aventure ambiguë" de Cheikh Hamidou Kane

This article reads the films L’aventure ambiguë by French director Jacques Champreux and L’Afrance by Franco-Sen-egalese filmmaker Alain Gomis as possible sequels, continu-ations or follow-up stories of L’aventure ambiguë, the best known novel of Senegalese author Cheikh Hamidou Kane. Building on the hypothesis that film adaptation is a creative endeavour that allows filmmakers to state their views, not just on the literary source text but also about their contem-porary social environment, it studies the aesthetic strategies and film techniques deployed to replicate the written literary content in the audiovisual media and elucidates some of the new perspectives that this remediation brings on the ques-tions raised in the novel. It argues that through a complex relationship of continuity and rupture, convergence and sub-version, the films recontextualize the ideas put forward in the novel to connect them with present-day sociocultural issues.

Spectral Soundscapes in Elfriede Jelinek’s Post-Holocaust Novel The Children of the Dead and Its 2019 Film Adaptation

Spectral Soundscapes in Elfriede Jelinek’s Post-Holocaust Novel The Children of the Dead and Its 2019 Film Adaptation

Sarah Polley’s take on the Me Too moment: adapting Women Talking to the big screen

Abstract This article discusses Sarah Polley’s 2022 film adaptation of Miriam Toews’ novel Women Talking (2018), inspired by a case of mass rapes in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia, as part of the Me Too moment; a new zeitgeist that has modified the conditions of reception for survivor testimony. We examine it as an audiovisual product that amplifies the resonance of the original text and contributes to the current wave of feminist testimonial practices about sexual violence, constituting an instance of narrative activism that promotes social change. Through our analysis of the dynamics of storytelling in the film, we prove that Polley’s cinematic strategies place emphasis on the women’s lived experiences and points of view, distilling the words of the book to capture the key elements of their discussion (forgiveness, justice, obedience, trauma, and structural violence) and, rarely but significantly, deviating from the original text to achieve her goal of female-centred focalisation. While scholars and survivors have described the battle over the narrative in rape cases, Polley does not leave room for it. In line with #MeToo, the movie takes an ethical listening stand, presenting female testimony as valid evidence. The question at stake is not whether the protagonists have been raped by the men of the colony, but what they are going to do about it; and, by extension, what the viewers are going to make of their story as told by themselves.

A Comparison of the 1940 Animated Pinocchio Movie and Walt Disney Studios' 2022 Live-action Version of Pinocchio Movie

Pinocchio is one of the popular classics of the Walt Disney animation industry released in 1940, the popularity of the Pinocchio series also prompted the animated film Pinocchio to be adapted into a live-action version in 2022. The movie is based on the classic novel by Carlo Collodi that tells the story of a wooden puppet named Pinocchio who wants to become a human child. There are different scenes from the 1940 version of Pinocchio and the 2022 version of Pinocchio. This adaptation process does bring changes in the meaning content when the story is adapted from animation to live-action. Based on this, this study aims to analyze changes in meaning in the 1940 animated version of Pinocchio and the 2022 live-action version of Pinocchio with a comparative method, data obtained from observation. The results of the study are that there are significant differences, in the 1940 animated version of Pinocchio scenes prioritize Pinocchio's self-transformation into a real boy through moral struggle and sacrifice, while the 2022 live-action version of Pinocchio adaptation emphasizes the emotional relationship between Pinocchio and Gepetto. The results of this research are expected to provide additional knowledge and new knowledge about film adaptation and the importance of considering changes that occur in both films and their impact on the content of meaning.
 Keywords: Animation, Live-action, Movie, Pinocchio Scene

Translation solutions used in the binary and intersemiotic translation of the graphic novel about the Marvel universe

The article discusses the key translation solutions that have been applied by translators in the binary and intersemiotic translation (film adaptation) of a graphic novel about the Marvel universe. The object of the study includes occasionalisms, substandard lexis and onomatopoeia in the graphic novel “X-Men: Battle of the Atom” as one of the most popular within the analyzed universe. Within the framework of the research, such linguistic methods as the continuous selection method, the contextual analysis method, the structural and semantic analysis method, the descriptive method, the comparative analysis method, the contrastive analysis method, as well as quantitative calculation methods are used. The authors conduct a comparative translation analysis of the translation and the original of the comics “X-Men: Battle of the Atom”, during which they identify occasionalisms and distribute them into certain thematic groups. The study highlights the main types of onomatopoeia typical of the English-language graphic novels. The calculation and analysis of translation solutions used in the transfer of onomatopes used in the comics into the Russian language are carried out. Attention is paid to the main types of stylistically substandard lexis – vulgarisms and swear words, which are also considered in terms of translation from English into Russian. When analyzing the transformations of the verbal component of a graphic novel in its intersemiotic translation (film adaptation), the authors focus on the occasional lexis, since in this type of translation only occasionalisms can have correspondences. The substandard lexis in the film adaptation is omitted, and when translating onomatopoeia, the verbal component is converted into the sound component of the film text. In the intersemiotic translation, only a part of the occasionalisms is preserved, which is conditioned by the reduction in the number of characters and significant locations.

„Wyobrażam sobie albo pamiętam…”. Strategie narracyjne dokumentu historycznego na przykładzie filmu „Mała Zagłada” Natalii Korynckiej-Gruz

The article is an in-depth, contextual analysis of Natalia Koryncka-Gruz’s film A Minor Genocide. The author focuses on its narrative structure, in which the documentarian tried to reflect the nature of the work of memory and post-memory. The film is a documentary adaptation of Anna Janko’s (auto)biographical essay. The narrative complexity of the literary text is reflected in the film version, which takes the shape of a palimpsest. Its individual layers consist of verbal narratives from three generations of women, contemporary sequences, archival photographs and stylistically diverse animated sequences. The memory of traumatic experiences is superimposed on the idea of them. For the author, A Minor Genocide is an example of bringing Polish documentary film and literature closer together, as well as a new formula of a historical document.

On the Composition and Performance of The Song of Burying Flower from the TV series Dream of the Red Chamber

The 1987 version of the hit TV series Dream of the Red Chamber has had a great influence in China. The film adaptation of Dream of the Red Chamber, aside from being a classic work of literature in its own right, marks a breakthrough in its development. It greatly enriched the content and form of literary dissemination and expanded the realm of Dream of the Red Chamber within the film and television art domain. Wang Li Ping, in particular, took four years to craft the first 13 episodes of film and television art and earned widespread acclaim. The series' unique artistic charm and the representative songs are truly inspiring and delightful. This paper aims to introduce the literary masterpiece Dream of the Red Chamber and delve into the 1987 TV adaptation of it to shed light on Wang Li Ping's successful adaptation and songwriting for Dream of the Red Chamber. It will approach this topic through an examination of major aspects such as the creation background, lyrics, singing and emotional processing.

Performance-related structural, optical, and electrical characteristics of 2 μm the CdTe-CdSe absorption layer of solar cell

The current work attempts to develop the most efficient compositions of 1 m between CdTe1-xSex thin films as absorptive layer in solar cell applications (with x = 0 to 1, step 0.1 wt.%). Mechanical alloying was used to create the CdTe1-xSex powdered materials, and thermal evaporation was used to create the thin film versions of these compositions. Swanepoel's approach was used to measure the films' thicknesses, and the spectroscopic ellipsometry technique was used to calibrate the results. The analyzed films' structural, electrical, and optical characteristics have been studied. It was determined that CdTe0.7Se0.3 at had the highest crystalize size and the lowest lattice strain, which contributed to the reduction in imperfection in this sample since XRD revealed the nanostructures nature of these films. Additionally, it was discovered that CdTe0.7Se0.3 had the lowest energy gap and the highest refractive index, which was responsible for this composition's largest crystalline size. CdTe0.7Se0.3 possessed low resistivity, high conductivity, a high carrier concentration, and high carrier mobility, according to the Hall effect studies of these films. Two different types of solar cells were created: n-CdS/pCdTe and n-CdS/p-CdTe/ CdTe0.7Se0.3. The power conversion efficiency of these two solar cells was determined to be 17.71 for CdS/CdTe and 18.92 for CdS/CdTe/ CdTe0.7Se0.3. Se should be doped in CdTe1-xSex thin films at an ideal level of 0.3%, making CdTe0.7Se0.3 thin film a suitable choice for solar cell applications.

From Print to Stage to Screen, Across the Ocean, and to Print Again

Edith Wharton’s novella Edith Wharton’s novella The Old Maid (1922) was successively adapted into theatre (Akins, 1935) and cinema (Goulding, 1939) in the 1930s. The Spanish version of the original film adaptation (La solterona) was released in Spain in 1947; subsequently, the original novella was translated into Spanish and published early in winter that year. In this paper, I analyse the textual and contextual linkages between these translated cultural products. The translated work and the relevant censorship reports are analysed, with particular attention paid to how some excerpts had been linguistically manipulated and underwent self-censorship. The Old Maid/La solterona provides an enlightening example of how views on female empowerment are consistently manipulated via the process of dubbing. Beyond this, I offer a panoramic view of the reception of the film in Spain, focusing on how it had been (problematically) ascribed to the genre of melodrama, and how it relates to its written counterparts. This case study substantiates a transnational cultural phenomenon that had already become common in the 1940s in which the import of films plays a central role in introducing foreign literary works to Spain. Lay summary In the 1930s, Edith Wharton's short novel The Old Maid, which she had published in 1922, was turned first into a play by playwright Zoë Akins, and then into a film, by director Edmund Goulding. The Spanish version of the film, titled La solterona, was released in Spain in 1947. Shortly after, the book was translated into Spanish and published in the country. In this paper, I explore how these different versions are connected. I look at how the translation and censorship of the work changed certain parts of the story, both in the film and the book. In particular, The Old Maid (or La solterona, in Spanish) helps us understand how ideas about women's empowerment were altered when the film was dubbed (in other words, through the translation of the script). I also look at how the film was received in Spain. The critics often considered it a melodrama, although they were unwilling to use that work. I see how the translated film compares to both versions of the book (in English and Spanish). This study provides an example of how literary works were introduced to Spain through imported film, which had become a common phenomenon by the 1940s.