Stephen Daldry Research Articles

A construção do feminino no audiovisual As Horas

This study investigates the influence of reading the novel (Mrs Dalloway 1925) on the construction of the feminine identity in the audiovisual (The hours 2002). The author of the novel, a reader, and the protagonist of the book Mrs. Dalloway, signed by Virginia Woolf, share the guiding line of the novel The hours written by Michael Cunningham (1998 USA) and echo the concerns of three women, living in different generations, in the 114-minutes audiovisual. How does the memory regarding the feminine character during the first decades of the XX century, as described by Virginia Woolf, sustain the cinematographic narrative? Sergei Eisenstein’s texts will guide the re-reading of cinematographic foundations regarding the intellectual montage used in the construction of the feminine. To what extent does the use of intertextuality and polyphony contribute to the elaboration of the protagonists’ cultural transformations over time? Issues related to intertextual polyphonic imagery will be based on Julia Kristeva’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s works. The methodological approach will be the film analysis, with special attention given to the construction of the feminine identity in The hours. The theoretical fundamentals will be provided by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari texts. This analysis intends to elucidate how the approach adopted by Stephen Daldry culminates in: an ending for Virginia Woolf, a path for Laura Brown and a new beginning for Mrs.Dalloway.

The Inheritance by Matthew Lopez

Reviewed by: The Inheritance by Matthew Lopez Eric Jorgensen THE INHERITANCE. By Matthew Lopez. Directed by Stephen Daldry. Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York City. January 8, 2020. One may as well begin with waiting in line to enter the theatre. Volunteers for the Buttigieg campaign seeking signatures of New York voters to ensure Mayor Pete’s name on the primary ballot was a reminder of changed times for the LGBTQ+ community. The unplanned prelude was fitting for The Inheritance, which, at its best, gracefully managed to occupy today while breathing air from the past, reinvigorating a need to understand the opposition of generational time. The Inheritance is a new American AIDS play (it is many other things as well, but it certainly meets the epidemiological and cultural criteria). But while it is a new addition to that particular corpus of drama, The Inheritance is not The Normal Heart (1985) or Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), although Matthew Lopez’s two-part, seven-hour play owes much to the dramatic voices of both Larry Kramer and Terrence McNally. And despite the frequent (perhaps unfair) comparison to Tony Kushner’s epic two-parter, The Inheritance stands on its own as a significant window into how a millennial outlook reconciles the livability and invisibility of HIV/AIDS in the current era of preventative treatments (PrEP) with a desire to occupy a place in the shared history of the pandemic—to embody the best and expose the worst of humanity, while coming to know what happened during the most devastating days of the plague. Structurally, the inspiration for The Inheritance comes not from American AIDS plays, but from E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End. The participants in the relationship hexagon that propels the action of the play are mostly drawn directly from the novel’s characters. The play reimagines the Edwardian novel as the story of a group of gay men in New York City in the present day, all with a longing to either know or forget the 1980s and ’90s. Forster himself (joyously played by Paul Hilton) enters the scene to conduct a metatheatrical masterclass, as if to say that in order to know the past, one must first hear the voices of the still more distant past. A young writer (Samuel H. Levine) begins his story with Forster’s gentle prompting, “As you are now, a link in this chain of gay men teaching one another, loving one another, hurting one another, understanding one another.” And like the novel, the play’s story begins, “One may as well begin with . . .,” but here, “Toby’s voicemails to his boyfriend.” Toby Darling and Eric Glass’s tenuous relationship fractures when one’s career booms and the other loses his family claim to Manhattan rent control (the excellent performances of Andrew Burnap and [End Page 101] Click for larger view View full resolution Tony Goldwyn (Henry Wilcox) and Kyle Soller (Eric Glass) in The Inheritance. (Photo: Matthew Murphy for MurphyMade, 2020.) Click for larger view View full resolution The cast of The Inheritance. (Photo: Matthew Murphy for MurphyMade, 2020.) [End Page 102] Kyle Soller guided these shallow plot beginnings to soulful depths). Alone, Eric builds a friendship with the ailing Walter Poole (Hilton again) in his final days. Eric listens to how Walter and Henry’s home upstate served as a sanctuary for dying men while Walter held the hands of friends (then acquaintances, then strangers) during their dying hours. Halfway through its seven-hour running time, The Inheritance cuts its most breathtakingly indelible moment of theatricality when innumerable ghosts of the past greeted the play’s moral center and accepted him into their midst, “Eric, welcome home.” With no curtain call for part 1, a stunned final silence (one longer than I have ever experienced) was broken by sobs from the audience. Where the first part glides to its emotional height, part 2 is more labored in finding dramatic peaks; its rewards, however, are plenty. As the wealthy Henry Wilcox (the one character name unchanged from Forster’s original, solidly played by Tony Goldwyn), who grew rich while turning away from all signs of death and grief, invites Eric into his world...

In Search of Meaning: ‘The Hours’ and Meaning Construction

This paper deals with the way in which certain meanings originate from the participation of a multiplicity of cues that emerge from different modalities. The analysis is based on the implementation of specific linguistic and cognitive mechanisms that trigger the generation of the audience’s unconscious construction of meaning. The corpus of the analysis concentrates on an excerpt of David Hare’s script (2002) of the movie The Hours: three women’s lives, by Stephen Daldry, that acts as the backbone of the analysis. The analysis is cross-referenced with parallel modality inputs (Kress 2009), such as specific filmic or visual details, found either in the scene or the rest of the movie. The approach of this qualitative study is mainly cognitive making special emphasis on the three types of underspecification proposed by Radden (2007a). It also draws from Langacker’s (2008) proposals related to attention and perspective to identify figure-ground relations as determinant in the molding of the characters and their ideological standpoints in the scene.

A Collage of Dead Mothers: On Stephen Daldry's The Hours.

The Hours, a film directed by Stephen Daldry in 2002, creates a collage of three women: Virginia Woolf, whom we meet in the year 1923, in the middle of writing what is to become the novel Mrs. Dalloway; Laura Brown, whom we encounter in 1951, in the midst of her reading the novel Mrs. Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, who lives in New York in 2001 and who is affectionately called "Mrs. Dalloway" throughout the film. This paper's analysis focuses on this literary collage, including a writer (Virginia Woolf), a reader (Laura Brown), and a protagonist (Clarissa Vaughan), using André Green's idea of The Dead Mother Complex as well as Kristeva's and Pontalis's ideas concerning the melancholy of language in order to explain the specific attack on language and love that characterizes the film's main characters and that may explain their terminal choices.

Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction by Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Reviewed by: Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction by Pamela Robertson Wojcik Melissa Lenos (bio) Pamela Robertson Wojcik. Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction. Rutgers UP, 2016. Pamela Robertson Wojcik’s latest book, Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction, focuses on a collection of examples of urban children and the “fantasies of neglect” that inform the urban child archetype, as well as shifts in that representation throughout history. She samples texts across target audience ages, genres, and traditions of boys’ and girls’ stories. Although scholarship on representations of urban children exist, most have been more general explorations of filmic children, such as Childhood and Cinema by Vicky Levbeau (2008) and Karen Lury’s The Child in Film (2010), or explored childhood through the lens of motherhood, as in Lucy Fischer’s Cinematernity (1996). Texts focusing on childhood in literature often divide into the era-specific, such as Marah Gubar’s Artful Dodgers (2009) and Lara Saguisag’s more recent Incorrigibles and Innocents (2018), which examines childhood as depicted in nineteenth- and twentieth-century comic strips. Wojcik’s book achieves a rare bridge; it is useful for scholars of literature, film, children’s studies, and urban studies, and it maneuvers a coherent intersection between the fields. In addressing a variety of urban spaces, Wojcik also explores socioeconomic class: the characters examined include Harriet M. Welsch (of Harriet the Spy), who lives in luxury, and the poverty-bound Dead End Kids and urban black boys of “racial impasse” films. Wojcik also notes that urban child narratives—particularly those of girls—often suggest a dramatic class mobility that mirrors the child’s sense of freedom of movement within the city. Thus, according to Wojcik, Shirley Temple’s characters frequently transitioned between wealth and poverty (sometimes multiple times within the same narrative), and Little Orphan Annie’s comic strip was sustained through the unreliability of Daddy Warbucks, who would “vanish repeatedly, ‘re-orphaning’ Annie over and over again” (87). These initially disparate-seeming areas of focus converge in Wojcik’s overarching purpose: an historical examination of the figure of the “urban child” and the transformation of the trope as a reflection of shifting American ideals in parenting and children’s texts. Fantasies of Neglect is divided into thematic chapters. Representations of boys are particularly addressed through Universal Studio’s “Dead End Kids” of the 1930s and 1940s, while the girls include Shirley Temple, Jane Withers, and Little Orphan Annie. Wojcik bypasses a focus on these child stars themselves, noting that much of what has been previously written on the topic explores the labor of child actors, stage parents, or autobiographical nature of some directors’ child-focused texts, specifying that she is less interested in the “labor of the child star herself” and more in how the “filmic representations of [End Page 323] children engage issues of labor and economics” (39). A chapter on the class-focused portrayals of “neglect” is followed by an examination of consistently problematic portrayals of black urban boys. Wojcik ends with reflections on neglect and failure, particularly in the shift in attitudes on children’s freedom and the often-imagined dangers that have led to contemporary “helicopter parenting.” Throughout the book, Wojcik includes examples from film and literature, primarily American texts. Wojcik’s final, most fascinating (and potentially provocative) chapter digs further into the concept of helicopter parenting and the way much of American parenting culture has shifted from “a model of largely benign neglect to one of total supervision” (171). The chapter provides a gloss of the birth of “stranger danger” culture in the late 1970s and early 80s following several high-profile child abductions and “Satanic Panic” hysteria. Aside from intensifying the mommy wars, Wojcik notes that this cultural shift also generated a noted change in representations of the urban child, highlighting the example of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (and the 2011 Stephen Daldry film adaptation) and the foregrounding of our cultural transition through the protagonist Oskar. Although Wojcik demonstrates that earlier urban boys’ stories tended to focus on groups while urban girls were solitary...

Transmissions of Aliveness and Deadness in the Hours (2002)

ABSTRACTIn this close reading of a series of connected sequences in Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film The Hours, I attempt to demonstrate how a child’s lifelong and catastrophic internalization of an early, traumatic experience of his mother’s emotional unavailability may be captured on camera.

The Cinematic Space in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours: A Heterotopian Perspective

The film The Hours directed by Stephen Daldry is based on an experimental novel in which three women from detached places and eras are interlinked by the book Mrs Dalloway. Given that, its sense of simultaneity and spatial heterogeneity is quite obvious. Adopting the notion of Heterotopia proposed by Michel Foucault, the current paper analyzes the juxtaposed construction of space and time in The Hours. It examines how the editing, recurring imagery and coherent motives in The Hours function in order to construct heterotopian space and to shed light upon central themes such as alienation, sexual identity and death. Through these meticulous filmmaking techniques, the film not only transfers the collapse and confluence of time and space from text to the screen, but also retouches its postmodernist aesthetics and social reflectivity, offering a thought-provoking viewing experience for the audience

Making New Theatre Together: The First Writers' Group at the Royal Court Theatre and Its Legacy within the Young Writers' Programme

Making New Theatre TogetherThe First Writers' Group at the Royal Court Theatre and Its Legacy within the Young Writers' Programme Nicholas Holden (bio) The reconstruction of the Royal Court between 1996 and 2000 saw the theatre relocated to the heart of London's West End. The Court's delayed return to Sloane Square, along with the arrival of Ian Rickson as the theatre's new artistic director (1998–2006), allowed for a period of reflection and adjustment as the theatre approached the new millennium. Under Stephen Daldry's leadership (1992–1998), the Royal Court enjoyed one of the most successful periods in its history, with new plays by exciting young playwrights such as Sarah Kane, Joe Penhall, Mark Ravenhill, and Rebecca Prichard all contributing to what was hailed as the "renaissance of new writing."1 Through Rickson's appointment, the Royal Court returned to Sloane Square with new intentions that rejected the "stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap" 1990s paradigm, which saw around fifty new plays produced for short runs in the Court's Theatre Upstairs between 1994 and 1997. Rickson's administration replaced it with a more considered culture of growth and development for new playwrights at the theatre.2 The rebranding of the Court's long-standing Young Peoples' Theatre as the Young Writers' Programme (YWP) and the subsequent relocation of that initiative to a building adjacent to the Royal Court known as the Site proved to be an early sign of Rickson's aspirations for a more unified theatre. Launched in 1998, the Young Writers' Programme sought to focus the Court's work with young people on playwriting, and this implemented what Catherine Love calls a "culture of development" that, importantly, aligned with the Court's identity as a writers' theatre.3 In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Young Writers' [End Page 248] Programme provided the foundation to the careers of playwrights such as Lucy Prebble, Duncan Macmillan, Polly Stenham, and Mike Bartlett, and those writers, in turn, featured regularly on the stages of the Royal Court and in British theatre more widely. The inception of the Young Writers' Programme, therefore, went on to provide an unsurpassed model of success for the Court that has since proved invaluable to the theatre's production of new plays by new writers. The achievements of the writers who have emerged out of the Royal Court's Young Writers' Programme can be measured through the production of their plays in the United Kingdom, the United States, and across Europe. In addition, the work of the Court's International department, headed by Elyse Dodgson, has ensured that the theatre's work with writers has become a truly international endeavor. But in spite of the YWP's significant accomplishments in its fourteen-year history, academic engagement within this area of the Court remains limited. Indeed, it is only Love's 2015 article that has looked to bring some much-needed focus and scholarly analysis to what she describes as the "overwhelmingly successful" structure of the Royal Court's Young Writers' Programme.4 But the YWP is not the Royal Court's first attempt to provide an infrastructure that would offer support for a new generation of playwrights at the theatre. Such ambitions can be traced back to 1958, two years after the English Stage Company first began its residency of the Royal Court, where a writers' group was first established by George Devine in an attempt to further relationships between the Royal Court and a number of aspiring young playwrights of the time. In contrast to the Young Writers' Programme, whose history, as I have noted above, is in the early stages of academic analysis, the purpose, practice, and impact of the first Writers' Group at the Royal Court can be largely comprehended from the recollections of that time in the autobiographies of the group's members and through many of the publications on the history of the Royal Court.5 It is the purpose of this article, therefore, to revisit what should be regarded as the first attempt to bring a new generation of young playwrights to the Royal Court, through the Writers' Group in 1958, and...

Manufacturing consent inExtremely Loud and Incredibly Close:The visual aesthetics of tragedy, vulnerability, and triumph

This article examines Stephen Daldry’s film Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011), based on Jonathan Safran Foer, 2005 novel, as a media model to demonstrate how the Hollywood film industry fashioned tragedy and vulnerability in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. As hegemonic propaganda, this film offers a specific case study to examine how the media engages in ideological battles over meaning to establish and promote the optimism of neoliberal policies and Western commercial interests. I proffer that Daldry’s visual narration follows an Aristotelian story structure from innocence to tragedy, which arouses pity and fear in the audience to provide a national catharsis, while at the same time reestablishing a corporate vision of globalized interconnectivity and renegotiated democratic space.

"The Hours", de Stephen Daldry: tramas y tiempo narrativo = "The Hours", by Stephen Daldry: plots and narrative time

La pelicula adaptacion del libro del mismo titulo –que a su vez es una transposicion de la novela de Virginia Woolf–, presenta una estructura narrativa caracterizada por la sucesion alternada de episodios que corresponden a tres tramas centrales (con una cuarta en el prologo y epilogo). Las tramas centrales recrean sendos dias en las vidas de tres mujeres. La cohesion narrativa se ve reforzada por la presencia de motivos comunes entre las tramas y el tratamiento del tiempo, el cual refleja la estructura de la narracion y da prominencia a los ejes tematicos del film. The film The Hours, adapted from the book with the same title – which in turn is a transposition of the novel Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf – has a narrative structure of alternating episodes that correspond to three main plots (together with a fourth plot in the prologue and epilogue). Each of the main plots reflect a day in the life of three women. Shared motifs among the plots and the treatment of time – which follows the narrative structure of the stories, giving additional prominence to the main themes of the film – create a strong sense of cohesion.

영화 ｢디 아워스(The Hours)｣에서의 인물심리와 화음진행의 상관관계

영화음악은 영화 속 등장인물의 심리상태를 나타내거나 암시하는 역할을 한다. 따라서 본 연구는 스티븐 달드리(Stephen Daldry)감독의 영화 "디 아워스"에 나오는 등장인물의 심리변화에 따라 음악이 변화하는 과정을 제시한다. 이것에 입각하여 심리상태에 따른 음악적 요소는 각각의 인물에게 나타나는 우울증상이 음악적 요소의 상징적 방법으로 구성 가능하다는 것을 입증한다. Film music expresses the inner mentality of characters and performs a suggestive role of narrative. This study suggests the process of musical change according to the psychological change of the characters in the movie "The Hours" by Stephen Daldry. These musical elements depending on the mental states prove that the minute differences of each depression symptom could be expressed using symbolic methods of musical elements.

Expanding Adaptation: Intertextuality and Remediation in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours

Expanding Adaptation: Intertextuality and Remediation in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours

The Times of The Hours: Queer Melodrama and the Dilemma of Marriage

This article explores Stephen Daldry's The Hours (US/UK, 2002) as a feminist and queer meditation on the dilemma of marriage. An important queer-authored crossover film in the tradition of the family melodrama and the woman's film, The Hours offers a considered return to the iconic cultural form of the white middle-class nuclear family in a context where norms of heterosexual family and conjugal life are at once firmly entrenched and widely contested. Largely overlooked in film criticism, The Hours is characterized by its baroque and generative temporality and intertextuality that contribute to a nuanced meditation on women's experience of conjugal and family life. While much of the literature on melodrama draws on psychoanalysis and theories of spatiality, this article develops three distinct yet interrelated temporal and affective readings: Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism and Virginia Woolf's modernist “moment of being”; the performativity of gender and kinship (Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick); and theories of queer time and affect (Judith Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, Lauren Berlant). These readings probe The Hours's return to mediated cultural ideals of white conjugal and family life across time through the prism of feminist and queer cultural production and critique. Daldry's film is treated as a dense and fascinating work in itself, but it is also read against a small but influential cycle of recent queer-authored melodramas: Far from Heaven (dir. Todd Haynes, US, 2002), Savage Grace (dir. Tom Kalin, Spain/US/France, 2007), and A Single Man (dir. Tom Ford, US, 2009). Released at a historical conjuncture when queer debates about marriage and conjugal life are deeply polarized, these works share an ambivalent and stylized fascination with the white bourgeois family melodrama that is at once problematic and generative. I situate the film at the crossroads of two complementary and sometimes contradictory genealogies: the “thinking woman's film,” engaged with female subjectivity and authorship belonging to an influential white liberal feminist genealogy, and the genealogy of queer, white male – authored melodrama.

Mise-en-scène, Aesthetics and the Shoah: The Ambiguous Portrayal of a Female Perpetrator in The Reader

Stephen Daldry’s film version of Bernard Schlink’s The Reader challenges us to consider the complexities inherent in the Holocaust while exploring the question of choice, responsibility and trauma. In this film, eroticism, monstrosity and victimisation collide in order to demand that we re-evaluate our own conceptions of victimhood and perpetratorship through the ambiguous portrayal of a female perpetrator. The Reader succeeds in imaging the Holocaust aesthetically without trivialising it.

Good Luck with the Strike: Mining, Dancing and Stephen Daldry's Billy Elliot

Good Luck with the Strike: Mining, Dancing and Stephen Daldry's Billy Elliot

Chiming the Hours: A Philip Glass Soundtrack

The 2002 film The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry, with a screenplay by David Hare, closely follows Michael Cunningham's 1998 novel of the same name. Cunningham's novel in turn bears a close affinity to Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925), so that a brief account of all three works is called for to clarify what the film embeds. Mrs. Dalloway recounts a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a fashionable evening party. Her thoughts and actions are counterpointed against those of Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked and delusional war veteran, whose day ends in his suicide. Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Hours takes the original working title of Mrs. Dalloway and uses Woolf herself as one of the characters. Both the novel The Hours and the screenplay based on it depict the intertwined lives of three women of different times and places. Woolf's life (England, 1923) is paralleled with the suburban domesticity of Laura Brown (California, 1951) and with publisher Clarissa Vaughan (New York, 2001). All three are dealing with depression and thoughts of suicide. 1 At the end of both novel and film, two of the lives coalesce in the meeting of Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughan. Laura's estranged son Richard, who proves to be Clarissa's dying friend (see note 1), further links the California and New York narratives, though that connection is not immediately made.

Holocaust and Genocide Cinema: Crossing Disciplinary, Genre, and Geographical Borders: Editor's Introduction

Holocaust and Genocide Cinema:Crossing Disciplinary, Genre, and Geographical Borders: Editor's Introduction Lawrence Baron (bio) Inundated by a spate of new Holocaust movies released at the end of 2008, New York Times writer A. O. Scott cleverly titled his column "Never Forget. You're Reminded."1 Despite predictions that media overexposure to the Holocaust eventually will dampen public interest in the subject or reduce its disturbing horrors to comfortable clichés,2 filmmakers continue to gravitate to stories about how Gentiles and Jews responded to the Third Reich's persecution and attempted liquidation of European Jewry before and during World War Two and about how the surviving bystanders, perpetrators, resisters, and victims of this onslaught and their children have coped with the ethical, political, and psychological repercussions of the event since 1945. Over the past decade, nearly 190 feature films employing the Holocaust as their primary or secondary plotline were produced. While constituting thirty fewer Holocaust movies than released in the 1990s, this corpus of works demonstrates the fascination that the "Final Solution" still holds for audiences and directors more than sixty years after it occurred.3 [End Page 1] Beyond the sheer quantity of such movies, many of them have garnered critical and popular acclaim on global scale. Consider the diversity of countries of production, genres, and themes of the following admittedly idiosyncratic list of one outstanding Holocaust film from each of the last ten years: Divided We Fall, directed by Jan Hrebejk (Czech Republic: 2000). An infertile couple encounter humorous and terrifying situations sheltering a Jewish man in their home under the nose of their collaborationist landlord. Oscar Nominee for Best Foreign Language Film and winner of fifteen international film awards. Nowhere in Africa, directed by Caroline Link (Germany: 2001). A German Jewish family finds refuge from Nazi persecution in Kenya where they are temporarily interned as enemy aliens by the British. Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film and of seventeen other international film awards. The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski (France, Germany, Poland, United Kingdom: 2002). A renowned Jewish pianist survives the Warsaw Ghetto and hides on the Aryan side of the city with the aid of Polish friends and the spiritual sustenance he derives from music. Winner of three major Oscars, the Golden Palm from the Cannes Film Festival, and over forty other international film awards. Facing Windows, directed by Ferzan Ozpetek (Italy, Portugal, Turkey, United Kingdom: 2003). An unhappily married woman gains perspective on a contemplated affair with an attractive neighbor through her conversations with an elderly Holocaust survivor racked with guilt for deciding to warn the Jewish community about an impending round-up before he told his gay lover. Winner of nineteen international film awards. The Ninth Day, directed by Volker Schlöndorff (Czech Republic, Germany, Luxembourg: 2004). The SS releases a priest from Dachau and promises him permanent freedom if he can convince the Bishop of Luxembourg to cease criticizing Nazi policies. Otherwise, he will be sent back, his family will be arrested, and the other interned clerics from Luxembourg will be executed. Winner of five international film awards. Fateless, directed by Lajos Kostai (Hungary, Germany, United Kingdom: 2005). A teenage boy interned in German concentration and labor camps recalls both his suffering at the hands of his oppressors and the support he received from fellow inmates. Winner of two international film awards. Black Book, directed by Paul Verhoeven (Belgium, Germany, Netherlands: 2006). A Jewish woman whose family was betrayed and murdered while trying [End Page 2] to escape Holland joins the Dutch Resistance and infiltrates the local Gestapo by seducing its commanding officer. Winner of eleven international film awards. The Counterfeiters, directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky (Austria, Germany: 2007). The SS recruits a Jewish counterfeiter to lead a team of other concentration camp inmates involved in a project to forge the British pound and American dollar. Winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and three other international film awards. The Reader, directed by Stephen Daldry (Germany, United States: 2008). An adolescent boy and an older German woman strike up an unlikely affair. As a law student years later, he subsequently attends her trial for serving as a guard at Auschwitz...

“A Life as Potent and Dangerous as Literature Itself”: Intermediated Moves from Mrs. Dalloway to The Hours

The article analyses an adaptation process in two steps, from Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, to Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours, to Stephen Daldry’s film The Hours. Close readings are ca ...

The Cambridge companion to literature on screen

Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 288 pp., $80.00 hard cover; 273 pp., $24.99 paper. The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen covers much the same ground as T he Literature /Film Reader, and even contains some of the same contributors (Brian MacFarlane, Sarah Cardwell). In many ways, however, it is a very different kind of book: the editors observe that, in view of the fact that Cambridge University Press has seen fit to publish it, adaptation studies has finally arrived as a suitable subject for academic debate (1). MacFarlane's and Timothy Corrigan's contributions provide useful surveys of theoretical developments in the field from the beginning of the last century to the present. While acknowledging the contributions made by George Bluestone (1957), both of them hope that the fidelity question can finally be laid to rest: greater attention should be paid to exploring the gap between disciplinarity and adaptation, between and film [. . .] adaptation studies necessarily trouble and disciplinary boundaries (42). The following chapters focus on the shifting historical contexts of adaptation. Douglas Lanier's survey of Shakespeare on film begins in the late nineteenth century and culminates with Luhrmann's Romeo +Juliet (1996) and Shakespeare in Love (1998). He concludes that Shakespeare has been constructed in recent times as a filmmaker rather than a literary giant (73). Linda V Troost offers a comprehensive guide to Jane Austen adaptations, although I can't help but feel that she prefers Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice (2005) to all the previous versions of the novel, simply because it drags the text out of the prison-house of literature and transforms it into a teen-oriented romance. Martin Halliwell's and Peter Brooker's essays focus on the modernist and postmodern aspects of adaptation; both identify Stephen Daldry's The Hours (2002) as a film containing both elements. I found both contributions invaluable in their determination to show what elements render an adaptation modernist or postmodern, while simultaneously showing how it can open out an alternative, underdeveloped, or suppressed trace in its source-material (115). This comment is strongly reminiscent of Tom Leitch's observation (made in his recent book Adaptation and its Discontents [2007]) that adaptations need to be treated as creative works in their own right. A further section Genre, Industry, Taste shows how adaptations are shaped by several criteria-institutional, and cinematic-as well as audience taste. Eckard Voigts-Virchow rehearses familiar arguments about Englishness and the heritage film, but provides an interesting sideline in his analysis of German television adaptations of Rosamund Pilcher's Mills and Boon novels, that create a Germaninspired view of Englishness. Imelda Whelehan's discussion of Now Voyager (1942) also follows a well-trodden scholarly path, as it shows how Irving Rapper's film version was shaped by Bette Davis's star image. Deborah Carimeli looks at how different genres of children's literature, ranging from classics such as The Wizard of 0% to more commercial texts such as P. L. Travers's Mary Poppins, have been adapted by various film studios. She is particularly convincing in her discussion of Disneyfication (168-74). The book's final section suggests new approaches for adaptation studies that are very different from those proposed in The Literature /Film Reader. …

Billy Elliot The Musical: visual representations of working-class masculinity and the all-singing, all-dancing bo[d

According to Cynthia Weber, [d]ance is commonly thought of as liberating, transformative, empowering, transgressive, and even as dangerous. Yet ballet as a masculine activity still remains a suspect phenomenon. This paper will challenge this claim in relation to Billy Elliot The Musical and its critical reception. The transformation of the visual representation of the human body on stage (from an ephemeral existence to a timeless work of art) will be discussed and analysed vis-a-vis the text and sub-texts of Stephen Daldry's direction and Peter Darling's choreography. The dynamics of working-class masculinity will be contextualised within the framework of the family, the older female, the community, the self and the act of dancing itself.