Adaptation - current issue

A Necessary Signifier: The Adaptation of Robinson's Body-image in 'The Jackie Robinson Story'

Raengo, A. — 2008-08-27

The essay singles out The Jackie Robinson Story, as an iconophiliac adaptation driven by the authorizing and authenticating presence of Robinson's body on screen, which functions as both the ‘source material’ and its ‘adaptation’. It argues that the film needs to be appreciated within a larger nexus of texts indicated as ‘The Jackie Robinson Story,’ revealing a larger process of embodiment of the integration drama grafted onto Robinson’s body-image in the years preceding and following the release of the film. Read in the context of Robinson’s presence in post World War II visual culture as emblem of the successful realization of its color blind utopias, ‘The Jackie Robinson Story’ appears to participate in the process of visual accommodation that brought the assimilationist imagination to elect Robinson’s body as the signifier of yet another adaptation process: the incarnated visuality of the integration drama itself.

Adaptation, the Genre

Leitch, T. — 2008-08-27

Instead of considering film and television adaptations in the context of the source texts they are adapting, this essay proposes another context for their reception and analysis: the genre of adaptation itself. Focusing on the Hollywood traditions of masculine adventure and feminine romance associated respectively with adaptations of Alexandre Dumas père and fils, it identifies four genre markers common to both traditions that make it more likely a given adaptation will be perceived as an adaptation even by an audience that does not know its source, and one anti-marker associated with adaptations in the tradition of the younger Dumas but not the elder. The essay concludes by proposing adaptation as a model for all Hollywood genres.

'Humanity must perforce prey upon itself like monsters of the deep': King Lear and the Urban Gangster Movie

Griggs, Y. — 2008-08-27

Since the 1940s there has been an ongoing and fertile intertextual relationship between cinema's popular gangster genre and the ‘high art’ works of Shakespeare. However, whilst consideration of films that lend a gangster twist to Macbeth and Richard III have become part of the critical landscape, little work has been undertaken in relation to the cinematic appropriation of King Lear as gangster movie, despite its thematic and ideological parallels with a certain type of gangster film. This article examines the textual transactions taking place between Shakespeare's King Lear and the gangster genre; it explores not only the ways in which Lear's story is shaped in accordance with the cinematic codes and conventions of the gangster genre, but how the gangster genre has evolved in response to the mythical Lear narrative.

Hamlet Smokes Prince: 101 Reykjavik on Page and Screen

Hopkins, L. — 2008-08-27

Hallgrímur Helgason's novel 101 Reykjavik, first published in 1996, was made into a film directed by Baltasar Kormákur in 2000 and subsequently translated into English by Brian Fitzgibbon. In one sense, both novel and film are adaptations, in that while the film is clearly based on the novel, the novel in turn insistently patterns itself on Shakespeare's Hamlet, with one of its central jokes being that its hero, unemployed 33-year-old Icelander Hlynur Björn Hafsteinsson, is both extraordinarily like Hamlet in temperament and situation and yet, in a way that the novel itself presents as part of the essence of Hamletism, also so self-obsessed that he refuses to register open awareness of the fact. Instead, he drifts through a series of Hamletesque situations thinking only of how they affect himself, without ever registering either that others are also involved or that his ‘self’ is in fact constructed and conditioned by external powers and precedents. By the end of the book, however, it is clear that Hamletism is not, as it was for Chekhov, a badge of doom, but actually a condition which can be outgrown and survived, as Hlynur Björn finally starts to take an interest in someone other than himself, his infant son/brother.

FILM REVIEW: Atonement--The Surface of Things

Childs, P. P. — 2008-08-27