Bob Stam
Fridays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
4 points
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) / Class #20444
Section 002 (Outside students) / Class #20445
A very high proportion of films made around the world have been adaptations of pre-existing works, whether plays, novels, comic books, biographies, internet games, or some other source “text.” To take only a few relatively recent examples, one need only think of films like The Hours, Fight Club, Twelve Years a Slave, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Spider-Man, and Lord of the Rings.
The course has three levels. On a first, historical/literary level, the course will examine a chronologically-arranged sequence of celebrated novels (and their cinematic adaptations) including classics from England (Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Fielding’s Tom Jones); Russia (Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground) the U.S. (Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Nabokov’s Lolita, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple); France Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; Henri-Pierre Roche’s Jules and Jim); and Brazil (Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star). On a second, analytic level, we will perform exercises in comparative stylistics by doing close readings of brief passages from novels and examining the film sequences based on them. On a third, theoretical level, the course will broaden the discussion to treat adaptation as an essential part of the creative process in all the arts in the form of what used to be called “influence” but is now often referred to as “dialogism,” “intertextuality,” “transtextuality,” “intermediality,” “remediation,” and so forth. All of these theories treat the complex relations between single texts -- whether a play, a novel, a film, a TV show, a music video, or any other kind of text -- and all the other texts, genres, media, and discourses with which those texts comes into dialogue. Although transtextuality theory will in this case be deployed to inform our readings of novels and films, it is ultimately relevant to all the arts, since the arts generally rethink, adapt, change, transform, and remediate pre-existing texts and arts and genres.
The reading for the course consists in the reading of the literary source-texts – whether of entire novels or of selected passages – along with key texts within the theory of adaptation. The course will use close analysis, first of the novels as literature, and then of the film adaptations as film, demonstrating the ways that a transtextual approach can illuminate both media and the practice of adaptation across media. The course will be especially concerned with revisionist adaptations that update, challenge, and otherwise alter their source texts, in sum the endless “remediations” (Bolter and Grusin) of novels as the source texts mutate into other forms and genres such as cartoons, popular songs, music videos, parodies and so forth. Classic novels such as Robinson Crusoe, for example, have spawned scores of adaptations moving from the “faithful” to the irreverent (the Buñuel version) to the subversively anti-colonial (Man Friday) with myriad covert reiterations such as Castaway and the reality show “Survivor.”
In some cases we will examine variant film versions of the same novel – e.g. comparing the various versions of Madame Bovary, whether American (Minnelli), French (Renoir, Chabrol), or Indian (Mehta's Maya Memsab), often reflecting on the very distinct ways that different directors stage the very same passage from the novel. The course will also touch on a number of broader issues: the ingrained prejudices against film adaptation as a “parasitic” form; the idea of the “proto-cinematic novel;” the problematics of the concept of “fidelity;” the amplification of intertexts in a multi-track medium; adaptation as social barometer; and transcultural adaptation.