This media course is the
result of cooperation between the Danish Department and the English Department
of the University of Aalborg.
The teaching language is English.
Time: Fridays 12.15-14.00 - Room: 4.128 Kroghstræde 3
9.2.
Jørgen Riber Christensen
Dickens adaptations - television torments?
Charles Dickens' narrative technique has influenced the early film, and Dickens
has been used extensively as a source of adaptations. Since 1897 more than 130
Dickens film adaptations have been made, and the serial publication form of
Dickens' novels has been easily transferable to television series. This lecture
will focus on the narrative technique of Dickens and his adaptations.
Literature:
"Dickens Adaptations from South Park to Futurama" in Kyle Nicholas and Jørgen Riber Christensen, eds., Open Windows Remediation Strategies in Global Film Adaptations, Aalborg University Press, 2005, pp. 139-155
Jørgen Riber Christensen, Charles
Dickens CD-ROM, Systime, Aarhus 2000
John Glavin, Dickens on screen, Cambridge University Press, 2003
16.2.
Bent Sørensen
Adaptation (the film, 2002)
Adaptation (2002) is a movie (directed by Spike Jonze, screenplay by Charlie
Kaufman), which addresses head-on the issues of adaptation, genre, character
and representation. It is “quite simply” a story about a screenwriter
(this real fictitious character is also named Charlie Kaufman) who is given
the impossible task of creating a Hollywood movie out of an intellectually restrained
and cool piece of New York non-fiction (the book The Orchid Thief,
written by Susan Orlean (real book, real writer)). Kaufman (the character) increasingly
stumbles over problems with his research, with his personal life, and with the
conditions his Hollywood employers impose on him. The end result is a monumental
writer’s block, which he can only exorcise by taking advice and inspiration
from unlikely sources, which include his suddenly successful twin brother Donald
(also a screen writer (although not real, despite the fact that he has a fan
website), but of the most clichéd type of Hollywood genre drivel (both
brothers (real and fictitious) are played by Nicholas Cage in the movie)); Susan
Orlean, whom he develops an obsessive (masturbatory) fascination with; the main
character of The Orchid Thief, John Laroche (who of course really was/is
an orchid thief); Robert McKee, a real Hollywood screen writing guru (author
of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting,
a real manual); and, chiefly, his own personal life (he writes himself into
the adaptation of Orlean’s book). The movie culminates in a number of
genre twists, which highlights the problems of representation made particularly
obvious by the adaptation process.
Readings:
Charlie (and Donald!) Kaufman: Adaptation - the shooting script (excerpt)
Susan Orlean: Foreword (from Adaptation - the shooting script)
Susan Orlean: The Orchid Thief (excerpt)
Robert McKee: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of
Screenwriting (excerpt)
2.3.
Lene Yding
The Hours and Virginia Woolf – adaptations of a cultural phenomenon
The film The Hours (2002) is a based on Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (1999). Apart from being an adaptation of this novel, this film thematizes a relationship to another novel – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and the work and life of its author, Virginia Woolf. Through three interwoven stories set in 1923 England, 1951 Los Angeles, and 2001 New York, this film juxtaposes a biography of Virginia Woolf with ‘adapted’ versions of her ‘story’ in the form of two fictional characters. The focus of this lecture is not on the adaptation from the novel The Hours to the film The Hours but the more general ways in which both novel and film not only adapt but rewrite Virginia Woolf’s life and work, in particular Mrs Dalloway. My point is that in connection with The Hours adaptation is not only a ‘technical’ transformation from one medium to another, but also a kind of cultural transformation and updating of Virginia Woolf as a cultural phenomenon.
9.3.
Torben Poulsen
Remediation made fun
It is no secret that Hollywood has found yet another creative vein to tap from in the world of comics. From the adaptations of well known characters (e.g. Spiderman, X-Men, The Hulk, etc) to the more marginalized (e.g. From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Hellboy) – comic aficionados finally get to see live versions of their favorite comics.
But the adaptation-craze is not limited to comics. Many popular computer games are also increasingly been turned into films (e.g. Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy & Resident Evil). This lecture will be investigating how filmmakers try to capture the essence in these many different types of popular fictions, and translate them to film.
In short, the lecture will examine some of the problems that arise when adapting film scripts from other sources than the literary. This will be exemplified both through both comparative example analysis coupled with theoretical backgrounds on remediation. The primary concern for this lecture will be an investigation into the stylistic features of the various media, but we shall also touch upon the narrative aspects of, as is the case with the computer games, transforming an interactive narrative into a linear format.
16.3
Andrew Fish
Trivial Pursuits: Adaptations of Jane Austen’s Novels
In many ways, Austen’s novels are ideally suited to adaptation.
Austen mobilizes her readers’ mundane moral judgment of characters and
their actions in the fictional world with minimal reliance on direct, privileged
access to characters’ mental processes. Characters are largely constructed
and judged by their publicly available words and actions, and internal ’psychological’
states (thoughts, feelings, attitudes) are mostly attributed to characters by
readers using mundane reasoning processes to make sense of the text. These words
and deeds can be transferred from the written to the visual medium, and thus,
apparently, one of the central features of Austen’s fiction functions
just as well on screen as in reading.
There is a catch,
however. Although the central mechanism that I have described is essentially
dramatic, in that it relies on external action, it is decidedly ’undramatic’
in terms of the magnitude of events portrayed and of the profundity of insights
offered. Why would anyone be interested in a series of visually unspectacular,
trivial events when the only prospect of reward is a reinforcement of common
sense through the guided use of the same faculty? If we ask the same question
of the novel, it becomes apparent that the pleasure of reading Austen derives
from the tension between the obvious and the mundane, on the one hand, and,
on the other, the subtlety of the narrative tone that constantly implies moral
judgment and moral positioning without overtly imposing any such judgment on
readers. Although the central actions and emphases of the book can easily be
transferred to the screen, the process of adaptation ’short-circuits’
the pleasure of the text, which, for readers, is participation in the process
of constructing the fictional world in cooperation with the narrative at the
most minute level of detail.
The problem for adaptation
is, therefore, more or less insoluble. If the production, on every level from
direction to acting, emphasises and interprets what is implicit, the result
will be a series of uninteresting, heavy-handed clichés that leave viewers
with few interesting participatory possibilities. If the adaptation eschews
interpretation, it will simply present an uninteresting series of woodenly acted
trivial actions.
23.3.
Gunhild Agger
Babette's Feast and other stories
Babette's Feast (1987) was based on a short story by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
and directed by Gabriel Axel. Dinesen and Axel represent a Danish as well as
an international cultural horizon. Dinesen wrote her first tales in English,
and Axel has directed several television serials in France. I shall discuss
the film as an example of a dual orientation, one side supporting traditions
of Danish film culture, on the other side selfconsciously appealing to an international
audience, and I shall relate it to the production of as well Isak Dinesen as
Gabriel Axel.
30.3.
Camelia Elias
The Merchant of Venice:
Passion through Fashion and Shopping for Forgiveness
To date, there have been 13 screen versions of The Merchant of Venice: five released in movie theaters, eight produced for television. One of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, in which a successful but moneyless merchant lends cash from his enemy, a Jewish moneylender who demands that in case of failure to pay back, the poor merchant must give him one pound of flesh, The Merchant of Venice in Michael Radford’s adaptation (2004) (featuring Al Pacino in an amazing performance) engages with the figure of the merchant in modern and surprising ways. Unlike other adaptations Radford focuses on trade and shopping to illuminate stages in human behavior: homosexual love is traded for friendship and has fatal consequences, forgiveness is shopped around for and has impossible consequences, racial difference is exchanged for doctrines and has irreparable consequences. In this session I want to look at figurative adaptations of sexual and racial differences in the context of forgiveness, especially as forgiveness is mediated by external appearance such as the use of costume.
Preliminary readings:
See this website
General literature:
Kyle Nicholas and Jørgen Riber Christensen, eds., Open Windows Remediation Strategies in Global Film Adaptations, Aalborg University Press, 2005 (will be available in Universitetsboghandelen)
Further reading:
Cartmell, Deborah, Whelehan, Imelda, Adaptations, Routledge, London
1999
Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation,
Clarendon Press, Oxford 1996
Sarah Cardwell, Adaptations revisited - Television and the classic novel,
Manchester University Press, 2002
International organizer: Janeen S. Joergensen
Mail
to all lecturers here.
The Internet Movie Database