Interpretation and Characterization in Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-100
Author(s):  
Megan Woller
Keyword(s):  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Library Of Congress ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Arthurian Legend ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Film Version ◽  
Frederick Loewe ◽  
Love Triangle ◽  
Once And Future King

This chapter looks at how Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe adapt T. H. White’s The Once and Future King in both original 1960 Broadway stage production and the 1967 Hollywood film adaptation. Specifically, this chapter looks at how the musical Camelot interprets White’s version of Arthurian legend, tracking the changes Lerner and Loewe made and especially how song affects characterization. Drawing on archival research completed at the Library of Congress, this chapter examines the process of adapting this long unwieldy myth into a musical. Although Loewe did not work on the 1967 film, Lerner wrote the screenplay. Since the film version remains fixed and widely available, it is worth investigating how the changes made to it further adapt the tale. Since Lerner and Loewe chose to focus on the love triangle between Arthur, Guenevere, and Lancelot, this chapter pays particular attention to how Lerner and Loewe alter their characters.

Attending the Tale of

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
Direct Address ◽  
Film Version ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
The Grotesque

This chapter examines Tim Burton’sSweeney Todd, a film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s award-winning musical thriller. In direct opposition to Sondheim’s opinion that this is the best, mostfilmicfilm version of a stage musical ever made it argues that Burton’s powerful deployment of the visual possibilities of cinemaalters the grand guignol of the stage musical with its direct address to the audience, to create a more attractive and conventional view of the two psychologically introspective protagonists who fail to evoke the grotesque and demonic force of their more convincingly melodramatic stage counterparts. By analysing Burton’s exploitation of the screen presence of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter, the chapteridentifies the contradictions resulting from the director’s attempt to position the film within the genre of such classic screen thrillers asPsycho.

Speaking of Abjection

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory S. Jay
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Film Version ◽  
White Backlash

The genre of the white liberal race novel was revived in 2009 by Stockett’s bestseller and its high-profile Hollywood film version. Much controversy broke out over the novel’s depiction of black maids in early 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, which was a center of Civil Rights activism and white backlash. Were these characters stereotypes or deconstructions of the “mammy” figure? The chapter demonstrates that the narrative sections told by the maids contain much subversion, and that even the white protagonist exhibits resistance to orthodox female gender norms. Understanding the novel also requires attention to its specific historical setting amidst the Civil Rights tumult in Mississippi and Alabama during the years in which the novel is set, including the attempt to integrate the universities in those two states and the assassination of Medgar Evers. These events belong to the theme of the necessity for change reiterated throughout the novel.

Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend (1944): life projects

2018 ◽  
pp. 98-117
Author(s):  
Steven Earnshaw
Keyword(s):  
Social Responsibility ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Film Version ◽  
Personal And Social Responsibility ◽  
Life Projects

Charles Jackson’s novel The Lost Weekend is usually seen as an indictment of alcoholics, an accurate depiction of their self-deceptions and lying to others, with an accusation that drinking is no more than an escape, a failure to face up to personal and social responsibility. As with other books with protagonists who commit to drinking, possible reasons are given for the failing self (suppressed homosexuality; relationship with the parents; unsuccessful career), but such interpretations miss the significance of repetition in this novel: the drinker continually faces his demons in a manner that London’s John Barleycorn argues is more truthful than the evasions of everyday sobriety. Unlike the Hollywood film version of the novel (which brought ‘alcoholism’ as a serious issue into the cultural mainstream), Jackson’s narrative is unusual in that rather than offering an ending which sees the death of the drinker or his reformation, it shows the character wondering what all the fuss is about and preparing himself for another binge. The chapter analyses the novel’s various conceptualisations of self and alcohol, its knowing engagement with psychiatry and psychology, the figure of the writer-drinker, and also covers its treatment of temporality.

The quest for the human: characterization in T. H. White's The Once and Future King and The Book of Merlyn

1982 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 168
Author(s):  
Maria Luiza Cyrino Valle
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
King Arthur ◽  
Arthurian Legend ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
Basic Source ◽  
Once And Future King

This work is an analysis of characterization in T. H. White's version of the Arthurian Legend , a tetralogy entitled The Once and Futune King and a fifth novel, The Book of Merlyn, which waspublished posthumously. The first part of this study presents an outline of the legend up to and including Sir Thomas Malory's text, which is the basic source for T. H. White's Arthurian series. The second part deals with the novels which constitute the tetralogy: The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkess, The Ill-made Knight and The Candy in the Wind,and also with The Book of Merlyn. More emphasis is given to The Sword in the Stone, the first novel of the tetralogy , which narrates the boyhood of King Arthur under the guidance of Merlyn, since it is White's original contribution to the legend and for its bearing on the other novels. Characterization is discussed as it becomes a thematic vehicle for White's contemporary preoccupation with the search for identity. Tne quest for the human is at the same time a theme andthe basis of the process of characterization used by T. H. White.

scholarly journals Solaris and the Dao: The Reception of Stanislaw Lem’s Novel in the Sinophone World

2021 ◽  
pp. 121-151
Author(s):  
Zofia Anna Wybieralska
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
The Third ◽  
Philosophical Aspect ◽  
Stanislaw Lem

The most popular science fiction novel written by the Polish author Stanisław Lem, Solaris, was published in 1961. Although it was translated into English as early as 1970, the book was unknown to the Sinophone readers until 2003, when the first translation from English into Chinese was published, most probably following the popularity of the resounding Hollywood film adaptation from 2002. Still, Suolalisi Xing (which can be translated as ‘Solaris Star’) did not attract broader audiences in China or Taiwan, at least not until the third version of the novel, translated directly from Polish into Chinese, saw the light of day in 2010. The appearance of this translation coincided with the beginning of a New Golden Era of Chinese and Taiwanese science fiction, which undoubtedly had a significant influence on the positive re-reception of Solaris. In the paper, the author focuses on the philosophical aspect of Lem’s work and investigates which themes and concepts present in Solaris caught the imagination of Chinese-speaking readers. The author wants to show how this reception, while coming from a different historical, cultural, and linguistic background, can enrich our understanding of the novel and introduce a new way of looking at the important existential questions stated by the writer.

Melancholic Nostalgia, Identity Crisis, and Adaptation in 1950s Hong Kong: Ba Jin’s Family on Screen

Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-333
Author(s):  
Yi Li
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Film Version ◽  
Hong Kong Cinema ◽  
Political Alignment

Abstract The communist takeover of mainland China in 1949 created physical, cultural, and political segregation between the mainland and Hong Kong, thus fostering a sense of dislocation and alienation among filmmakers who had migrated to Hong Kong from the mainland. The aim of this study is to explore the symbiosis between nostalgia and adaptation in Hong Kong cinema within the cultural landscape of 1950s Hong Kong, when Cold War politics was operating. With a detailed analysis of the 1953 Hong Kong film adaptation of mainland writer Ba Jin’s novel Family, and a comparative reading with the mainland film version produced in 1956, this study illustrates the cultural and historical significance of nostalgia in the development of Hong Kong cinema. This article further argues that nostalgic sentiment was expressed effectively through adaptations, while simultaneously improving these adaptations artistically and strengthening their political alignment with the mainland.

Unexpected turns in lifelong sentimental journeys: redefining love, memory and old age through Alice Munro's ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’ and its film adaptation, Away from Her

2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 389-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
NÚRIA CASADO-GUAL
Keyword(s):  
Gender Difference ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Late Life ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Retirement Home ◽  
Film Version ◽  
And Gender

ABSTRACTAlice Munro's 2001 short story ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’ and its 2006 film version, Away from Her, directed and adapted for the screen by Sarah Polley, are two interconnected narratives through which diverse (and even divergent) representations of romantic love and memory in later life can be analysed. Even if the two texts are constructed on an apparently simple plot line, which basically depicts the last phase of a 44-year-long marriage once the wife, Fiona, presents symptoms of dementia and is interned in a retirement home, they both allow for, at least, two contrasted interpretations. As will be demonstrated, these two possible readings unveil different cultural, social and psychological facets of memory in connection with late-life expressions of love; and each of them contributes, in their own way, to the construction of a dialogical narrative that mediates between the complexities of old age, dementia and gender difference, while at the same time demonstrating the power of literature and the cinema to reflect and refract the complexities of contemporary forms of ageing.

scholarly journals The Ethics of Uncovering Something Else in Histoire(s) du cinema

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-60
Author(s):  
Jiewon Baek
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
The Other ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Written Text ◽  
Film Version ◽  
Funeral Music ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
Inside Out

In lieu of an abstract, here is the essay's opening paragraph:Marguerite Duras prefaces the second edition of Le navire night, from which an excerpt is cited above, by explaining that after writing the story of a man named J.M., everything came too late, including the realization of the film version of Le navire night. Once the event has been written and the common night of history been closed up, did she have the right to flash a light into the darkness to go back and see? The only seeing through cinema that was possible, she continues, was to film the failure, the disaster of the film. But how does one film the failure of realizing a film adaptation of a written text, which itself was transcribed from an oral re-telling of a story, which itself was adapted from memory? The event already took place – writing, “this history here” –, leaving cinema to film what never took place, namely, the film itself. As Jean-Luc Godard confirms in a chapter titled Seul le cinéma in Histoire(s) du cinéma, not only in the form of his project as a whole but also more explicitly in one shot that positions two close-up photographs of his face with the sound of Paul Hindemith’s “Funeral Music” and this text: “Faire une description précise de ce qui n’a jamais eu lieu est le travail de l’historien.” Describing the rise of the film Le navire night from its disastrous death, Duras writes: “On a mis la caméra à l’envers et on a filmé ce qui entrait dedans, de la nuit, de l’air, des projecteurs, des routes, des visages aussi.” The camera turned upside-down, or in the other sense, inside-out, Duras films the entrance of the exterior, a sort of a Levinasian visage. The question no longer is one of having the right but of the duty to re-write history, as is insinuated by the reference to “The Critic as Artist” written across one of the photographs mentioned above, which is again a gesture of Godard’s positioning himself as the critic whose role Oscar Wilde defined: “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”

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