The censor, the steam fitter and Anita Loos: Or, the silent film adaptation of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928)

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-122
Author(s):  
Leslie Kreiner Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Silent Film ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Anita Loos

Blue Jeans Stage and Screen

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-72
Author(s):  
David Mayer ◽  
Helen Day-Mayer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Attempted Murder ◽  
Modern Media ◽  
Blue Jeans

Scholars of Victorian and Edwardian theatre necessarily piece together their accounts of ephemeral performance through manuscripts, reviews, and other responses preserved in print and visual culture. However, films made between 1895 and 1935 offer frequent, unexpected, and sometimes curiously skewed glimpses of the Victorian and Edwardian stage. This essay focuses on John H. Collins’s 1917 silent film adaptation of Blue Jeans, Joseph Arthur’s melodrama, popular from its New York debut in 1890. The melodrama is perhaps most famous for ‘the great sawmill scene’. This iconic scene, an early example of an episode in which a helpless victim is tied to a board approaching a huge buzz saw, turns a mundane setting into a terrifying site for suspense, violence, and attempted murder. Whilst the film made alterations and abridgements, the overall effect was to preserve the play’s distinctive features. Our essay shows how the stage version is preserved within Collins’s film adaptation so that the cinematic artefact gives unique access to the Victorian theatrical work. Films not only preserve Victorian forms in modern media and extend the reach of Victorian culture, but also open a new resource and methodology for understanding Victorian and Edwardian theatre.

scholarly journals Melodrama's afterlife : Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and The Woman in White from the Victorian stage to the silent screen

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Karen Laird
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Film Adaptations ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
David Copperfield ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
Written Word

Unique in building a much-needed bridge between fiction, theatre, and film, "Melodrama's Afterlife" proves that writers working in all three genres throughout the long Victorian era engaged in a reciprocal relationship bound by their common use of melodrama. Covering dramatic adaptations of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and The Woman in White staged between 1848 and 1878 in London and New York, this dissertation argues that the first playwrights prioritized experimentation over fidelity to their source texts. These three case studies reveal the Victorians to be pioneers in the art of adaptation. Silent film directors depended more heavily upon these Victorian playscripts as sources for their film adaptations than the original novels. By unearthing the adaptation strategies of the Victorian theatre and early twentieth-century cinema, "Melodrama's Afterlife" ultimately challenges the theory predominant among adaptation scholars today, which holds that the experimentation evident in contemporary film adaptations represents a revolutionary break from a century-long concern with fidelity to the written word. This study proves that our new focus on originality and experimentation in film adaptation is not so much a breaking away from an older model of film adaptation. Instead, it is a return to Modernist adaptation approaches that were rooted in Victorian melodrama.

scholarly journals THE FIRST SCREENING OF ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1903)

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-98
Author(s):  
EKATERINA V. SALNIKOVA ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Political Union ◽  
Alice In Wonderland ◽  
Fantasy World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Almost All

The article is dedicated to the British silent film Alice in Wonderland by Percy Stow and Cecil Hepworth, which was found and restored in 2010. The 12-minute film was unusually long for early cinema. Almost all of the survived credits annotate several short scenes at once, showing their interconnection or, conversely, apartness from each other. This suggests that some scenes were sold not separately, but as a series of scenes united by a credit. Structurally, each fragment of the film, consisting of 2–3 scenes, is similar to one episode of series. Therefore, the origin of the principles of seriality in cinema can be associated with film adaptations of fairy-tale stories. The concept of space demonstrates the inner duality of the Wonderland. The private part of it looks like an English landscape garden, while the space of the Queen and her entourage is designed as a classicist regular park. In his adaptation (2010) of Carroll’s fairy-tale, Tim Burton will further unfold the theme of duality and conflict inside the Wonderland. In the 1903 film adaptation, Alice was played by May Clark, a grown-up girl who worked at the Hepworth studio. The dreamlike nature of the screen reality is emphasized by the restraint of the amateur performers’ play and the unobtrusiveness of the fantastic, when the screen fantasy world is both similar and different from the everyday life. The marriageable age of the heroine and some of the scenes that look like Alice’s “going through the torments” make us interpret the action as the embodiment of her unconscious. The magic garden, where a young girl is so eager to get, a symbol of the desirable joys of an adult life, becomes a nightmare for Alice. The film was released in the same year as the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was established, and it merged into an era of revision of Victorian ideals and rejection of the perception of women in line with patriarchal values. Tim Burton’s film, created in the era of the new emancipation and reconsideration of gender, largely corresponds to the first screen adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, presenting the Victorian world as a generalized image of a society that suppresses the individual and naturally provokes protest.

Alienated Entertainment: Ludwig Berger’s Meistersinger Film Der Meister von Nürnberg (1927)

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
ÁINE SHEIL
Keyword(s):  
Sustained Attention ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Film Making

Abstract Der Meister von Nürnberg is a silent film adaptation of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg remembered chiefly for the protests it generated on its release in 1927. Several authors refer to it briefly in reception histories of Die Meistersinger, but the film has not yet attracted sustained attention either within Wagner scholarship or within literature on opera and film. Der Meister von Nürnberg is, however, an effective lens through which to examine sensitivities in opera’s relationship with film in 1920s Germany, as well as various ambiguities in Weimar-era film making and consumption. The film constitutes fascinating proof of the historically conditioned reverence for Wagner’s Die Meistersinger that existed within conservative opera criticism in 1920s Germany, while its ephemerality serves as a key to understanding several wider features of the Weimar cultural landscape. In this sense, the film exceeds curiosity status and emerges as a multivalent artefact of a complex, contradiction-ridden time.

“Any Chance to Be Unrefined”: Film Narrative Modes in Anita Loos's Fiction

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brooks E. Hefner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Silent Films ◽  
Anita Loos ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines the underappreciated work of the Hollywood scenarist and humor writer Anita Loos. In general, Loos is known separately to film scholars, as a prominent writer of silent films, and to historians of American culture, as an important twentieth‐century humorist. However, her film‐writing career and her work in the theory of film writing influenced the narrative structure and assumptions of her fiction. Through readings of Loos's three early novels, the essay demonstrates how the humor and complex cinematic structure of these texts depend on a stark text‐image divide that stems directly from her ideas about writing for silent film. Looking at Loos's fiction in the light of her intimate familiarity with the film industry provides new insight into dialogues about high and popular culture and into the engagement of modernism with cinema. (BEH)

‘Wheels have been set in motion’: Geocentrism and Relativity in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liliane Campos
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Frames Of Reference ◽  
Quantum Uncertainty ◽  
Galilean Relativity ◽  
Modern Physics ◽  
20Th Century Physics ◽  
Time Specific ◽  
Do So

By decentring our reading of Hamlet, Stoppard’s tragicomedy questions the legitimacy of centres and of stable frames of reference. So Liliane Campos examines how Stoppard plays with the physical and cosmological models he finds in Hamlet, particularly those of the wheel and the compass, and gives a new scientific depth to the fear that time is ‘out of joint’. In both his play and his own film adaptation, Stoppard’s rewriting gives a 20th-century twist to these metaphors, through references to relativity, indeterminacy, and the role of the observer. When they refer to the uncontrollable wheels of their fate, his characters no longer describe the destruction of order, but uncertainty about which order is at work, whether heliocentric or geocentric, random or tragic. When they express their loss of bearings, they do so through the thought experiments of modern physics, from Galilean relativity to quantum uncertainty, drawing our attention to shifting frames of reference. Much like Schrödinger’s cat, Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are both dead and alive. As we observe their predicament, Campos argues, we are placed in the paradoxical position of the observer in 20th-century physics, and constantly reminded that our time-specific relation to the canon inevitably determines our interpretation.

James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein: Haunting Samuel Beckett's Film

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Weiss
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Biographical Data ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
The Past

Samuel Beckett's Film has been the focus of several articles in the past decade. While current investigations of Beckett's film are diverse, what most of them share is their dependence on biographical data to support their readings. Many scholars who have written on Beckett's failed cinematic excursion, for example, point to Beckett's letter of 1936 to Sergei Eisenstein. However, the link between Beckett's interest in film and his admiration for James Joyce has sadly been overlooked. Both Irish writers saw the artistic possibilities in film and both admired the Russian silent film legend, Sergei Eisenstein. Although there is no record of Joyce and Beckett discussing cinema or of Beckett knowing about Joyce's meeting with Eisenstein in 1929, it seems unlikely that Beckett would not have known something about these meetings or Joyce's much earlier film enterprise, the Volta. By re-examining Film and speculating on the possible three way connections between Eisenstein, Joyce and Beckett, I wish to add a footnote to Beckett studies which hopefully will lead others to wander on the Beckett-Joyce-Eisenstein trail and which will open up further discussions of Film. Beckett's film is haunted by the memory of his friendship with James Joyce and his admiration for Eisenstein's talent, both of which are visible in the screen images and theme of Film.

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