Comparative Study of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca Film Adaptations. Chronotope of a “Castle”

The article performs the comparative study of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca film adaptations. It investigates motion pictures by A. Hitchcock (1940), R. Milani (2008) and B. Wheatley (2020). The analysis of the narrative-discursive techniques used by these authors aims to consider the problem of screen representation of the Rebecca’s specific spacetime model. The main investigated subject is the screen image of Manderley estate, its impact on diegesis, plot and symbolism in these movies. Manderley as an aesthetic complex corresponds to the chronotope of the “castle” in the interpretation of M. Bakhtin. Accordingly, the comparative study of the operations performed with it reveals the most important characteristics and traits of this spacetime model and shows how it applies with the detective genre or plots with a detective component. The “castle” as a spacetime structure that outlines the external boundaries and sets the internal laws of diegesis; its role in the “mystery” logics and the development of detective intrigue; “castle” as a plot-forming principle and metacharacter — all these questions concerned in terms of screen arts.

Power off-screen

This final chapter uses extrafilmic material, such as fan magazines, to explore the construction and development of Power’s off-screen image throughout his career. The careful manufacture of star images was a device used by studios to attract audiences to films, and ultimately sell tickets and Power received extensive publicity from early on, fan magazines depicting his off-screen life in ways that often resonated with his on-screen persona, particularly in the 1930s. This chapter explores the development of Power’s off-screen image in fan magazines from his bachelor days in the 1930s, his marriage to French actress Annabella and subsequent divorce when he returned from active war duty. His high-profile romance with Lana Turner preceded his marriage to Mexican actress Linda Christian and the birth of their two daughters, before another divorce and remarriage just before his death in 1958. Magazines then ran stories of his sudden death and subsequent birth of his only son, Tyrone Power Jr, a few months later for months to come. Additionally, while Power’s professional acting career began in the theatre in 1933, he returned to regular stage work in the 1950s in a move that was mostly well received by critics as the chapter discusses.

The musical star

This chapter looks at Power’s work within the genre of musicals. Despite his lack of singing and dancing ability, he was cast as the lead in five musicals between 1937 and 1939, although he made no more films in this genre after the decade ended. To compensate for his lack of musical talent, Power was cast opposite female stars who were skilled musical performers, being paired with ice-skating champion Sonja Henie twice and singer-actress Alice Faye three times. This move by Twentieth Century-Fox demonstrates the actor’s appeal to contemporary audiences at a time when musicals were extremely popular and its plans for his maximum exposure. Power’s characterisations in all five musicals are slightly different, some building on his already established screen image and others advancing it either slightly or significantly. Indeed, while his films with Henie have many similarities to his comedic pairings with Young, Faye provides his most sensual screen pairing to date, suggesting a new sexual maturity to his image at the end of the 1930s.

Chapter 10

Chapter 10, covering the year 1934, explores the jealousy and insecurity that haunted Cary Grant during his short-lived marriage to Virginia Cherrill, which ended in a drunken fiasco that was reported in the press as a suicide attempt. Grant denied attempting suicide, and the chapter argues that he was likely imitating a scene from one of his recent films, Ladies Should Listen (1934), in which his character attempts to lure his lover to his bedside by faking a suicide attempt. The chapter also considers Paramount’s attempt to remake his screen image, casting him in comedies, including one written by Preston Sturges, Thirty Day Princess (1934), which was his best film of this period. He was also cast as an “art deco dandy” in a string of weak comedies that flopped at the box-office: Kiss and Make Up (1934), Ladies Should Listen, and Enter Madame! (1934). The chapter ends with Cherrill’s courtroom claims that Grant abused her physically and emotionally, and Grant’s explanation, in later years, that her charges were not true but were the legally required “grounds for divorce” in the 1930s.

Livestreaming the ‘wretched of the Earth’: The Christchurch massacre and the ‘death-bound subject’

The livestreaming of terror, its co-production through live consumption and the massacre of lives as ‘entertainment’ propelled us into another long abyss of ethical challenges in the case of the xenophobic terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. Livestreaming, as part of the convergence of technologies, enables narration in ‘real’ time, dragging us into a new ‘banalisation of evil’ where terror and torture can be co-produced by inviting audiences to consume through the vantage point of the perpetrator. This article examines the Muslim ‘body’ through JanMohamed’s notion of the ‘death-bound subject’ where the continual threat of death foreshadows the Muslim body, imbricating it within a political and ideological archaeology wherein both its possibility of death and the performance of death enter into a realm of theatrics of production incumbent upon invoking new moralities around consumption and its residues as a screen image. The ‘wretched of the Earth’ and their residues as immaterial matter online as the ‘wretched of the screen’ connote a new architecture of violence conjoining the temporalities of liveness with the sharing features of ‘semiotic capitalism’.