Adaptations, Refractions, and Obstructions

This chapter looks at a particular shape of adaptation today in what may be called a “refractive environment,” a look that may seem slightly less peculiar if we keep in mind that the chapter poaches its fundamental terms and ideas and what they suggest from essays by André Bazin. Alongside abiding respect for traditional pathways into adaptation studies, the direction here has little to do with cinematic adaptation in most of the usual senses. Instead it wants to follow Bazin’s terms as dynamic metaphors for some ways of thinking about adaptation studies today and, as a somewhat more provocative move, of raising some questions about the advancement of adaptation studies into today’s environment as an evolutionary shift that might be best served by looking backward. Here is where the chapter locates the intersection of adaptation and metacinema.

The Films of Aleksey Fedorchenko: Between Cultural Mythmaking and Playing with a Document

This article studies the films of Alexey Fedorchenko in order to discover the dominant features of his artistic world. This is based on the guiding principles of documentary filmmaking, with its commitment to fact, the reliability of archival sources, trust in physical reality, and addressing the laws of the art of presentation, where a free play with reality becomes a dominant feature in its most diverse forms from documentation to mystification. The director creates his own coherent world of fiction and non-fiction, based on strategies of the cultural matrix of mythmaking as a means of understanding and experiencing the “arrangement” of the world. The purpose of the article is to study Fedorchenko’s films in order to discover the dominant feature of his artistic world. The first methodological basis for the analysis of his films is a cultural concept of art where art is understood not only as the self-consciousness of culture, but also as an object that depends on all subsystems of culture, both material and spiritual. The cinematography of Fedorchenko stems from a special type of artistic consciousness, which determines (predetermines) the subject and conceptual sphere of his artistic expression. Analysing the films of Fedorchenko, the author identifies the dominant feature of his artistic consciousness, which is focused on a reflective attitude towards culture and traditions. This type of artistic consciousness is understood as culture-centric. The culture-centric type of artistic consciousness ignores nature and its mimetic imitation, but at the same time, the dominating idea determining the source of artistic creation becomes a conscious attitude to culture as material that requires interpretation in a new context, as a space that generates meanings. Fedorchenko uses myth as source material and cultural space in his films. However, he does not deal with the cinematic adaptation of myths. He creates them on his own, using the logic of a mythological narrative, the peculiarities of mythological space and time. That is why the second methodological basis of the article is the classical concepts from A. Losev, R. Barthes and M. Eliade. The author mostly refers to documentaries and feature films by the director, as well as his mockumentaries. The study identifies certain algorithms in which documentary historical events acquire the characteristics of myth, and mythmaking becomes a key to understanding the truth.

#Metoo and the Filmmaker as Monster

Contributor Marc DiPaolo examines John Landis and his 2005 episode for the Masters of Horror anthology television show, “Deer Woman,” and Quentin Tarantino and his 2007 film Death Proof through the #MeToo movement of 2017. DiPaolo's study casts both directors as monsters, at once attractive and repelling, especially so after supervising well-documented onset tragedies. Landis supervised a helicopter stunt that killed Vic Morrow and two child actors. Tarantino oversaw a car accident that severely injured Uma Thurman while filming Kill Bill. DiPaolo wonders if Landis’s “Deer Woman” and Tarantino’s Death Proof serve as attempted confessions or even veiled apologies for these atrocities. He wonders if filmic confessions and apologies are worth the film they are set on. DiPaolo'a tentative answer is it depends on what the audience does with each confession. The cinematic adaptation of atrocities might only matter when the audience disavows themselves from the director's deplorable behavior.

A STUDY OF BOLLYWOOD’S COMEDY OF ERRORS: AN INTERTEXTUAL APPROACH

The cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare's play never been antediluvian around the world. There are a plethora of lms in Hindi cinema which have been adopted from literary works by lm makers. When it shows up to adaptation of William Shakespeare's epic tales in Hindi cinema, Vishal Bharadwaj acclaimed trilogy of Maqbool, Omkara and Haider comes rst in mind but not comes rst in the history of Indian cinema. This paper will begin with analysing one of the rst adaptation of Brad's epic-the 'comedy of errors' into Gulzar's enduring popular 'Angoor'(grapes) considered one of the Bollywood's best comedies. This research article is an attempt to understand and answer these questions with intertextually approach. Why a comedy of error is an appropriate choice for an adaptation? How the Gulzar's Angoor has an accurate title for an adaptation of Brad's saga of two sets of identical twins? And how Gulzar has done justice to his Bollywood adaptation of an epic play with obvious similarities and difference in plot and characterization? The paper will end with the discussion over the very rst adaptation of comedy of errors into Bengali theater well as Bengali cinema with the same name by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's -' Bhranti Bhilas' which can also be considered as inspiration for Gulzar's tribute to Shakespeare.

Impossible Origins: Trauma Narrative and Cinematic Adaptation

In this essay, I explore the cinematic adaptation and the representation of trauma, while I further consider the role and significance of the notion of the origin in both trauma and in cinematic adaptation. Through an initial consideration of the relationship between the theory of the impossible origin, particularly as it is articulated by Walter Benjamin, the essay goes on to analyze the significance and role of an impossible origin in the elemental form of adaptation. To this end, the essay considers the movement of adaptation from an autobiographical trauma memoir to a feature film, considering the success or failure of adaptation in situations where the original literary work concerns an experience of extremity. As I consider the vicissitudes of trauma and its grounding in a repetitious structure that leaves the survivor suspended in a kind of missed experience (or missed origin), I further explore how this missing origin (or original text in the case of adaptation) can be represented at all.

An Analytical Approach to the Italian Renaissance through Popular TV: The case of Medici

This article explores the educational value of using audiovisual media to enhance the learning of history and civilization in foreign language and culture classes. More specifically, it analyzes the pedagogical impact of learning about the Italian Renaissance through a television series about the Medici family, the most acclaimed patrons of the Renaissance. Focusing on the televised adaptation of this family, the article examines how media can revisit and reshape the history of this period through streaming television distribution, the important and highly popular internet-based delivery system of services such as Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube TV, Sling TV, and Fubo TV. I argue that students can become conscious of the mechanisms of historical adaptation by considering their own learned perspectives, and by reshaping them through a highly dramatized and psychologically rooted narrative. Questioning students about the extent to which their understanding of the past is filtered or modified through popular culture—and about the way popular culture uses the past—leads them to think critically about historical continuity. The article pays specific attention to the two main characters in the series, entitled Medici: The Magnificent (2018): the hero, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and the villain, Jacopo Pazzi. An accurate historical and cinematic discussion of the two characters will allow me to elucidate the medium-specific potential of the TV series to teach historical facts. Drawing on a few courses I taught on Renaissance Italy, where I implemented this approach, I will demonstrate that students are not just entertained, but also actively engaged in the cognitive aspects barely to be found in written history, namely, the characters’ inner lives and struggles. The article will demonstrate that a comparison of the historical sources with their cinematic adaptation is of great pedagogical value for students.