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TOPIC 61. THE ROLE OF CINEMA IN THE DISSEMINATION OF THE ENGLISH LITERARY…
TOPIC 61. THE ROLE OF CINEMA IN THE DISSEMINATION OF THE ENGLISH LITERARY PRODUCTION.
REFERENCES
Encyclopaedia
Brittanica
Soomro, S., Kazemian, B., & Mahar, I. (2015). The importance of culture in second and foreign language learning.
Grlica, T. (2013). "THE IMPORTANCE OF TEACHING LITERATURE IN A HIGH-SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT WITH THE INCORPORATION OF FILM AND MULTIMEDIA INTO THE PROCESS"
Bekmuratovich, X.G. (2020). "On The importance of Teaching History To Students"
Crystal, D. (2012). "English as a Global Language"
De Querol, G. (2022).
“The 20 Best Sci-fi Films of the 21st Century”.
2.1.
FILM ART
The
cinema inheritance and source material
:
19th c.
🎭
theatre
(acted through visible characters and unrolls at a fixed pace) and 📙
novel
(the story goes on unaffected by the audience). Any fictional film is a kind of merging of the 2 media but there's a movement from the theatrical to the novelistic.
2 main
approaches
can be analysed to understand the nature of art:
From an
idealistic
perspective,
cinema
was at the 🔝 of a pyramidal conception of arts due to its unity and aestheticism
From a
formalist
approach,
form
is given greater
importance
. This vision implies that
any text can be transformed
into a new form of expression.
From the 1920s, There are studies focusing on the
relationship
between fiction and film:
the
divergences
btwn the 2 arts, considering the
cinema as a secondary form
, not worthy of a place among the "Arts" because of its association with entertainment and popular taste.
the
independence
of films from the other arts (most extreme theory coming from France's French Nouvelle vague)
the
acceptance of the aesthetic value
of the moving pictures, stress the superiority of literature over cinema and center their analyses on the dependence of the latter upon the former.
2.2.
FILM LANGUAGE
is approached upon literary language and images, the latter being the
main narrative medium
in films and the
minimal unit of film language as they cannot be divided nor taken in isolation. Images
don't sustain language
.
cuts
are basic units that represent a meaningful
combination of sound and image that constitutes a system
, which articulates into a narrative syntax and forms the
script
of a film: which can be created for film production and can be the result of transforming a literary work into a technical resource for film production.
Different
artistic movements
, such as the
Free Cinema in England
, have influenced the nature of film language by prioritising a naturalistic approach through techniques such as
direct sound through handheld cameras
A)
From
Lumiere
's language to modern films there have been many quantitative and qualitative
changes
. At the very beginning films were quite theatrical in terms of:
Performance
as gesture and movement had to be expressive on a theatrical scale.
Space
: the camera remained fixed as if viewing a stage setting from the middle of stalls.
Time
: due to the absence of cutting, and the action happened in "real time".
D.W.
GRIFFITH
introduced
innovations
, such as strategies (bringing the
camera closer
to the actors; developing a
system of parallel action
,
cutting back and forth
between different locations and allowing the cinema to free itself from the single perspective and single time of theatre and to attain a 'novelistic' flexibility of movement).
DW Griffith: CCC
close-ups
cross-cutting
camera movement
2.3.
FILM AND LITERATURE
: NCI
Complex relationships with Different
dimensions
The
Nature
of adaptations and the
Strategies
followed when adapting a literary work into a film
the
consideration
of film scripts as literary material.
the
influence
of novelistic technique on film texts.
A)
According to de Querol (2022) Cinema has
influenced
literary works in several ways:
breaking the logical sequence of
time
with flashbacks to interpolate material from the past into the present. (such as in Harry Potter from JK Rowling)
Narration
from different
perspectives
: there are many novels where the same story is told by different narrators (as in Game of Thrones by George RR Martin
)
The
film industry as a theme
in literary works (Fitzgerald's the Last Tycoon)
.
Greater freedom in credible presentation, taking for granted the readers' familiarity with cinema conventions by imitating the use of look when writing to provide an irresistible illusion of reality,
trying to erase the felt presence of the narrator
(as in Pynchon's "Vineland").
Writers made
scripts out of literary works
, such as Dahl who wrote the script for the adaptation of his own novel, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory")
Using literary works as source for film scripts has been a dominant circumstance in the history of the new art.
DW Griffith was
the 1st American producer to turn a literary work into a film
. He started what has become general trend in English-speaking films.
This was quite beneficial for literature by means of:
adaptations
stimulate the viewers' interest in the literary work, widening its readership significantly. The film becomes a sort of long commercial advertising of the literary product seen by millions of people who become potential buyers of the work.
An example would be JRR The Lord of the Rings. It has helped authors who went unnoticed and became recognised because of these adaptations.
Collaborations
of several writers in film scripts, including playwrights with novelists to combine their skills in dialogue creation and dramatic progression.
2.4.
ADAPTATIONS OF LITERARY WORKS IN ENGLISH
Since their inception, many of the Academy Awards for the "best picture" have gone to thought-provoking adaptations based on either novels or short stories, with many filmmakers pushing to reach new heights (de Querol, 2022). Several reasons can be proposed for this:
Novels already present a narrative articulation
so they're easier to adapt.
Producing a film is expensive so film producers find it
less risky to adapt already successful material
.
Literature is full of successful material among the
reading
public
who are regarded as
potential film audience
.
Cinema suffered an
inferiority complex
with respect to literature. It's a young art considered popular entertainment in its roots so it's looking for artistic recognition under the protection of an already culturally and artistically recognised creation
According to
, the
highlights of the history of cinema are
:
the
Golden Age
of cinema (1920s-1950s), American producers used
19th c. stories as a source
, considering that the audience of these films were used to read them and had been educated in that literary tradition. David Selznick was one of the most important producers of such films.
In the 1950s the situation shifted since the audience was divided into film spectators who never read or who were educated watching films; and those who read no longer consumed 19th c. novels but rather popular best sellers. Thus
productions of
these
best seller
started to appear instead of adaptations of classical works. For instance, Coppola's The Godfather Trilogy, based on Puzo's novel.
In the last decades a new phenomenon has come into being: international best-sellers, even classical works, have been made into television
mini-series
, which prove to be more economically profitable for the film producers.
In the 2020s, a significant portion of the world's best films have been based on books.
De Querol (2022) highlighted "Children of Men", a dystopian masterpiece adapted from PD James' work under the same title.
A) There are 3 basic
TYPES OF ADAPTATIONS
, depending on the degree of correspondence between the film version and the literary source:
Transposition
: with the purpose to
translate
the original text from literary language into the film image as if it were a copy, trying to introduce as few differences as possible (as !
Robert Z. Leonard's version adaptation of Jane Austen's work)
Re-interpretations
: retain the fundamental narrative structure at the same time that a substantial reinterpretation is being made. The idea is to
recreate the original text making use of modern technical devices developed by cinema
. The film producer focuses on specific areas within the literary text and feels free to avoid themes, to expand on certain characters, to modify the narrative structure, to add episodes, etc. (such as in Coppola's version of Bram Stoker's Dracula
)
Free adaptation
: the
literary work is just a raw material to work upon, a source of inspiration to create a new work of art
. (Such as The Wizard of Oz
)
B)
FILM TECHNIQUES VS LITERARY TECHNIQUES
The main
elements that undergo changes
are:
type of narration
: some films
preserve
a narrator but others do not. Epistolary novels can preserve their character or the letter writing element can be dropped altogether. The
story
often has to be substantially
shortened
, with incidents missing. On the other hand, movement and cutting in a film can be used to express + in (-) time.
Lengthy
descriptions
of landscapes or climatic conditions can be condensed in films with images that reflect all the aspects of the narrative.
Characters
from a novel or a drama can be
changed
and even
omitted
. Their elements of characterisation can be changed and some of the effects available to the film director and not to the writer can be applied to influence characterisation. For instance, the tone of voice or the character's pronunciation can greatly affect the viewers' perception of their personality, intentions or motives. Furthermore, the
appearance of the actors may contradict the readers' image of the character.
The
setting and the historic moment
of the history can also be changed.
🗣The
function of the dialogue
in the film is also different from those found in novels or short stories. When sound was 1st added to the moving image in the 1920s, dialogues were poor imitations of theatrical works. Gradually, filmmakers realised the importance of the role of the image in a film and they started to use the zoom technique to highlight the actors' emotions.
C)
EXAMPLES OF ADAPTATIONS BY GENRES
According to Britannica, well over half of all fiction films made since 1920 have been adapted from plays or novels.
The range of adaptations of literary works in English for films is extensive and has undoubtedly been helped by the dominant position of
in the film making industry. We can find examples of works belonging to every genre known in the literature written in the English language.
🎭Film directors have often adapted
theatrical
works and some versions even feel like recorded versions of stage performances. Shakespeare and his tragedies and comedies have become the object of many adaptations, such as The Tempest (2010)
.
🎬🎞️
Novels and short stories provide most of the material for film scripts
. Dickens is one of the examples, "A Christmas Carol" has been taken to the screen more than 100 times
.
🕵🏻Finally,
one of the most popular film genres,
the detective story
, has taken much advantage of such classics as Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, Agatha Christie's Poirot and Miss Marple or American Hard-Boiled authors like Chandler or Hammett.
2-
THE ROLE OF CINEMA: BACKGROUND
According to
The film industry set in motion in 1877, when Thomas
Edison
invented the
phonograph
, a device for recording and playing sound. Seeking to provide a visual accompaniment to the phonograph, Edison commissioned his assistant Dickinson to develop the
Kinetoscope
. It was the first device to show motion pictures, viewed through a peephole, one person at a time
. Then, Edison's assistants Dickinson and Kennedy combined these toghether into the
Kinetophone
, to synchronise motion pictures and sound.
Later in Paris,
the
Lumière
brothers debuted the
first one-shot short film
, widely regarded as the
first commercialized production
.
In
1927
,
Hollywood released
The
Jazz Singer
, the
first feature-length film to include audio
. This marked the beginning of the “golden age” of cinema, dominated by major
studios
such as the Warner Brothers
.
In 1940s, the introduction of the
“
blockbuster
” genre, exemplified by the film '
Jaws
'🦈 based on a novel, took films to another level with
literary sagas
such as Dune turned into multiple films.
Today,
streaming services
such as
continue to transform the way viewers consume literature in the form of miniseries or animated films that they can watch at home.
