Reunion, a Novella by Fred Uhlman (1971) adapted to the Cinema by Harold Pinter for Jerry Schatzberg (1989): from (auto)biography to politics

Before starting on the analysis of the ways in which Harold Pinter and Jerry Schatzberg transformed and re appropriated Fred Uhlman’s text to make it into a film, it is necessary to sum up what the text is about. The plot of Uhlman’s largely autobiographical novella is quite simple. It is about the short and intense, but ultimately impossible, friendship between two fifteen-year-old school boys during the rise of the Nazi party in Stuttgart in the early 1930s, and more exactly between Februar..

I, Claudius (1976) vs Rome (2005), or Ancient Rome revisited by television

On top of its arguably philosophical and/or pedagogical intentions, the representation of Antiquity in literature and film has always conveyed much about the ideology of the periods in which it was written or filmed. For example, the social and cultural background radically altered between two critically acclaimed BBC television series about Ancient Rome: the 1976 I, Claudius, an adaptation of Robert Graves’ novels, and the 2005 first season of Rome, a BBC-HBO coproduction. Whereas I, Claudius is set almost exclusively within the ruling Imperial family and considers history as that of “great men”, Rome on the other hand clearly plays on the fascination for class distinctions and more specifically on the division between Patricians and Plebeians. This conception of Roman history is also built into Rome’s structure, as the lives of two common soldiers are intertwined with major historical events and characters, giving a fresh perspective on well-known occurrences. The way in which sexuality and religion are dealt with in both series is also quite relevant to the times in which they were filmed but on the other hand, their representation of the role of women as, essentially, mothers, seems to conform to the same stereotype

Laura MATTOON D’AMORE (dir.) (2014), Smart Chicks on Screen. Representing Women’s Intellect in Film and Television

L’ouvrage se compose d’une courte introduction par la rédactrice, d’un index et de 13 articles présentés dans un ordre plus ou moins chronologique (des débuts de la guerre froide au début du XXIe siècle). La plupart des articles sont consacrés à des séries télévisées étatsuniennes (Grey’s Anatomy, Mad Men, Elementary, The Big Bang Theory, Scandal) et quelques-uns à des films comme Born Yesterday de George Cukor (1950), avec Judy Holliday ; Some Like it Hot de Billy Wilder (1959), avec Marilyn..

‘Run, Forrest, run!’ … or not? The Remarkable Migration of Forrest Gump from Winston Groom’s 1986 Novel to Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 Film.

“Run, Forrest, run!”: this famous quotation from Robert Zemeckis’ hugely successful Forrest Gump is in a way emblematic of the many transformations undergone by the original eponymous character in Winston Groom’s first person narrative in the process of adapting it for the cinema… since it does not even appear in the novel. Whenever novels are adapted and their characters migrate from the pages of the book onto the silver screen, their literary entity is necessarily altered to fit in with the requirements of the new medium. In the case of Forrest Gump however these alterations were quite extreme, for the nice, kind idiot of the film is radically different from the Forrest of the novel. The endings of the film and the novel also differ considerably, the sour sweet and conventional filmic closure fundamentally departing from the rather sad open ending of the picaresque novel. In this paper, I shall be concentrating on some of these obvious differences in the characterisation of Forrest without making value judgments on the perceived quality of the film or the novel, but by attempting to find out the reasons why the screenwriter and the director chose that very particular reading

Geology as a Metaphor in Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992)

In Ever After, Graham Swift’s fifth novel, Matthew Pearce, the main narrator’s ancestor, is a Victorian surveyor who chronicles in his Notebooks how his reading of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-1833) and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) shattered his vision of the world, opening up “epistemological fault lines” and “yawning fractures” in his “teleological understanding” of human life: “If Lyell is right”, he exclaims, “if the world existed so long without Man upon it, why should we suppose . . . that we occupy any special and permanent place in Creation?” (Ever After, 135). This of course echoes the seismic debates between “creationists” and “evolutionists” that bisected Victorian society and which are often represented in neo-Victorian fiction. However, this is not the only fault line in the novel. The text itself of the Notebooks is fragmented, presented achronologically, used by the main late twentieth-century narrator, Bill Unwin, for his own ends, creating a feeling of unease and uncertainty in the reader, who feels the fictional ground beneath his/her feet moving and his/her reading comfort zone shaken. Geology and fault lines are thus very much an essential component of Swift’s novel, both literally and metaphorically

Pierre SKILLING (2001), Mort aux tyrans ! Tintin, les enfants, la politique

Le rôle des Aventures de Tintin dans la formation de la conscience politique des enfants est exploré dans cet ouvrage, très documenté. L’auteur divise le cycle des 22 albums en deux grandes périodes : la période publique, qui va de Tintin au Congo, premier album de la série, au Sceptre d’Ottokar, où Tintin défend l’ordre social, aide la police « dans des affaires criminelles mettant en danger la sécurité publique » (p. 56) et la période privée, du Crabe aux pinces d’or aux Picaros, dernier al..

Claude-Jean Bertrand (1997), Les médias et l'information aux États-Unis depuis 1945

Roblin Isabelle. Claude-Jean Bertrand (1997), Les médias et l'information aux États-Unis depuis 1945. In: Communication. Information Médias Théories, volume 18 n°2, automne 1998. pp. 196-199

From Greenwich to Pittsburgh: the Americanisation of Graham Swift’s Waterland in Stephen Gyllenhaal’s 1992 Cinematic Adaptation of the Novel

In Graham Swift’s fictions, History (more particularly WWII) is often seen through the stories and the memories of the different narrators. As Swift himself put it however, ‘we do not remember things in straight sequence, we remember haphazardly’ and in his writing he tries to mimic this process. This is the case in Waterland (1983) and one of the most important challenges of the 1992 film adaptation of the novel was to find cinematic equivalents to this narrative technique without losing the spectator in a dizzying succession of flashbacks and flash forwards. We will not here engage in comparing novel and film and assess the latter’s ‘fidelity’ to the former since, as critic Brian McFarlane and many others since pointed out, this issue obscures other, more interesting aspects. We will study the (re)reading choices made by the director (Stephen Gyllenhaal) and screenwriter (Peter Prince) of the film with, among others, Jeremy Irons as Tom Crick, Sinéad Cusack as Mary and Ethan Hawke, then fresh from his main role as student Todd Anderson in Peter Weir 1990 Dead Poets Society, as Price. We will focus more specifically on the consequences of the transposition of part of the action of this quintessentially British novel to the United States, on the way History is presented and the of the enigmatic ending of the novel into a relatively happy end