Cinema & Literature

Word to Image: Cinema inspired by poems

2010-08-04T13:13:00.006-04:00

curated and notes by Konrad Steiner

Cinema is used here in a response to poetry. These tapes and films were chosen out of the American experimental tradition to exemplify various techniques of marrying the two arts. Poetry as the art of utterence and cinema the art of showing, both whole on their own, don't easily make a good couple. But these film and videomakers have taken up the challenge anyway by responding to the spirit and the letter of the poet, creating an original cinematic writing. Cinema and language meet head on, not unified as in conventional film, but remaining distinct and dancing, stepping on toes, wooing each other with the charms of mouth and eye and mind. You'll see images' own syntax shuffled, blended, chafing and dovetailing with language, you'll hear and read poets' work while seeing and hearing filmmakers' work. It's like having two extra senses!

Peter Herwitz, Songs of Degrees: With a Valentine (the 12 February) As To How Much
Super 8mm, 5min color/sound on cassette (1990)
Thad Povey, Under a Broad Gray Sky
16mm, 5min, color/sound (1995)
Rick Hancox, Waterworx
16mm, 6min, color/sound (1986)
Marcus Nascimento, Video Haikai
video, 8min
Nathaniel Dorsky, excerpts from "What Happened to Kerouac?"
video transfer, 8min

I N T E R M I S S I O N

Abigail Child, Prefaces
16mm, 10min, color/sound (1981)
Henry Hills, Kino Da!
16mm, 4min, color/sound (1981)
Martha Colburn, What's On
16mm, 2min, color sound (1997)
Jim Flannery, Photoheliograph
16mm, 12min, color/sound
Stan Brakhage, First Hymn to the Night -- Novalis
16mm 3min color/silent (1994)"To write 'purely visual perception' is to write a meaningless phrase. Obviously. Because every time we want to make words do a real job of transference, every time we want to make them express something other han words, they align themselves in such a way as to cancel each other out. This, no doubt, is what gives life so much charm. Because it is by no means a matter of awareness, but of vision, of simply seeing. Simply! And the only field of vision that occasionally allows one merely to see, that doesn't always insist on being misunderstood, that sometimes allows its followers to ignore everything in it that is not appearance, the inner field."
Samuel Beckett, Le Monde et le pantalon, [1945]

How can you possibly combine film and poetry? Films are chosen here that solve the problem in various ways. Many of the pieces tonight started as poems. Some ended up as one. Some use text on screen and modulate your reading through its presentation as scratched words, sub-titles, intertitles, or graphically integrated within the whole frame. Others use a recording of the author's reading. Still others create a weld of sound and image, a 'poesie concrete' descendant of the dadaists.

Music is the mother of all meaning

Poetry and cinema _are_ too different to work together without music. Of course 'music' meant in the broadest sense, not just the acoustic sense. Whenever we talk about melody, rhythm, harmony, dissonance, phrasing, cadence, tempo: these are musical concepts and perceptions. These kinds of sensitivities and distinctions manifest in word and image work, and serve as the basis for the joinery of the films and tapes shown here tonight. The existance of music makes it possible for images and words to communicate with each other. Peter Herwitz says about his films to reading by Louis Zukofsky:
"The first work is a repetition of the words 'Hear her clear mirror care his error. In her care is clear' each time presented with different line brakes and different emphasis. It is ambiguous and very precise at the same time and above all strikes me as music -- like a thoroughbass in baroque music. The images and other sounds I added seemed like an upper voice-- more open and more melodic in relation to this basic repetition.
"The second poem is a bit more _atmospheric_ but seems to me to be above all about degrees, limitations in describing an image -- tentative yet again very precise which is what I sought to acheive in similar _possibilities_ for creating an image on film.
" ... I find Zukovsky to be above all about music and the choice of words almost always meant to work in terms of musical structure first and foremost. He almost always uses very specific language despite the fact that the meanings are extremely _indeterminate_.
"The miracle of so called *objectivism* is that very specific words and images are used by the poets to create an endless series of possibilities for seeing the world. [...] And as a filmmaker I find this kind of writing to be truly a mirror of the way montage works -- the space between Zukovsky's words creates the meaning as it does in montage-- the challenge of a filmmaker is both to present and attempt to answer a series of questions raised by his/her choice of imagery and the spaces between them. "

Either, Or, But, Not, Both

One motive for these works is the challenge of making verbal language and visual gesture hang together organically. These films respect the integrity of either medium by avoiding pat equivalences and conceptualization. I'm interested in looking at cinema as a medium for bringing separate things into contact. What's evoked, what readings are motivated that otherwise would not occur, taking place as illustration, irony, counterpoint, mood, metaphor, rhythm, etc? These are the varieties of joinery are available to bring these together. These are modes of interaction between the poem aspect and the film aspect of a poem-films shown in this program -- there are two things, and the experience of the two is one thing.
Most of the films on this program took existing poems as their starting point. The integrity of the text in a film distinguishes it from the montage and acts to acknowledged the independence of the two. We can see that these are images that can illuminate aspects of a poem, but not be the poem, and have their own integrity. What is their relationship?
"The poem-film is showing what the filmmaker thought the poem meant."
"It provides a reading of the poem."
"It shows the artist interpreting the poem."
"It shows a response to the poem."
"The tape affects the meaning of the poem."
"It means what the poem means."
"The tape is a completely new work."
I think the highest success of this form depends on showing the possibilities of meaning, instead of the determined meaning. Interpreting the poem happens, so it's very tricky. The idea is to keep caught up to experience. The poet Robert Grenier said at a reading of his i attended years ago that a translation has to be as real as the original, and the original if it's worth translating at all is as real as experience, which is a moving among the potentials for significance and symbolism without translation. (Well, okay, i don't know if he said all that but that's what i got out of it.) This logic only works if you see that reading is experience, though the conventional wisdom is that the text you read is a kind of delivery system for a message. Conversely, experience is reading. Think about it. Watching these films is like watching someone reading; but of course, you too are reading. Watch yourself read the city landscape as you go home tonight.
Anyway, how can a film present the "facts" of the poem without distorting them to present a favored message? If you were the filmmaker how could you begin with something that's already complete? Do you parallel or complement the text? How to you add without taking away?
Rick Hancox's film Waterworx gives us some pictures to wonder about. You have a chance to make up something, or not. Then you see them again, with the subtitles and subtleties of Wallace Stevens' enigmatic poem, "A Clear Day and No Memories." The images as you saw them are now torqued, by your having to read, and by what you read. As they move towards one another, watch what happens to your mind.
"What I find most impressive about Waterworx is Hancox's ability to fuse Stevens's poem and his own imagery and sound, not only without doing damage to the poem, but so that the film provides an effective reading of it ... The clear, empty vistas of the film (empty of action, of people) reflect those of the poem, and yet both are haunted by the presence of the poetic mind in its process of forming what we are experiencing." (Scott MacDonald, Afterimage)
Thad Povey takes the prose poem by Baudelaire (We've Each Our Own Chimera) but (in this version) rendered into spoken English, a description of toil, and in Under a Broad Gray Sky puts it next to images of rustic labor and repose. Does the poem describe what we're seeing or not? Do the images belie exaggeration in the lyric? The bold grotesqueness of the description's at odds with the handsome people, the quotidian scenes, almost. Are these people not within reach of that futility Baudelaire describes? The film is so efficient in making you wonder about these questions, using very conventional means. There is a gentle weaving of three strands: the images shown, the text heard, and the images of the text seen in the mind. Notice also beneath this are the sounds that also play with a sense of illustration, with cuts sublty shifting sounds from off to on camera.
Brazilian Marcus Nascimento has borrowed from my beloved Japanese linked poetry form haikai to create his enigmatic sequence of vitruoso video effects woven among the words of his short verse statements. Video Haikai's text hovers around inside its images coming from and receding into them, teasing the highly processed imagery and sound to answer with the meaning of the poems. The images respond coyly and remain delightfully independent.

Lip
Sync

Typically the artiface of sync sound seems to draw the image and sound together presented as a thing making noises. In fact using this technique many film documents have been made of poets reading their work for the camera. But these films intervene by creating artificial sync between a visual gesture and the heard sound, creating impossible events. You can see irony and humor in all this synthetic sync presented so viscerally and rapidly.
Henry Hills film Kino Da! starts with the simplest relation of word to image, the 'talking head' shot. In this case a portrait of San Francisco poet Jack Hirschman. The 'poem' is composed of the speech of the man, that speech emerges as poetry in a contiuum from street sounds to language(s) thru non-sense as the sound and image slip and skip. It exists somewhere between a document and a created event.
Prefaces, Abby Child's intense sound-image-schrapnel, inaugurates her "Is This What You Were Born For?" series. Child's film is unique in this collection. It's a film in which you might say "There's no poem there." But consider it the simplest: the poem is the soundtrack, which makes it the most extreme: the film tracks the poem exactly.
What's On is a list poem. It's like Martha Colburn's sarcastic TV Guide. The sound and image run parallel and lead each other and alternate that lead so fast that you only ever get about one in three of the jokes in there.
"A Hyper-Fire Telepazzumentary rendered in orgiastic collage animation, Media Mush and freaky live chunks. Brats, Boobs, Snot-Based Game Shows, First Lady Baboon attacks, cross-dressing amputees, stress, estrogen and more spew and mutate.... With Telesmashing Chaos poetry soundtrack by 99 Hooker and video game samples by Naval Cassidy. Blasting you into HELL-A-VISION!" (Martha Colburn)

Counter-illustration

Anytime we look at a shot of something we can consider how explicitly showing something is implicitly pointing out how to view it, showing what to see about it. Similarly, the diction, rhyme or intonation of a phrase implies an attitiude to take towards the subject or speaker or what aspect of that is in focus. This double (implicit/explicit) expression of what is said and how it's said can be the basis of a contrapuntal relationship between image and word. The poem and the montage induce implicit and explicit readings of each other.
In the feature-length documentary What Happened to Kerouac? Nathaniel Dorsky edited three sequences to recordings of Kerouac reading his poems. The first sequence is quite illustrative of the text, as if just getting to know the poet. Each successive interpolation reaches deeper into the source of the poems. The final poem is a perfect example of 'counterpoint-illustration.' The montage floats along with the voice together and independent, not in illustration of the words, but of the meaning.

Translation

In Jim Flannery's Photoheliograph, film splits the poem into text and sound. Harry Crosby's originating poem from 1928 is a non-linear graphic poem, and Flannery takes what is an instantaneous poem and projects it into time. Flannery's 'translation' might just a well be considered a 'rendition' as a response. Here's his description:
"If I describe the poem, perhaps this will indicate what I considered 'adaptable' in it: it is a 5x10 grid of the repeated word "black", in the center of which (actually, replacing what would have been the 23rd "black" and reducing the number of "black"s to 49) is the word "SUN". As to the title: a (photo)heliograph is variously (a) a signaling device, by which a coded message may be sent via the reflected image of the sun; (b) a photoengraving (lithograph); (c) a "sun print" or "Rayogram"; (d) a telescope adapted for solar photography. In short: either a device for observing or reflecting the Sun, or the matter resulting from exposure to the sun.
"A great deal of what (I think) 'goes on' in this poem is included by allusion, assembled in the mind of the reader as a 'rationale' for the juxtaposition of these three words, in this arrangement. Crosby relies on the reader's knowlege of (a) his other work and (b) sotericism in general in order to give it some meaning beyond the simple visual pun of "an image of the sun" (itself a rather simpler, naive/folk-etymological reading of the title); in adapting the poem, I attemped to use materials/processes which would point an allusive reading in roughly the same directions as (I believe) Crosby's intentions were (for xample, the original color image which is manipulated throughout the film was a photograph of the planet Saturn, one of several "black suns"), but I am equally dependent upon the viewer's participation/previous knowledge -- and I equally intended for it to be 'readable' in a closely analogous fashion as *the same* visual pun. ... there are 49 instances of my voice saying the word "black" (those separate recordings having been put through a variety of manipulations) ... and there are 49 instances of the initial visual image (again, having been put through an analogous series of manipulations)....
"The words which make up the poem, as one would speak them -- "black SUN" -- semantically connote the *negative* image, the black circle/eclipse/inversion/nigredo image which is usually invoked by the phrase. As one experiences the poem *visually* however, one sees a SUN surrounded by black -- that is, the *positive* image of the light-bearing sun against a black field. The second half of the film reflects this oscillation between the two views in the flicker of the black matte: it should be noted that the composite image in the second half is produced in the perceptual apparatus of the viewer, not in the production of the image -- the black is *always* there, the color is _always_ there, the combination of color/color is *never* actually on the filmstrip. At a larger structural level, the film is again split in two parts, one "positive" and one "negative": in the first half, the black matte obscures the colored image; in the second, the colored image obscures the matte.
"One characteristic of the poem which interested me was its rejection of the temporal vector. Poetry, in its assumption of being embodied in a speaking voice, is based upon progress through time; but Crosby's poem is perceived in its entirety, in a single moment. To make a film of this poem is to (perversely) restore the temporal dimension to it. It was important to me, first, to maintain the two-dimensional quality of the poem, to make a screen which -- at one level of detail, at any rate -- insists upon the surface of the screen as the medium, avoiding any hint of illusionistic depth (how much more perverse it would be to add _two_ dimensions to the poem!). So the film concentrates, at the larger scale,on what might be considered "still" images (the black screen, the unmoving circle) on a "flat", 2-dimensional surface. And second, to somehow maintain the "all-at-onceness" of the poem, given the constant shifting of small details, and the determinate duration of the film.
Brakhage's First Hymn to the Night -- Novalis reaches for the root of the language of the poet. Not whole poems, only phrases are etched between handpainted sections. Etching alternated with painting, in a call and response form. The poet's words chosen evoke also Brakhage's well-known sense of closed-eye vision, or perhaps the inner vision that Beckett referred.
"This is a hand-painted film whose emotionally referential shapes and colors are interwoven with words (in English) form the first Hymn to the Night by the late 18th Century mystic poet Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg, whose pen name was Novalis. The pieces of text which I've used are as follows: 'the universally gladdening light ... As inmost soul ... it is breathed by stars ... by stone ... by suckling plant ... multiform beast ... and by (you). I turn aside to Holy Night ... I seek to blend with ashes. Night opens in us ... infinite eyes ... blessed love.' [SB]

Konrad Steiner, February 2000
source: http://www.hi-beam.net/hi-beam/steiner.html

Books to Movies: Readers' verdicts

2010-03-22T22:27:00.006-04:00

The silver screen and the printed page have been nearly inseparable since the very first black-and-white movies flickered in dark theaters more than a hundred years ago.

And why not?
Novels, short stories and even nonfiction works provide an endless treasure of stories and characters.
That doesn’t mean something isn’t occasionally lost in the translation. For every “Gone With the Wind” or “Lord of the Rings” there’s a “Bonfire of the Vanities.”
So we asked a panel of film buffs and our readers to share their picks of the best and worst adaptations of books into movies.

A sampling of what our readers consider the best and worst movies ever made from books:

The best movie adapted from a book is "The Wizard of Oz" (1939).

Yes, quite a few elements in the movie are different from L. Frank Baum's book (silver slippers anyone?), but the core story of a little girl from Kansas being stranded in a fantasy world of wonder and danger remains.

This movie has stood the test of time and is loved all over the world. When I was a child it would come on only once a year, and I can remember anticipating its arrival almost as eagerly as Christmas morning.

Even when I watched it on my grandmother's ancient black-and-white television --and the movie never turned to color -- it was still a fantastic experience. If you doubt the power of this movie, try watching the eyes of a child seeing it for the first time.

The worst movie adaptation ever may be of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (by Douglas Adams). The film was totally forgettable with none of the whimsy and humor that made the book such an entertaining read.

-- Tim Tribbett, Greensboro

One of the best: The film version of William Goldman's "Marathon Man," although I think it's best to read the book first and then see the movie. Experiencing the movie first could detract from the book's more nuanced tension.

One of the worst: "The Poseidon Adventure," an absolutely mesmerizing book (by Paul Gallico) with a laughably pitiful film version.

-- Mike Clark, Greensboro

The truest and very best: Horton Foote's screenplay based on Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962) stands tallest and alone. Reading it is seeing it. And seeing it is reading it.

The absolute worst: Martin Scorsese's rendering of author William Tevis' novel, "The Color of Money" (1986). The only thing they share in common is the title of the book and the names of two of the characters.

-- Joy Shores, Summerfield

The best? "To Kill a Mockingbird." A great read.

I read the book when I was stationed in New Jersey and saw the movie at the base theater.

It was so accurate that I not only was able to anticipate the dialogue but was able to quote along with it.

The actors depicting Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck), Jem (Phillip Alford), Scout (Mary Badham) and Boo Radley (Robert Duvall) portrayed their parts on the screen consistent with Harper Lee's writing.

The worst: "The Prince of Tides." Albeit another wonderful read from Pat Conroy, the movie that starred and was directed by Barbra Streisand was an abomination. The adaptation (1991) was an egocentric exercise designed to showcase Streisand. Errors and omissions between the book and the film abound.

-- Chip Durham, Burlington

The best movie adaptation from a book is Steven Spielberg's film version of Alice Walker's "The Color Purple." This movie shows, step by painful step, the character Celie's unlikely progression from nothingness to being. The theme is universal.

-- Joyce Woodbury, Greensboro

The best movie adapted from a book was "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote, based on a real-life event that was chilling and horrifying.

The movie is filmed in black and white to give it a stark, documentary-like vibe.

The actors are relatively new and unknown, including a young Robert Blake.

The film spares you of the awful details of the murders until the killers, now in captivity, give their confessions in graphic detail through flashbacks.

You watch in the finale as both are hanged in a lonely, warehouse-like building. Devastating.

The worst adaptation from a novel: The movie version of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," a totally boring and verbose waste of time. I enjoy Tom Hanks, but please! Ugh.

-- R. Scott Valle, Greensboro

SUNDAY, MARCH 21, 2010

(Updated 3:00 am)

http://www.news-record.com/

Why we just can’t get enough of ‘Alice’

2010-03-09T08:31:00.004-05:00

Almost 150 years after its creation, Lewis Carroll’s delightfully weird Wonderland world continues to fascinate — and to spawn merchandise. Jewelry, trinkets, clothing, cosmetics: We want it all.

March 07, 2010|By Adam Tschorn, Los Angeles Times

When Lewis Carroll popped Alice down the rabbit hole in 1865, he had no way of knowing that the girl in the pinafore dress — along with the creatures that populate "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and its 1872 sequel "Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There" — would become a permanent fixture on our pop culture landscape.

Alice (Mia Wasikowska) joins the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) in director Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. (Walt Disney Pictures)

The phenomenon encompasses more than the 100-plus versions of the book – the most recent of which, published last month, pairs Carroll's text with illustrations by Camille Rose Garcia and recently hit the Los Angeles Times and New York Times bestseller lists. It's something beyond the more than two dozen feature film incarnations, ranging from a star-studded 1933 version — in which Cary Grant played the Mock Turtle, W.C. Fields was Humpty Dumpty and Gary Cooper, the White Knight — to the Tim Burton take that opened Friday. And it's greater than the nearly dozen TV versions (the most recent a Syfy miniseries that included Kathy Bates as the evil Queen of Hearts who happens to run an emotion-emptying casino and Harry Dean Stanton as a shadowy operative code-named "the Caterpillar").
When you start adding in the broader popular culture influences that can be found everywhere from music ( Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," the Beatles "I Am the Walrus"), to elementary school drug-education (a 1972 program funded by the National Institute of Mental Health portrayed the Hatter as an acid head, the Dormouse on downers and the March Hare as a speed freak), things get curiouser and curiouser indeed.

What is it about Alice and her friends, conjured by mathematician, logician and author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll was his pen name) that has kept them in our hearts and our frontal lobes for nearly a century and a half? And how can it be that 145 years later, this tale continues to spawn not only books and movies but a flurry of merchandise that seems to be raining down on us like an exploding pack of playing cards — tea party trinkets, Wonderland-worthy jewelry and every manner of Carrollian-themed cosmetics, cocktails and clothing?

What compels some of us to amass 4,000-piece collections of Alice-related ephemera, ink Cheshire cat tattoos into our flesh, or translate Carroll's words into Latin and Klingon? Why do some of us (a very few of us, we hope) insist that the trip down the rabbit hole is a symbolic return to the womb, or claim that Alice is a stand-in for Jesus Christ, the Queen of England, or our inner child — or see the Cheshire Cat as an embodiment of the riddle of the universe, the Navajo trickster archetype?

One reason is surely the 7-year-old at the center of the original books. "Lewis Carroll made this figure — a gutsy kid who's curious and wants to move ahead to the next adventure, and [explore] all kinds of possibilities," says James Kincaid, the Aerol Arnold professor of English at USC and the school's resident Alice expert. (The author of extensive essays on all things Alice, Kincaid also provided the preface and notes for the 1983 Pennyroyal Press edition illustrated by Barry Moser.)

"At the time, she seemed to represent something new in children's literature, a sense of self-sufficiency," Kincaid says. "She makes mistakes — she's even attacked — but she never once refers to her parents. I think there's a powerhouse appeal to the idea that children both need to be protected but have a sense that they live in a world of their own and have their own authority within that world."

Sensible nonsense
But it's clearly more than just a plucky child heroine going solo with a supporting cast of misfits (sorry, Pippi Longstocking). Carrollian scholars and armchair Alice aficionados alike point to the trippy text itself, which, when you actually read it (the original, not a watered-down nursery school version) is at turns sad, frightening, melancholy and just plain absurd, veering from political treatise to logic primer and crammed right full of pig babies, bewigged frog footmen, playing-card painters and size-changing tea cakes.

Freelance artist Daniel Singer, 50, of Altadena, a member of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America (and a former Disney Imagineer who worked on the Alice attraction for Disneyland Resort Paris), says the "inherent weirdness" of the tale is definitely part of the appeal.

"It's so startlingly weird, you just don't expect a little girl to have this bizarre adventure," he said. "Being 3 inches tall and standing up on your tiptoes and to see over a mushroom to see this blue caterpillar smoking a hookah is the weirdest thing — especially in a children's book."

Scholars agree " ‘Alice' is a text that doesn't hesitate to do wildly playful things with language, with the inversion of social mores and with wild and wacky characters," says Elizabeth Tucker, a folklorist and professor at Binghamton University in New York who teaches the texts as part of a folklore and fantasy literature class. "And we love that. No matter what our era or our age, that's something that appeals to everyone from the very young to the very old."

Joel Birenbaum, a semi-retired math tutor and former engineer who lives in Lisle, Ill., once served as the president of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America and over the last 32 years has amassed an Alice-related collection of more than 1,000 books and nearly 3,000 other pieces of memorabilia and ephemera. He explains the enduring popularity a tad more bluntly: "I hate to say it, but it's like the Bible," he says. "People interpret the books in infinitely different ways — which is a testament to how they were written."

"The ‘Alice' books are just malleable enough to be read any way you want — and to be used to your benefit."

So, it's such well-crafted nonsense that, in the words of Humpty Dumpty in his wall-top dialogue with Alice in "Through the Looking Glass": It "means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less"?

USC's Kincaid says yes. "It has that enticement, and you get the sense that the barriers [to applying various meanings] are pretty weak. You just need to be persuasive enough — get two people to agree with you — and it's off to the races. There have been people who interpret it as the key to the cabala or [say] it's really about Queen Victoria."

And Kincaid points out that the Wonderland world taps into something that makes us want to accumulate all things Alice, whether it's temporary (or permanent) tattoos, black knit caps or zip-front hoodies with Cheshire Cat appliqués from the local Hot Topic, Urban Decay eye shadow or OPI nail polish (shades include "Off with her Red!" and "Mad as a Hatter").

"In addition to the usual merchandising phenomena, ‘Alice' is tied into a kind of nostalgia," Kincaid said. "Even in Carroll's time there were little shops set up in Oxford that would sell ‘Alice' teacups and things like that."

"A lot of people associate ‘Alice in Wonderland' with childhood, so I wouldn't be surprised if owning a bit of it operates psychologically the way old photographs do. This [merchandise] is a strong connection to the past."

And in true through-the-looking-glass fashion, that connection with the past looks like it's only going to get stronger in the future.

"You know when a lot more ‘Alice' stuff is going to be coming out?" Birenbaum said. "In 2015 — the 150th anniversary of [the first book]. … "I've been working on the 2015 celebration for the last two years, and we've got a Facebook page too: Alice 150: Celebrating Wonderland."

adam.tschorn@latimes.com

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

2010-02-27T18:36:00.007-05:00

Hiroshima Mon Amour is an acclaimed 1959 drama/romance film directed by French film director Alain Resnais, with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras. It is about a relationship between a French woman and a Japanese man. It was one of the first French New Wave films and made innovative use of flashbacks.

Synopsis

Hiroshima Mon Amour concerns the experiences of a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva), referred to as Elle (she), who performs the role of a nurse in a film being shot in post-war Hiroshima. She meets a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada), referred to as Lui (him) and, separated from their spouses, they become lovers. The early part of the film recounts, in the style of a documentary, but narrated by the so far completely unidentified characters, the effects of the Hiroshima bomb on August 6, 1945, in particular the loss of hair and the complete anonymity of the remains of some victims. The man had been conscripted into the Japanese army, and his family were in Hiroshima on that day.

Using flashbacks intercut into the love story set in 1959 — the couple's meetings in hotel rooms and restaurants — the woman relates for the first time her experiences during World War II in Nevers, where she was involved with a young German soldier during the German occupation. She suffered the humiliation of women who had colluded with the enemy, a severe almost bald haircut, before leaving for Paris, her hair regrown, and her anonymity regained. He urges her to stay in Hiroshima, but the situation is untenable.

Production

According to James Monaco, Resnais was originally commissioned to make a short documentary about the atomic bomb, but spent several months confused about how to proceed because he did not want to recreate his 1955 Holocaust documentary Night and Fog. He later went to his producer and joked that the film could not be done unless Marguerite Duras was involved in writing the screenplay.

The film was a co-production by companies from both Japan and France. The producers stipulated that one main character must be French and the other be Japanese, and also required that the film be shot in both countries employing film crews comprising technicians from each.

Significance

Hiroshima Mon Amour has been described as "The Birth of a Nation of the French New Wave" by American critic Leonard Maltin. New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard described the film's inventiveness as "Faulkner plus Stravinsky" and celebrated its originality, calling it "the first film without any cinematic references".

Filmmaker Eric Rohmer said, "I think that in a few years, in ten, twenty, or thirty years, we will know whether Hiroshima mon amour was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema".

Among the film's innovations is Resnais' experiments with very brief flashback sequences intercut into scenes to suggest the idea of a brief flash of memory. Resnais later used similar effects in Last Year at Marienbad.

Film References

In his book on Resnais, James Monaco ends his chapter on Hiroshima mon Amour by claiming that the film contains a reference to the classic 1942 film Casablanca:

“

Here is an 'impossible' love story between two people struggling with the imagery of a distant war. At the end of this romantic, poignant movie about leave takings and responsibilities, the two fateful lovers meet in a cafe. Resnais gives us a rare establishing shot of the location. 'He' is going to meet 'She' for the last time at a bar called 'The Casablanca' - right here in the middle of Hiroshima! It's still the same old story. A fight for love and glory. A case of do or die. The world will always welcome lovers. As time goes by.

Cultural Errors

In Japan Journals: 1947-2004, film historian Donald Richie tells in an entry for 25 January 1960 of seeing the film in Tokyo and remarks on various distracting (for the Japanese) cultural errors which Resnais made. He notes, for example, that the Japanese-language arrival and departure time announcements in the train scenes bear no relation to the time of day in which the scenes are set. Also, people pass through noren curtains into shops which are supposedly closed. The noren is a traditional sign that a shop is open for business and is invariably taken down at closing time.

Awards

Hiroshima mon Amour earned an Oscar nomination for screenwriter Marguerite Duras, as well as a special award at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival,[5] where the film was excluded from the official selection because of its sensitive subject matter as well as to avoid upsetting the U.S. government.

Songs inspired by the film

The film has inspired several songs. One was written by John Foxx and Billy Currie, and initially recorded and performed by their band Ultravox! in 1977. One recorded version of the song is a romantic electronic ballad, notable for showcasing an early use of a drum machine in popular music. Ultravox! also recorded a different arrangement of the song, in an aggressive punk style. This version was covered by the band The Church.

The heavy metal band Alcatrazz also recorded a song titled "Hiroshima Mon Amour" on their debut album, No Parole from Rock N' Roll.

In 2003, the New York-based no wave band My Favorite released "Burning Hearts," which draws upon the main characters in the film.

Punk rock band The (International) Noise Conspiracy's album The Cross of My Calling features a song entitled "Hiroshima Mon Amour."

In 2002 Bryan Ferry released the album Frantic which includes the song "Hiroshima", where the chorus includes the full sentence of "Hiroshima Mon Amour".

Cinema inspired by the film

In 2001, Japanese film director Nobuhiro Suwa directed a remake, titled H Story.

In 2003 Iranian film director Bahman Pour-Azar released Where Or When. The 85-minute film places Pour-Azar's characters in the same circumstances as Resnais' nearly a half century earlier. However, the current global tension of today's world is the backdrop instead of post-war Hiroshima. When screening the film Stuart Alson, who founded The New York Independent Film and Video Festival, said that the piece was "a parallel line of work with the French masterpiece "Hiroshima Mon Amour".

Alice in Wonderland (1903)

2010-02-22T02:03:00.009-05:00

The first-ever film version of Lewis Carroll's tale has recently been restored by the BFI National Archive from severely damaged materials. Made just 37 years after Lewis Carroll wrote his novel and eight years after the birth of cinema, the adaptation was directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, and was based on Sir John Tenniel's original illustrations. In an act that was to echo more than 100 years later, Hepworth cast his wife as the Red Queen, and he himself appears as the Frog Footman. Even the Cheshire cat is played by a family pet.
With a running time of just 12 minutes (8 of which survive), Alice in Wonderland was the longest film produced in England at that time. Film archivists have been able to restore the film's original colours for the first time in over 100 years.

Music: 'Jill in the Box', composed and performed by Wendy Hiscocks.

To find out more about the film, visit http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/974410/

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)

2010-02-22T01:54:00.003-05:00

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (commonly shortened to "Alice in Wonderland") is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic creatures. The tale is filled with allusions to Dodgson's friends. The tale plays with logic in ways that have given the story lasting popularity with adults as well as children. It is considered to be one of the most characteristic examples of the "literary nonsense" genre, and its narrative course and structure have been enormously influential,especially in the fantasy genre.

to read the full book, click on image below.

Cinematic and television adaptations

The book has inspired numerous film and television adaptations. This list comprises only direct and complete adaptations of the original books. Derivative works and works otherwise inspired by but not actually based on them (such as Tim Burton's 2010 film Alice in Wonderland), appear in Works influenced by Alice in Wonderland.

Alice in Wonderland (1903 film), silent film
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1910 film), silent film
Alice in Wonderland (1915 film), silent film
Alice in Wonderland (1931 film)
Alice in Wonderland (1933 film)
Alice in Wonderland (1949 film), part live-action
Alice in Wonderland (1951 film), animation film from Disney
Alice of Wonderland in Paris, 1966 animation film
Alice in Wonderland (or What’s a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This?), 1966 animation television movie
Alice in Wonderland (1966 film), made-for-TV movie, directed by Jonathan Miller.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972 film), musical motion picture
Alice in Wonderland (1976 film), pornographic film
Alice (1981 film)
Alica v strane chudes, 1981 animation film by Efrem Prujanski
Alice at the Palace, filmed performance of Elizabeth Swados's 1981 production Alice in Concert
Alice in Wonderland (1983 film), filmed performance based on the 1982 Broadway revival
Fushigi no Kuni no Alice, 1983 anime adaptation
Alice in Wonderland (1985 film), television movie
Alice in Wonderland (1986 TV serial), 4 x 30 minute BBC TV adaptation, written and directed by Barry Letts
Alice in Wonderland (1988 film), a 51-minute direct-to-video animated film from Burbank Films Australia.
Neco z Alenky (1988 film), surreal film mixed with stop motion animation by Jan Švankmajer. Released on DVD in English as "Alice" by First Run Features.
Alice in Wonderland (1999 film), television movie
American McGee's Alice (2000), a video game based on the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland universe.
Abby in Wonderland (2008 film), made as a Sesame Street Special. Released directly on DVD.
Alice (TV miniseries), a 2009 miniseries on the Syfy Channel
Alice in Wonderland (2010 film)

The Last Man on Earth (1964)

2010-02-22T01:02:00.009-05:00

Based on the chilling Richard Matheson science fiction classic story I am Legend and later remade as The Omega Man (1971) starring Charlton Heston, and the last one I am Legend (2007) starring Will Smith.

This classic features Vincent Price as scientist Robert Morgan in a post apocalyptic nightmare world. The world has been consumed by a ravenous plague that has transformed humanity into a race of bloodthirsty vampires. Only Morgan proves immune, and becomes the solitary vampire slayer.

Wuthering Heights (1939)

2010-02-22T00:44:00.005-05:00

The earliest known film adaptation of Wuthering Heights was filmed in England and directed by A. V. Bramble. It is unknown if any prints still exist.

The most famous was 1939's Wuthering Heights, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon and directed by William Wyler.

This adaptation, like many others, eliminated the second generation's story (young Cathy, Linton and Hareton). It won the 1939 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Film and was nominated for the 1939 Academy Award for Best Picture.

Wuthering Heights (Bronte Sisters)

2010-02-22T00:38:00.002-05:00

Brontë, Emily, 1818-1848; Brontë, Anne, 1820-1849
To read the full book, click on image below.

Nosferatu (1922)

2010-02-22T00:02:00.003-05:00

Originally released in 1922 as Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens, director F.W. Murnau's chilling and eerie adaption of Stoker's Dracula is a silent masterpiece of terror which to this day is the most striking and frightening portrayal of the legend.

Frankenstein (Mary W. Shelley)

2010-02-21T23:56:00.003-05:00

To read the full book, click on image.

Frankenstein (1910, Full)

2010-02-21T23:46:00.003-05:00

Frankenstein is a 1910 film made by Edison Studios that was written and directed by J. Searle Dawley. It was the first motion picture adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The unbilled cast included Augustus Phillips as Dr. Frankenstein, Charles Ogle as the Monster, and Mary Fuller as the doctor's fiancée.

Shot in three days, it was filmed at the Edison Studios in the Bronx, New York City. Although some sources credit Thomas Edison as the producer, he in fact played no direct part in the activities of the motion picture company that bore his name.

Adaptation Addict: When Is A Movie As Good As The Book? | Airlock Alpha

2010-02-19T08:49:00.002-05:00

A comparison between successful remakes and the new Percy Jackson movie helps answer the question.
(This column may contain spoilers for "Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief")

I like nothing better than taking something like a good book or comic and seeing it well done in another medium. Whether I watch on the television or especially in a movie theater, I sit in absolute anticipation that what I loved in the original will still be there on the screen.

That feeling of adoration that I had for certain characters or interest in a compelling storyline drives me to keep trying again and again. There is nothing better than to walk away from a movie remake thinking that the writers, the director, and the cast absolutely nailed it, or in the case of the Lord of the Rings trilogy movies made it even slightly better.

But there is nothing like that feeling of “meh” or even utter disappointment when walking away from a poorly done adaptation.

A lot of excitement can surround a film adaptation of a good book. There have been some very nicely done film remakes in past years, although I am still on the fence as to how well done the Twilight series is as far as being representative of the books (please don’t send me hate e-mails). However, the second film did do a better job than the first.

I think that the Harry Potter series qualifies to be at the top of that list. But what makes that series and other successes work? And what makes others absolutely fail?

These were the questions that I was considering while sitting through the latest adaptation “Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief.”

Many reviewers are calling the new Percy Jackson movie the new Harry Potter, and because of this I anticipated an absolutely fun time like I had when reading the first of Rick Riordan’s book series. I can definitely see the similarities between the two series: it is a coming of age story for a young teenage boy, there are magical powers involved, there are interesting characters, and there is a lot of action.

While making a judgment on “Percy Jackson,” let’s compare it to what the Harry Potter series does well.

First of all and maybe most importantly, the Harry Potter series remains very faithful to the books. One of the key reasons is because author J.K. Rowling was very involved in the approval of the scripts. She even steered them away from unfaithful scenes that wouldn’t match the books, like when they wanted to give Dumbledore a girlfriend in a flashback.

On his official Web site, Riordan admits to having sold the movie rights to Disney more than five years ago and even before the first book was published so that it could get more publicity. This means that the screenwriters for the movie had every opportunity to make changes that they wanted to. That decision may have helped the book and the rest of the five-book series gain the popularity that it now has, but I can bet there were some changes to the basic story that may have made Riordan regret this decision.

Unlike Harry Potter where we are introduced to several colorful characters, there were only a few of the major characters present in “Percy Jackson." I don’t know if they think that we viewers are incapable of meeting multiple characters or if the choice was made in the name of streamlining the plot. But there were some characters, albeit not the most important ones, that I missed and that I think will be essential if they choose to film all five of the book series.

More importantly, since Percy is dealing with the Olympians, you would expect him to interact with more than just Zeus, Athena, Poseidon and Hades. In fact, there was a complete omission of Ares and his house at Camp Half Blood.

Speaking of Camp Half Blood, one of the fun aspects of Percy discovering his demigod status and joining everyone at the camp is his placement. Yes, it is very reminiscent of the Sorting Hat at Hogwarts. But at Camp Half Blood, your house is chosen when the god that sired you claims you. One of the things that make an adaptation at least satisfactory if not completely successful is staying true to the basic plot. In order to do this, the writers have to go to the source material and find the important plot kernels that need to stay to maintain faithfulness.

In Harry Potter, although there have been plot points that have had to be dropped because of adapting 600-plus pages into a two-hour movie, the basic and most important kernels remain. My biggest complaint about the “Percy Jackson” movie is that they changed the major storyline of the chief gods Zeus and Poseidon not claiming their children, which makes them an anomaly at the camp. The feelings of abandonment and father issues that Percy and other demigods feel make the characters more fascinating.
Take away the flaws and complications, and movie Percy becomes very flat. Also, if they want to continue the series, the issue of god parenting becomes extremely important.

I know that in order to make a movie from a book a reasonable length, changes have to be made. Only Peter Jackson was daring enough to take extra scenes that were straight out of the books, film and score them, and add them as extended versions to appease the diehard fans.

Harry Potter, and now possibly the last Twilight book, took the lengthy last books of the series and split them into two movies in order to do it justice. For a smaller book like “Percy Jackson,” I wonder why they had to make such a major change that ultimately took away from what could have been a film success.

Was there anything I liked about the movie version of “Percy Jackson”? Absolutely. I liked the actor they chose for Percy, but I bet he could have handled the more complex character of the book. I think that they brought the setting of the book into our modern world very well, although I think that some of the songs that they chose will date the movie in the future, whereas Harry Potter will always seem timeless.

My favorite part of the movie was the character Grover who I think added even more cheekiness than the character in the book did. But I wonder whether or not they will make more of the book series. If they do, they’ll have to make up for some plot points that they chose to change.

If I had to choose between the movie or the book, I’m afraid that for “Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief,” the movie’s deficiencies affect its fun factor. My advice to those that liked the book is to wait for the DVD or reread the book.

For those who haven’t read the book yet, it’s your choice whether to spend your money at your local bookstore or at the movie theater for this one. However, I am not deterred and will return to the theater for many upcoming adaptations including the updated “Clash of the Titans” and Tim Burton’s vision of “Alice in Wonderland.”

Adaptation Addict: When Is A Movie As Good As The Book? | Airlock Alpha

Film version of popular teen novel disappoints

2008-12-02T08:57:00.004-05:00

By Matthew Lucas, Correspondent

Published: Thursday, November 27, 2008 at 9:00 a.m.

By now I'm sure it's safe to assume that most people have either read at least one of Stephenie Meyers' best-selling "Twilight" series or have at least heard of the phenomenon whose popularity reached a fever pitch in the last few months with the release of the final book in the series, "Breaking Dawn," and film adaptation of the first installment, "Twilight."

I won't belabor the plot points for very long as popular culture has become so saturated with it recently. The film introduces us to Bella (Kristen Stewart), a shy, awkward teenager who moves from Arizona to Washington to live with her father. There she is greeted as an exotic outsider by the other youths in town, but she never really fits in until she meets Edward (Robert Pattinson), an enigmatic hunk who turns out to be a vampire. He comes from a family of "vegetarians," vampires who have eschewed human blood to only hunt animals. But Edward's newfound attraction for Bella comes with a price; he must grapple with his thirst for her blood and his equally fiery passion for her. The danger is compounded by the arrival of a trio of vampires whose bloodlust extends to humans, and they set their sights on Bella.

After avoiding it for as long as possible, I read "Twilight" over the summer to see what all the fuss was about and found it to be an enjoyable, if lightweight, read - an entertaining piece of teen pulp fiction fluff. However, I had tempered expectations for the film version. Movie adaptations of popular books almost always pale in comparison to their literary counterparts. The only factor that gave me hope was the presence of director Catherine Hardwicke, who (despite the dull "Nativity Story") has always impressed me with her gritty sensibilities and visual prowess in films such as "Thirteen" and the severely underrated "Lords of Dogtown."

This time, however, one of her biggest weaknesses has come to the forefront. "The Nativity Story" hinted at it when she took a more mundane visual approach, which left her without her greatest strength. Hardwicke may be a talented visual stylist, but in many ways she is a weak storyteller. There are some beautiful moments in "Twilight," but they are often hampered by intrusive and inappropriate use of music and an overall lack of narrative movement. It just doesn't flow well. When you add that to the fact that many moments that seemed wondrous and magical on the page seem hokey and contrived on the screen (Edward's supersonic running is especially laughable), then "Twilight" fails to live up to its full potential.

Not that there was much to begin with. Quite honestly, I feel it's a story better suited to the page than the screen, or at least to a director whose storytelling skills match their visual prowess.

"Twilight" never had a very strong narrative in the first place. It is filled with long passages of breathless, enraptured descriptions of Edward's beauty and Bella's burgeoning love for him. Hardwicke attempts to up the ante and keep things moving by pulling the film's villains that don't appear until the end of the novel into a series of interludes that keeps a sense of danger over the film and a semblance of a plot that really doesn't exist.

It doesn't really add anything to the film, but it's a commendable effort. But ultimately I just didn't feel it the way I did in the book, the deep sense of longing just isn't there, nor, strangely, is the sense of danger despite the strengthened efforts in that area.

While I admit to liking the book, I'm far from a "Twilight" groupie. I hated the second book, "New Moon," so much that I stopped reading it after 200 pages and moved on to something else. It just didn't do anything for me. So I didn't have a very big emotional investment in whether the film succeeded or failed.

For my part, "Twilight" is not a massive failure, but it just doesn't work separate from the page. Anyone who has not read the book may find themselves bewildered, or at least a little confused, without some of the nuances of the book to fill it out. It will doubtless please the legions of fans who have devoured Meyers' novels. But discerning filmgoers may find that "Twilight" the movie leaves much to be desired.

Matthew Lucas, a student at Appalachian State University in Boone, is a correspondent for The Dispatch. He also has a blog site where he posts movie news, buzz and commentary at fromthefrontrow.blogspot.com.

William Shakespeare, Screenwriter

2008-12-02T08:51:00.003-05:00

Happy 444th Birthday, William Shakespeare, Screenwriter

Let's raise a toast and watch some clips to honor this one-man movie-making machine.

Joseph Fiennes as William Shakespeare in Miramax Films' 'Shakespeare in Love' - Miramax Films

Mark Bourne, Apr 22, 2008

With Wednesday, April 23, marking William Shakepeare's birthday, let's all raise a flagon of ale and wish a happy 444th to one of our favorite screenwriters.
Sure, the Western canon's greatest playwright may have lived centuries before movies came along, but he has proved himself time and again as one of our most prolific and popular writers for the big screen. So to commemorate his birthday, let's go to the DVD shelves and find a few of our favorites that ask "What light through yonder movie break?"

Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989)
With gritty realism and lavish production values, this directorial debut of 29-year-old actor Kenneth Branagh reinvigorated Shakespeare's great play of history and warfare for a new generation -- and made Branagh a darling of critics and audiences on two continents. The Bard's dialogue remains largely intact, and the strong top-to-bottom cast -- including Brian Blessed, Ian Holm, Christian Bale, Paul Scofield, Emma Thompson, Robbie Coltrane, and Judi Dench -- are fully equipped for the task. There's something about Branagh's delivery of the famous St. Crispin's Day speech -- issued to his battle-weary troops in the French countryside, as king and soldiers alike are covered in sweat, blood, and earth -- that sends a thrilled shudder up my spine every time.

Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1996)
Of course we can't pair Branagh and Shakespeare together without giving a nod to Branagh's production of Shakespeare's most famous tragedy. The first unabridged theatrical film version of the play, the running time is just over four hours, but it is spellbinding and powerful cinema. Branagh is, naturally, the thoughtful prince out to avenge his father's murder, supported by Derek Jacobi as King Claudius, Julie Christie as Queen Gertrude, Kate Winslet as Ophelia, Richard Briers as Polonius, Nicholas Farrell as Horatio, and -- in this clip -- Billy Crystal as the grave digger.

(Branagh's movie version of Much Ado About Nothing is pretty good too.)

Ian McKellen's Richard III (1995)
For some of us he'll always be Gandalf. For others, he's the evil mutant Magneto. But before Sir Ian McKellen was immortalized in a line of action figures, he was one of England's most respected Shakespeareans. His Richard III casts McKellen as the charismatic, murderous, clever, subtle, and often slyly humorous villain ascending to the throne in a Nazi-inspired 1930s England. In this brazen, fast-paced adaptation, the machine-gun pocked opening credits climax with McKellen driving a tank through a wall to kill King Henry VI and his son. One of the play's most famous lines -- "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" -- was recontextualised by the new setting: during the climactic battle, Richard's scout car becomes stuck, and his lament is cast as a plea for a mode of transport with legs rather than wheels.
In this clip, among the supporting cast we see Robert Downey Jr. as Lord Rivers, Annette Bening as Elizabeth, and Maggie Smith as the Duchess of York.
Perhaps no other title on this page better proves that Will Shakespeare would have loved writing for the movies.

Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971)
Starring Jon Finch as Macbeth, Polanski's interpretation of "the Scottish play" is as bleak and bloody as they come. You can feel the dank misery of the Middle Ages in every scene. But of course it's most remembered for the nude scene with Lady Macbeth (Francesca Annis) freaking out and looking for a really good bar of soap. That's not this clip, alas. Still, we have Finch's "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech (ah, flashbacks to high school English class) and a bloody good fight scene.

Julie Taymor's Titus (1999)
In Shakespeare's day, his early revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus was a hit "slasher film" of the era. This most gruesome of all Shakespeare's plays -- a real "Itchy & Scratchy" of the First Folio -- was a smash success that his company trotted out many times over the years to give the groundlings brutal, over-the-top thrills -- mutilations, beheadings, even a mother tricked into eating her own children that have been baked into pies. (Step aside, Sweeney Todd.)
Director Julie Taymor adapted her own tricked-out stage version for a powerful and wildly weird film starring Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, and Alan Cumming. As one of the unfortunate sons, also here is Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (now TV's Henry VIII in The Tudors). The setting is an anachronistic "all times, all places" world that uses locations, costumes, and imagery from many periods of history, including ancient Rome and Mussolini's Italy. This clip is from the "Iron Chef" scene:

Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968)
Whoa. After all that death and debauchery, let's move to some lighter fare. This movie adaptation of Shakespeare's most famous romance was directed by Franco Zeffirelli, and won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography and Best Costume Design, with nominations for Best Director and Best Picture. Shakespeare scholar Stephen Orgel describes the film as being "full of beautiful young people, and the camera, and the lush Technicolour, make the most of their sexual energy and good looks." Made at the height of the "British invasion" in U.S. pop culture, and aimed straight at the era's counterculture youth, a generation of teenagers thereafter grew up on this film. Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet is notable for being one of the first filmed versions of the play in which the main actors are near the ages of their characters -- Leonard Whiting (Romeo) was 17 during filming, and Olivia Hussey (Juliet) was 15. Zeffirelli had to get special permission for Hussey to appear nude in the film. Hussey later amusingly recalled that she was not permitted to view the film because it contained her own nudity.

On the other hand, if you like your Romeo and Juliet with a modern pop edge, there's Baz Luhrmann's Romeo+Juliet (1996) starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, and a soundtrack that successfully targeted the "MTV Generation."

Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985)
Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's Oscar-winning adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear, moved to a sixteenth-century Japan of warloards and fierce battles, was the famed director's last great epic and remains one of the most gripping and beautifully made of all "Shakespeare movies." With a budget of $12 million, it was the most expensive Japanese film produced up to that time. Ran was hailed for its powerful images and use of color -- costume designer Emi Wada won an Academy Award for Costume Design for her work. Kurosawa loved filming in lush and expansive locations, and most of Ran was shot amidst the mountains and plains of Mount Aso, Japan's largest active volcano. Kurosawa was also granted permission to shoot at two of the country's most famous landmarks, the ancient castles at Kumamoto and Himeji. For the castle of Lady Sué's family, he used the ruins of the Azusa castle.

If you like Kurosawa's Ran, follow that film (after you recover) with his 1957 Throne of Blood, which transposes Macbeth to medieval Japan. It's one of Kurosawa's best films, and for many critics it's one of the best film adaptations of Macbeth, despite having almost none of the play's script. Washizu/Macbeth's famous death scene, in which his own archers turn upon him and fill his body with arrows, was in fact performed with real arrows, a choice made to help actor Toshiro Mifune display realistic facial expressions of fear.
And talk about pop culture cool! In an episode of TV's Smallville, Lex Luthor claims that a sword hanging on the wall of his study is a prop from Throne of Blood, his "favorite Akira Kurosawa movie."

King Lear with James Earl Jones at the New York Shakespeare Festival
There have been so many King Lears on film. There are versions set in post-Chernobyl Russia, at a Yiddish seder, and in the cornfields of Iowa. We've seen existential Lears, a Soviet Christian Marxist Lear, and a punk-apocalyptic Lear. Orson Welles was a fine screen king, and at 75 Laurence Olivier won the International and Primetime Emmy awards in a 1984 TV production co-starring Diana Rigg, John Hurt, and Stonehenge.
Then again, you may prefer your King Lear served straight up. In that case, I suggest the Broadway Theatre Archive DVD starring James Earl Jones (before he became Darth Vader), from a performance filmed before an audience in New York City's Central Park and broadcast in 1974 as a PBS Great Performances presentation. The supporting cast showcases Raul Julia as the seductive villain Edmund, Rene Auberjonois as Edgar/Tom o' Bedlam, Rosalind Cash as treacherous Goneril, Lee Chamberlain's loving and steadfast Cordelia, Douglass Watson as loyal Kent, and Tom Aldredge (The Sopranos) as the Fool, Lear's voice of observant wisdom. (The only weak link is, oddly, Paul Sorvino's lackluster Gloucester.) Here's a no-fripperies, full-speed-ahead King Lear that's accessible, exciting, haunting, moving, and crowd-pleasing in ways that merely reading the play in English class will never achieve.

Al Pacino's Looking for Richard (1996)
Al Pacino self-produced this terrific fly-on-the-wall documentary because, basically, he's a Shakespeare buff. In it, Pacino explores not just the gold and dirt within Shakespeare's text -- we watch him also dip into the well of his own skill and craft as an actor to see if he has what it takes to make the vile (but layered and nuanced) Richard III live for modern American audiences. Pacino embarked upon Looking for Richard by recruiting fellow actors -- such as Kevin Spacey, Alec Baldwin, and Winona Ryder -- and shooting small excerpts on film, be it conversations, debates, table-readings, or informal scenes in casual settings. Michael Mann lent some of his film crew from Heat to shoot the climactic Battle of Bosworth Field just outside of L.A. The result is a meditation on the value of the play, and of Shakespeare in general. It's a master class in acting, with behind-the-scenes conversations illuminating how much thought and planning goes into this sort of production.

Shakespeare in Love (1999)
Okay, sure, it's not strictly speaking "a Shakespeare movie," but this romance-comedy-drama does a great job taking us back to the days when Will Shakespeare -- just 29 years old with his career on the rise -- might forsake it all for the love of a higher-born woman. The witty script by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard overflows with in-jokes for Shakespeare fans and theater buffs. Shakespeare in Love left the 1999 Academy Awards with seven statuettes, including the one for Best Picture. Joseph Fiennes (Ralph's brother) is Will, and Gwyneth Paltrow (ah, my Gwyneth, shall I compare thee to a summer's day?) has never been better.

Forbidden Planet (1956)
In 1956 with Forbidden Planet, MGM did for science fiction what it had done for musicals four years earlier with Singin' in the Rain. The studio took the stuff its audiences loved, gave it that high-polish MGM razzle-dazzle, and produced an enduring best-of-breed favorite, a CinemaScope spectacle that's terrifically entertaining, smartly written, memorably cast, briskly paced, and production-designed to the hilt. Instead of Gene Kelly's tap shoes or Debbie Reynolds' pertness, this time we get Leslie Nielsen as a proto-Captain Kirk, special effects photography that still knocks our socks off, Hollywood's most famous robot before Star Wars' less imaginative and interesting droids, and (the stuff space-kids' dreams are made on) leggy Anne Francis ably modeling miniskirts a decade early. It has aged well, and any dated elements -- that great flying-saucer design of the starship, the crew's baseball-cap uniforms, the casual Rat Pack-era sexism -- only add a quaint charm to the film's robust retro-future vibe. Oh, and its plot points -- and even some dialogue -- come lifted with an Amazing Stories spin from Shakespeare's The Tempest.
The 50th Anniversary Special Edition DVD is the one to get here. For a few bucks more you can get it in a big tin box with your own Robby the Robot miniature.

Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare Style
And finally, it's not a video clip, but it's too good to not mention. Via Boing Boing, we now know that Livejournal's Ceruleanst has given Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction the Bardolator treatment. Forthwith, here's the "Royale with Cheese" bit as written by William Shakespeare:
ACT I SCENE 2. A road, morning. Enter a carriage, with JULES and VINCENT, murderers.
J: And know'st thou what the French name cottage pie?
V: Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue?
J: But nay, their tongues, for speech and taste alike
Are strange to ours, with their own history:
Gaul knoweth not a cottage from a house.
V: What say they then, pray?
J: Hachis Parmentier.
V: Hachis Parmentier! What name they cream?
J: Cream is but cream, only they say le crème.
V: What do they name black pudding?
J: I know not;
I visited no inn it could be bought.

Of course, social networking being what it is, others have joined in and further passages have been appended anon. And on and on and on. . . .

(With thanks to JJB at DVDJournal.com.)

Don't be stuffy over screen adaptations

2008-10-22T11:19:00.005-04:00

28.09.2008

A N Wilson pays tribute to the skill involved in turning books into film

Addicts, not merely of Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece, but also of the 1981 Granada Television version of Brideshead Revisited can only look forward to the new screen version with diluted enthusiasm.

We are told that the new version has Charles Ryder and Sebastian snogging; that the story turns into a "love triangle" between Charles, Sebastian and Julia. Religion is played down. And how could it be Brideshead without Geoffrey Burgon's superb music?

Still, it would be stuffy to say that no one should ever be allowed to adapt our favourite books for cinema or television. Think of the number of enjoyable Sherlock Holmes films, for example, starring Basil Rathbone, which bear only small relation to the books.

The reason Jane Austen films are so deadly is that they remove the chief attraction of the books - which is Jane Austen's own voice. Without the jokes in Pride and Prejudice, there is a sort of inevitability that you will end up with the flavourless Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet.

Something of the same kind operates with Dickens. It takes real skill to adapt him, since there is so much more in the books than just the "characters".

The best Dickens adaptation, however, is also my favourite film - it is Christine Edzard's Little Dorrit, with its total faithfulness to the book, and its extraordinary line-up of great actors, including the totally unknown Sarah Pickering as the child-woman.

Joan Greenwood - Sibella from Kind Hearts and Coronets - never gave a finer performance than she did as Mrs Clennam. Max Wall and Patricia Hayes make the most superb Flintwinch and Affery. The sublime Miriam Margolyes simply is Flora Finching, and Derek Jacobi and Alec Guinness create marvellously understated Arthur Clennam and Dorrit.

The film looks as if it was made on a shoestring. When I speak of its total faithfulness, that is not to say that they have not made judicious cuts - all the lesbian intrigue between Miss Wade and Tattycoram goes, and so does the opening in the French prison and the plot which goes with it. The film is in two longish parts - the first Nobody's Fault sees the story from Clennam's viewpoint, and the second is Little Dorrit's Story.

I remember when it first came out spending almost all week in the cinema, viewing it repeatedly. I suppose I've watched the videos - and now a DVD is available - any number of times. Rather than starting in Marseilles, the film comes immediately to London, and it comes intimately indoors.

The interiors are beautiful - tiny, panelled rooms, sparsely furnished. Mrs Clennam's dark house, from whose black shadows Max Wall sinisterly hobbles, or Little Dorrit flits with her baskets of darning or trays of oysters, is a place which, once you have come to inhabit it, will haunt your dreams for ever.

The outside shots, Shotter Boys prints brought to life, are done in almost toy-theatre fashion. Dreamy shots of Borough High Street suggest the background that leads to the Marshalsea Prison, which is just a small yard when you get inside it. The roofscapes of London have a similar near-amateur brilliance. And crowd scenes are suggested by comparatively few actors passing and repassing shop windows.

Little Dorrit, my own personal favourite among Dickens's novels, is a sort of fairy story. Yes, it is "about" money - but not in the sense that Trollope or Balzac would have written about it, with their knowing worldliness. The exact nature of the Clennams' business transactions in China would have taken up pages of Balzac's time, but in Dickens, Arthur merely comes home with the uneasy sense that his father's money was gained unjustly.

Likewise all the Dorrit money arrangements - both Dorrit's ruin, and the sudden restitution - come about quite arbitrarily. Clennam and Mr Pancks could as easily have been fairies with magic wands, for all the interest which Dickens takes in the actual details of the debts. (In Trollope, we would be rummaging about looking for lost cheques and promissory notes).

The point of money in Little Dorrit - as in the last few weeks of excitement in the world markets - is the effect it has on the lives of human beings whose values are out of skew. That is why, though we have no Marshalsea prison any more, figures like Dorrit and Merdle are perennial, and the love between Dorrit and Clennam remains so hauntingly touching.

Graphic Novels are Hollywood's Newest Gold Mine

2008-06-23T02:24:00.002-04:00

Thursday, Jun. 19, 2008 By REBECCA WINTERS KEEGAN
TIME magazine

Superman Leaped 40 years' worth of tall buildings on the printed page before he landed his first feature film, in 1978. In 2003, Wesley Gibson, the cubicle-dwelling assassin in Mark Millar's nihilist graphic novel Wanted, had producers circling before his first issue even went to print. Millar's work is unlikely source material for a big-budget movie; one of his obscenely named villains is made of fecal matter from 666 evildoers, including Adolf Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer. Nevertheless, Wanted is now a glossy summer action movie starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, directed by new-to-big-studio-movies Russian Timur Bekmambetov.

Graphic novels--long comic books for grownups--have always had mostly cult appeal. Last year's most successful, the 13th volume in a Japanese manga adventure series--Naruto, by Masashi Kishimoto--sold 80,000 copies, far short of 2007's hottest novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, which sold more than 1.5 million copies. The point of the comics was largely their transgressiveness. "They're the last pirate medium," says Millar, a Scottish writer who consults for Marvel Comics on more mainstream fare, like Iron Man. "They're the last medium for a mass audience where you can do anything you want."

But the creations of oddball loners like Millar scribbling at drafting tables have also become the movie industry's most reliable development tool. Thanks to the box-office success of A-list superheroes like Spider-Man and the X-Men, Hollywood's appetite for comics-fueled material is insatiable. Titles from the darker corners of the genre, including gritty graphic novels like Wanted and Alan Moore's watershed deconstructivist superhero tome Watchmen are getting the big-screen makeover. Stories and characters first written for an audience of a few hundred thousand geeks at most are reaching, at the box office and on DVD and cable, popcorn-chomping crowds that number in the tens of millions. "The dalliance between Hollywood and comics is becoming a marriage," says Frank Miller, creator of the graphic novels Sin City and 300. "The downside is in the heads of people who make comic books. Everybody wants money and fame."

Times weren't always so flush in Toontown. In 1997, "George Clooney killed comic-book movies," says Millar. Joel Schumacher's joyless Batman & Robin, in which Clooney legendarily donned a bat suit complete with rubber nipples, left fans feeling abused. Studios turned their attention to fantasy literature like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. But when Spider-Man bested two wizard movies and a Star Wars prequel in 2002 and X-2: X-Men United broke $200 million at the box office in 2003, hand-drawn heroes swung back into favor. The joke in Hollywood now is that in a risk-averse era, comic-book adaptations have a distinct advantage: the drawings mean studio execs can see beforehand what the movie will look like.

At first, it was the family-friendly superheroes who made the leap to multiplexes, with the help of directors like Bryan Singer and Chris Nolan. Slowly, lesser-known comic books got a shot. Some, like Sin City and Hellboy, became modest box-office successes by adhering to the distinctive spirit of their creators. Others, like Road to Perdition and A History of Violence, attracted audiences with sophisticated stories that few people knew were derived from graphic novels.

Then came the spear that pierced the industries of comics, movies and ab videos: 300. "I was pretty sure we were making a boutique movie," says director Zack Snyder of his R-rated, blood-spattered retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae. With no stars and a lot of leather bikini bottoms, 300 grossed more than $200 million in the U.S. alone. "The movie struck a chord because it was unapologetic," says Snyder, who is directing Watchmen for release next March. "It's difficult to find a movie that feels true to itself. You feel the hand of Hollywood, the moviemaking by committee, on everything."

In the case of 300, the hand audiences felt was really Miller's, since whenever Snyder made a creative decision, he asked himself, What would Frank do? Comic-book-movie directors like Snyder, who see themselves as stewards of another person's vision rather than architects of their own, have made comic-book creators Hollywood's latest big-budget auteurs. Because they work with such low overhead compared with moviemakers, comic writers and artists can take many more creative chances than directors. "You don't have endless development meetings that turn your brain into milk," says Miller. "You get to at least see what an individual has to offer." After co-directing Sin City with Robert Rodriguez in 2005, Miller is completing his comics-to-movies arc by directing The Spirit, an adaptation of a 1940s crime-fighting strip, for a December release.

The other axiom 300 proved to Hollywood is one the comics industry has known for decades: "The audience for comic-book movies is overweight guys in their mid-30s," says director, comic-book-store owner and overweight guy in his late 30s Kevin Smith. Actually, the average age of a comic-book buyer is 23, but Smith's point--that there are fans aplenty to support R-rated comics franchises--has been digested. Even PG-13 comic-book movies are maturing. Batman keeps getting darker scripts, like Nolan's The Dark Knight, starring Christian Bale and Heath Ledger (in his haunting last performance, as the Joker). Marvel Studios' first two movies, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, star Robert Downey Jr. and Ed Norton, Oscar-nominated actors with indie credibility. And Hellboy, who is back this summer for a sequel, is hardly your standard man in tights. He smokes cigars, drinks Red Bull and collects kittens. "Kids aren't kids anymore," says Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. "They're so exposed to everything. They wouldn't accept really simplistic superheroes." It's likely that a superhero movie like Watchmen or The Dark Knight couldn't be appreciated by audiences without the simpler fare that came before it. You can't deconstruct the superhero until someone has constructed him, rubber nipples and all. "Watchmen is thick and complicated and violent and political and critical of America," Snyder says. "It's huge."

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Film Semiotics: A Metalinguistic Analysis

2008-06-23T00:32:00.003-04:00

A language, by definition, is a semiotic process through which thought may be conveyed, but a language system (or linguistic system) enables a response to that thought using the degrees and kinds of signs and signifiers produced by the language. Film uses not only words, but also different kinds of shots, angles and speeds; therefore, while the audience can react to a film's semantic intent, that audience cannot address its concerns regarding the film in the same language the film used to convey its argument. For that reason, Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis advance Christian Metz’s argument that while the means by which film expresses itself to its audience constitutes a language, it cannot constitute a linguistic system. Metz argues that

one might call ‘language’…any unity defined in terms of its matter of expression…Literary language, in this sense, is the set of messages whose matter of expression is writing; cinematic language is the set of messages whose matter of expression consists of five tracks or channels: moving photographic image, recorded phonetic sound, recorded noises, recorded musical sound, and writing…Thus cinema is a language in the sense that it is a ‘technico-sensorial unity’ graspable in perceptual experience. (37)

The language of cinema, as a result, cannot be answered by the language of literature because the two systems use different modes of expression. In support of this point, Raymond Bellour argues that film is the "Unattainable Text":

the film-text, unlike the literary text, is not ‘quotable.’ Whereas literature and literary criticism share the same medium – words – film and film analysis do not. While the film medium entails five tracks – image, dialogue, noise, music, written materials – the analysis of the film consists of a single track – words. Critical language is therefore inadequate to its object; the film always escapes the language that attempts to constitute it. (56)

To appropriately respond to a film, consequently, one would have to generate a film of his or her own using the same methods employed by the director in a manner dialogic to the film being addressed, and this is problematic for most of the viewing audience. In spite of our inability to respond to a film in its language through natural means of discourse, understanding the nature of film semiotics makes us critically aware of the language being used, and that results in an enhanced understanding of the way in which film is representative of cultural and counter-cultural values.

The book is divided into five parts, the first of which develops the terminology and history of semiotics in a chapter entitled "The Origins of Semiotics." It begins with an introduction of two seemingly interchangeable terms: semiology and semiotics. The former is defined by Ferdinand de Saussure as:

A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would be a part of social psychology, I shall call it semiology (from Greek semeion ‘sign’). Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. (Course in General Linguistics 4)

The latter is derived from Charles Sanders Pierce, who proffered a similar definition of the term (4). Regardless of this semantic distinction in terminology, Stam et al. explains that the "sign is for Saussure the central fact of language, and the primordial opposition of signifier/signified constitutes the founding principle of structural linguistics" (8). The dichotomy between these two is reconciled in the following formula:

The identity of any linguistic sign is determined by the sum total of paradigmatic [involving choosing] and syntagmatic [involving combining] relations into which it enters with other linguistic signs in the same language system. (9)

The Paradigmatic is defined as "a virtual or ‘vertical’ set of units which have in common the fact that they entertain relations of similarity and contrast," and the Syntagmatic⁴ deals with "the sequential characteristics of speech, their ‘horizontal’ arrangement into a signifying whole" (9). This formula loosely resembles the linguistic system of Tagmemics, wherein diction and syntax are construed in a slot-plus-class (syntagm-plus-paradigm) relationship, which enables them to be better understood in their functional grammatology.

The use that Stam makes of this in its relationship to cinematic forms lies in the concept of translinguistics, which entails a "theory of the role of signs in human life and thought" (13), in that signs have multiple significances depending on the views of conflicting classes. This multi-accentuality⁴ is "the capacity of the sign to elicit variable social tones and ‘evaluations’ as it is deployed within specific social and historical conditions" (13). In contrast to Saussure’s structuralism, Derrida proposed a vision that went beyond it--post-structuralism. This line of thought "demonstrated a thoroughgoing distrust of any centered, totalizing theory, a radical skepticism about the possibility of constructing a metalanguage which might position, stabilize or explain all of the other discourses, since the signs of the metalanguage are themselves subject to slippage and indeterminacy" (23). By entailing "a critique of the concepts of the stable sign, of the unified subject, of identity and of truth" (23), post-structuralism

exists in both continuity and rupture with structuralism. It shares the structuralist premise of the determining, constitutive role of language, and generally continues within the structuralist problematic, especially the assumption that signification is based on difference. At the same time, it rejects structuralism’s ‘dream of scientificity,’ its hopes of stabilizing the play of difference within an all-encompassing master-system. (27)

The Saussure-Derrida disagreement’s significance to film is discussed in the second chapter entitled "Cine-Semiology," in which Christian Metz is introduced by way of transition.

The question which oriented Metz’s early work was whether the cinema was Langue (language system) or Language (language) and his well-known conclusion…was that the cinema was not a language system but that it was a language. (34)

His argument is that "langue is a system of signs intended for two-way communication, while the cinema allows only for deferred communication" (34). In today’s world, however, this assertion will eventually have to be rethought because it does not allow for interactive cinema (like porn chatrooms) or Internet conference calling where role play is being done by either party—either of which can technically be considered film-making, especially if the parts of dialogue and imagery are manipulated to produce a contrived result. Metz further argues that cinema is not a language system because "it lacks the equivalent of the arbitrary linguistic sign," replacing it instead with a ‘motivated’ sign. So, the relationship between signifier and signified differs from literature to film (35). Metz argues against the idea that the camera/cinematic shot is like the word while the sequence is like the sentence. He states as evidence that "(1) shots are infinite in number…(2) shots are the creations of the film-maker…(3) the shot provides an inordinate amount of information…(4) the shot is an actualized unit [meaning that it generates an exact representation of its intended meaning]…(and) (5) shots, unlike words, do not gain meaning by paradigmatic contrast with other shots that might have occurred in the same place on the syntagmatic chain" (35-6). Also, cinema "does not constitute a language widely available as a code" (35), for while all speakers of English can produce English, not all can produce the talent, training and access produced by filmic utterances (35). Again, this would have to be qualified in respect to advances in technology that put Internet cameras on everyone’s desktops or enabled lightweight camcorders to be used in independent film-making efforts like The Blair Witch Project. Stam argues further that language and film are both discursive "through paradigmatic and syntagmatic operations" (37).

Language selects and combines phonemes and morphemes to form sentences; film selects and combines images and sounds to form syntagmas, i.e. units of narrative autonomy in which elements interact semantically. (37)

The idea that there was one grand syntagmatic code, moreover, was refuted by others who argued that he was setting up a system too rigid to be viable. In response, Metz modified his argument to allow room for other cinematic codes. Stam explains that

like any artistic language, the cinema manifests a plurality of codes. In cinema, numerous codes remain constant across all or most films; unlike language, however, film has no ‘master code’ shared by all films. Filmic texts, for Metz, form a structured network produced by the interweaving of specific cinematic codes, i.e. codes that appear only in the cinema, and non-specific codes, i.e. codes shared with languages other than the cinema. (48-9)

The sense Metz makes of these codes, to give meaning to the plot of any given film, is discussed in the third chapter entitled "Film-narratology." Within this chapter, Stam explains the means by which the idea of a lengthy feature film is sold to an audience.

Metz argued that the organization of images into a narrative was one of the most important ways that film was like a language. The Grand Syntagmatic sought to designate and classify the specifically narrative segments of film language, which Metz understood in terms of sequences of shots, called syntagmas. These eight syntagmas [see footnote above], which were distinguished primarily through editing, expressed the spatial temporal and logical connections that form the universe of the fabula. (79)

Implicit in the need for a cohesive plot structure driven by a recognizable and powerful theme lies the necessity for these syntagmas to be sutured, or stitched, together in a way that enhances the flow of the film and generates the realism necessary for the audience to maintain credulity. The way in which those shots are sutured together is another form of communication between the film and its audience, but it is not a dialogue any more than the actors on the screen are influenced by the mood of the spectators sitting in the theater⁵. By choosing how to cut the story the film is trying to relate to the viewer, the director decides how that story is going to speak to the outside world.

That the outside world responds to film in a certain way is predicated upon its having been pre-conditioned through an innate desire to find the self in the gaze of the other. The fourth chapter, entitled "Psychoanalysis," describes one of the aims of psychoanalytic film theory as "a systematic comparison of the cinema as a specific kind of spectacle and the structure of the socially and psychically constituted individual" (123). Stam explains

If psychoanalysis examines the relations of the subject in discourse, then psychoanalytic film theory meant integrating questions of subjectivity into notions of meaning-production. Moreover, it meant that film-viewing and subject-formation were reciprocal processes: something about our unconscious identity as subjects is reinforced in film viewing, and film viewing is effective because of our unconscious participation. Moving from the interpretation of individual films to a systematic comprehension of the cinematic institution itself, some film theorists saw psycho-analysis as a way of accounting for the cinema’s immediate and pervasive social power. For them the cinema ‘reinscribes’ those very deep and globally structuring processes which form the human psyche, and it does so in such a way that we continually yearn to repeat (or re-enact) the experience. (124)

The idea that individuals can be influenced by films that mirror their latent desires within a broad range of their birth culture is interesting in the sense that it defines the culture as the macrocosm of the individual. It further seems to explain the voyeurism and vicarious living undergone by each audience member who sits alone surrounded by a crowd of other people who are alone, too. Theaters, therefore, are not social gathering places in the sense of a community’s coming together to enjoy a shared experience. They are, rather, places in which the lone individual, even if surrounded by his or her friends, can experience nascent predilections and explore formative moments within or outside of the safety of his or her own cultural norms. Spectators are able to do this as individuals either because they have already developed beyond the confines of their own understanding of the world and, therefore, are open to the suggestions of others that lay outside their realms of experience, or because they have yet to grow beyond their earliest attachments and rediscover those within the context of film.

This idea of the self as both a part of culture and as an autonomous unit with a very specific inner sense of identity helps us recognize the effect any given sequence of images may have upon us and distinguish the roles played by those images in relation to dominant cultural values. The book concludes with a chapter entitled "From Realism to Intertextuality," which lists the Comolli and Narboni taxonomy of the possible relations between a film and the dominant ideology of the culture in which the film was made. These include:

1) Dominant films, i.e. those films thoroughly imbued with dominant ideology

2) Resistant films, which attack the dominant ideology on the level both of the signified and of the signifier

3) Formally resistant films, those films which, while not explicitly political, practice formal subversion

4) Content-oriented political films, explicitly political and critical films...whose critique of the ideological system is undermined by the adoption of dominant language and imagery

5) Fissure films, i.e. films which superficially belong to dominant cinema but where an internal criticism opens up a ‘rupture’

6) Live cinema I, i.e. films depicting social events critically but which fail to challenge the cinema’s traditional ideologically conditioned method of depiction

7) Live cinema II, direct cinema films which simultaneously depict contemporary events critically and question traditional representation (196)

In each of these film types, there is a means for the spectator to either identify with or rebel against the image offered. The choice the movie offers is not necessarily compatible with the spectator’s ability to answer back with the language of the ideology, just like there is no possibility of the spectator’s being able to answer back in the language of the cinema. However, the spectator’s reaction to those choices helps that spectator define his or her place in that culture in comparison to or contrast with the values being witnessed. The signs and signifiers of the film media can, therefore, be accessed and responded to even though they engage the audience in a language the audience itself cannot speak.

Works Cited

Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Visitors by countries

2008-03-31T20:15:00.002-04:00

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Movie adaptations of Dr. Seuss stories

2008-03-22T10:43:00.007-04:00

Horton captures imaginations and Seuss' vision

Rameez Anwar

Issue date: 3/21/08

After the last two movie adaptations of a Dr. Seuss story - the forgettable How the Grinch Stole Christmas and the abominable The Cat in the Hat - it had become a legitimate concern as to whether it was possible to successfully convert one of Seuss's concise classics into a full-length film. However, Hollywood's latest attempt, Horton Hears a Who!, makes the prospect of a big screen Green Eggs and Ham much less frightening. While the movie is legitimately entertaining, and not even in a "so bad it's kind of good" way, it flags in energy whenever it strays from the concept of the original story and focuses on uninspired plot additions.

For the most part, the film focuses on Dr. Seuss' original plot: Horton the elephant (The Number 23's Jim Carrey) discovers a microscopic world on a speck of dust, befriends the mayor of tiny Whoville ("The Office"'s Steve Carell) and then embarks on a journey to find a safe place to store the speck of dust.

In addition to its faithful rendition of the original plot, the movie's vibrant animation excellently captures the tone of Seuss' trademark whimsical illustrations. The live-action adaptations of Seuss' work had neutered this essential quality with pounds of creepy makeup and expensive but drab set pieces. The success of Horton's visual style seems to indicate that Seuss' magic works best in a cartoon format.

Another aspect of the movie that separates it from The Grinch and The Cat in the Hat is its refusal to allow the story to be hijacked by any of its performers. Jim Carrey tones down his act to create a sweet and sometimes funny character without overstaying his welcome.

The voice acting in general is well done, with notable performances coming from Carell and from Will Arnett ("Arrested Development") as the vulture mercenary, Vlad.

The movie only temporarily loses its way whenever it forays into the subplots added in order to extend a 10-minute read into a 90-minute movie. For instance, the plotline involving the miscommunication between the mayor and his only son (out of 97 children) is clichéd and never really gets resolved.

Besides adding these ill-advised plot devices, the movie's only other shortcoming is that it never really strikes an appropriate balance between entertaining both children and adults. For a cartoon like Horton, keeping parents and nostalgic college students from groaning or falling asleep in their seats should be subservient to the primary goal of entertaining children. However, most of the laughs in the theater were coming from the adults, while the kids often sounded confused. That isn't to say they were never laughing; on the contrary, most of the kids seemed to enjoy the movie quite a bit, judging by the looks on their faces as they exited the theater. But it often seemed like there was a chorus of "huh?" accompanying the film's soundtrack.

Overall, Horton Hears a Who! is the best of the three recent Dr. Seuss adaptations. The general adherence to the original plot, engaging but never over-the-top voice acting and lively visuals easily offset the movie's few shortcomings.

ILLUSTRATED BOOKS Movie adaptations have happy endings

2008-03-20T11:16:00.005-04:00

ILLUSTRATED BOOKS

Movie adaptations have happy endings

Friday, March 14, 2008 3:06 AM

BY MARK FEENE

THE BOSTON GLOBE

What Horton the elephant hears in the Dr. Seuss story about him is, of course, a Who.

What 20th Century Fox hopes to hear with the movie adaptation of Horton Hears a Who!, featuring the voices of Jim Carrey and Steve Carell, is something quite different: the rustle of runaway box-office receipts.

That's what Hollywood has always wanted to hear when it adapts children's stories -- and why it's adapted so many. What's notable about Horton Hears a Who! is that it marks the latest instance of an increasingly common development in Hollywood's pursuit of the family market: the return of the illustrated children's book.

Using children's picture books and illustrated novels as inspiration is nothing new for Hollywood. Several early Disney animation features originated that way. Yet the past few years have seen picture books come to the screen as never before.

Seussian cinema, as one might call illustrated-book-derived movies, has practically become its own genre: The Cat in the Hat (2003) and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), among others, preceded Horton. No doubt this movie connection would please Seuss, who, as Maj. Theodor Geisel, headed the animation division of Frank Capra's Armed Forces Picture unit during World War II.

Rivaling Seuss as king of the illustrated-book movie genre is Chris van Allsburg. Adaptations of his books include Jumanji (1995), The Polar Express(2004) and Zathura (2005). Like Seuss, van Allsburg has a Hollywood connection: He was a layout designer on Disney's The Little Mermaid (1989).

The genre might have rival kings, but there's no argument about who its 800-pound gorilla is -- or, rather, 800-pound ogre: The three Shrek movies, featuring the title character of William Steig's 1990 picture book, have had worldwide grosses of $1.6 billion.

Almost since they began, movies have adapted both fairy tales (Cinderella in 1899) and children's classics (Heidi in 1920). And it was a fairy tale that Walt Disney turned to for his first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

The bad thing about the genre is how it invariably abandons one of the most cherishable elements of the books it draws on: their elegant simplicity of storytelling.

In filling out the narratives for the screen, so much of the charm, grace and character of the books' storytelling gets lost. The Shrek movies are the worst offender, but they make up for it with their inventiveness. The creepiest children's book adaptation might be The Polar Express, with its weird animatronic computer graphics.

Almost since they began, movies have adapted both fairy tales and children's classics.

REVIEW: I am Legend

2008-01-12T22:09:00.000-05:00

I Am Legend (PG-13)

Ebert: Users:

Will Smith the sole human survivor in New York City in “I Am Legend.” He has a dog.

I Am Legend

/ / / December 14, 2007

Cast & Credits

Robert Neville: Will Smith
Anna: Alice Braga
Ethan: Charlie Tahan
Zoe: Salli Richardson
Marley: Willow Smith

Warner Bros. presents a film directed by Francis Lawrence. Written by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman. Based on the novel by Richard Matheson. Running time: 114 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence). Opening today at local theaters.

By Roger Ebert

The opening scenes of "I Am Legend" have special effects so good that they just about compensate for some later special effects that are dicey. We see Manhattan three years after a deadly virus has killed every healthy human on the island, except one. The streets are overgrown with weeds, cars are abandoned, the infrastructure is beginning to collapse. Down one street, a sports car races, driven by Robert Neville (Will Smith), who is trying to get a good shot at one of the deer roaming the city. He has worse luck than a lioness who competes with him.

Neville has only his dog to keep him company. He lives barricaded inside a house in Greenwich Village, its doors and windows sealed every night by heavy steel shutters. That's because after dark the streets are ruled by bands of predatory zombies -- hairless creatures who were once human but have changed into savage, speechless killers with fangs for teeth. In his basement, Neville has a laboratory where he is desperately seeking a vaccine against the virus, which mutated from a cure for cancer.

The story is adapted from a 1954 sci-fi novel by Richard Matheson, which has been filmed twice before, as "The Last Man on Earth" (1964) starring Vincent Price, and "The Omega Man" (1971) starring Charlton Heston. In the original novel, which Stephen King says influenced him more than any other, Neville cultivated garlic and used mirrors, crosses and sharpened stakes against his enemies, who were like traditional vampires, not super-strong zombies. I am not sure it is an advance to make him a scientist, arm him and change the nature of the creatures; Matheson developed a kind of low-key realism that was doubly effective.

In "I Am Legend," the situation raises questions of logic. If Neville firmly believes he is the last healthy man alive, who is the vaccine for? Only himself, I guess. Fair enough, although he faces a future of despair, no matter how long his cans of Spam and Dinty Moore beef stew hold out; dogs don't live forever. And how, I always wonder, do human beings in all their infinite shapes and sizes mutate into identical pale zombies with infinite speed and strength?

Never mind. Given its setup, "I Am Legend" is well-constructed to involve us with Dr. Neville and his campaign to survive. There is, however, an event which breaks his spirit and he cracks up -- driving out at night to try to mow down as many zombies with his car as he can before they kill him. He is saved (I'm not sure how) by a young woman named Anna (Alice Braga), who is traveling with a boy named Ethan (Charlie Tahan).

He takes them home, and she explains they are trying to get to a colony of survivors in Vermont. Neville doubts that such a colony exists. I doubt that she and the boy would venture through Manhattan to get there. Yes, she has doubtless heard his nonstop taped voice on all AM frequencies, asking to be contacted by any other survivors. But we have seen every bridge into Manhattan blown up as part of a quarantine of the island, so how did they get there? Boat? Why go to the risk?

Never mind, again, because Anna and the boy import dramatic interest into the story when it needs it. And director Francis Lawrence generates suspense effectively, even though it largely comes down to the monster movie staple of creatures leaping out of the dark, gnashing their fangs and hammering at things. The special effects generating the zombies are not nearly as effective as the other effects in the film; they all look like creatures created for the sole purpose of providing the film with menace and have no logic other than serving that purpose.

"I Am Legend" does contain memorable scenes, as when the island is being evacuated, and when Neville says goodbye to his wife and daughter (Salli Richardson and Willow Smith), and when he confides in his dog (who is not computer-generated, most of the time, anyway). And if it is true that mankind has 100 years to live before we destroy our planet, it provides an enlightening vision of how Manhattan will look when it lives on without us. The movie works well while it's running, although it raises questions that later only mutate in our minds.

REVIEW: I Am Legend

2008-01-12T22:05:00.000-05:00

Posted Dec 14th 2007 12:01AM by James Rocchi

''When I started in movies, I said, 'I want to be the biggest movie star in the world.' The biggest movie stars make the biggest movies, so (my producing partner James Lassiter and I) looked at the top 10 movies of all time. At that point, they were all special-effects movies. So Independence Day -- no-brainer. Men in Black -- no-brainer. I, Robot -- no-brainer.'' -- Will Smith, Entertainment Weekly, "Hollywood's 50 Smartest," Nov. 28, 2007

And that's a fairly loaded turn of phrase, because to many movie fans, 'no-brainer' better describes the scripts and direction of Independence Day, Men in Black and I, Robot than it does the decision to star in them. And before seeing I Am Legend, a third Hollywood version of Richard Matheson's 1954 book following in the footsteps of 1964's The Last Man on Earth and 1971's The Omega Man, the specter and spectacle of Smith's track record in big-budget science fiction loomed like a dark cloud. I walked into I Am Legend cautious and underwhelmed, with Smith's past genre efforts in mind; I staggered out of I Am Legend impressed and enthused and a little wrung-out after a well-executed and perfectly pitched demonstration of brute-force big-money horror-action film making. I'm hesitant to say how well I Am Legend will endure the test of time, but while you're watching it, you're caught in an iron grip, moved and manipulated and carried away by film makers who know exactly how to make you sink into our seat with dread. I shivered and tensed throughout I Am Legend, and at the end of the credits, I was dumbstruck to learn it was PG-13; it felt far more gripping and grim and upsetting than that rating would suggest.

I Am Legend opens with a TV newsblip, as the disarmingly unpolished Doctor Krippen explains that she and her team have found a cure for cancer by re-engineering potent viruses to attack it. The cure works; it works every time. Dr. Krippen (played by an uncredited actress whose name I won't give, but she's perfect) smiles, nervous and nerdy in her moment of triumph, and then a title jumps us Three Years Later. We see Manhattan desolate and quiet. The tunnels are flooded; the bridges destroyed; cars rust and molder as weeds crack through the pavement; some buildings wear plastic sheeting like a burial shroud. And then we see one car -- just one, a Mustang GT -- racing through the ruined streets.

The driver's Dr. Robert Neville (Smith); Neville was a doctor for the U.S. Army, a virologist. Now, he's a survivor. He may be the last one. He and his dog Sam forage and worry, with all of New York as their empty playground during the daylight. Night time, as we gather from Neville battening down iron hatches over his doors and windows at the dimming of the day, is a different story. I Am Legend has almost no voice-over, and does its best to keep exposition to a minimum, both of which add to the slow-poison sense of dread in the movie. When Sam's raced into a darkened building chasing a wounded deer during one of their daytime excursions and Neville hesitates to follow, the only thing to explain the stakes to the audience is Smith's performance and the storytelling choices of director Francis Lawrence (Constantine) as a frightened Neville sneaks through the dark, desperate to find Sam and even more desperate to get out. Smith is a charming star, but he's not charming here; watching him in I Am Legend, he's constantly sad, scared or lonely; Neville is constantly at the edge of madness or the brink of death. And Smith, to his credit, turns a character that could have been an off-the-rack collection of action hero clichés into a real and affecting performance. If we believe I Am Legend's flights of dark fancy, it's in large part because Neville believes them, to the trembling core of his soul.

And Neville should be scared; flashbacks and current events explain to us that the Krippen Cure became the Krippen Virus, and literally decimated the human race; any who survived live on as seemingly mindless, colorless, blood-hungry revved-up predators that burn at the touch of the sun. Neville is one of the minuscule fraction of humans with natural immunity to KV, but that scattered and struggling group was swiftly wiped out by the monsters as near as Neville can tell. Neville is still trying to find a cure -- he mutters "I can fix this" repeatedly as he walks the ruined world -- but he's hardly hopeful. He thinks he's the last man alive, facing an army of mindless monsters. He's wrong about a lot of things.

Regrettably, if a monster movie is only as good as its monsters, then I Am Legend loses a few points for the execution of the KV-creatures. Making every appearance of the creatures computer-generated animation (with scattered exceptions of make-up and models in specific shots) means that the KV-creatures begin to look a little too similar, a little too familiar. When the creatures swarm, you can almost hear the mouse-click sound as they're copied and pasted over and over again, an army of the identical. And while the 28 Days Later adrenaline-zombie aesthetic may be overly familiar, it still works in scenes where the howling half-human KV-creatures race towards murder -- and Akiva Goldsman and Mark Protosevitch's script always makes the level of threat the creatures present scary, even as Lawrence leans on every B-movie trick in the book. One of the best things in I Am Legend is how firmly things go from bad to worse to far, far worse like an elevator to hell, smoothly oiled and gaining speed on the way down to the depths. Goldsman and Protosevitch also fill the film with tiny, quiet details -- an abandoned apartment is posted with public health warning from the beginning of the plague; Neville's working his way through the 'G' section at the video store; Neville's bunker-brownstone is decorated with pilfered masterpieces. And while the script may have a few groan-inducing moments where subtext is spoken as text, there's nothing here to compare with the worst moments of modern big-budget sci-fi, whether the staggering stupidity of Independence Day or the clumsy cloying closure of Spielberg's War of the Worlds.

Lawrence had the good judgment to fill his technical staff with professionals, from cinematographer Andrew Lensie (King Kong, The Lord of the Rings films) to second-unit director Vic Armstrong, whose stunt and action-director work makes him legend in and of itself. (Armstrong's resume ranges from Bond to Blade, Superman to Starship Troopers, and his work here is top-notch.) Not every decision Lawrence makes is perfect -- one of Smith's forays into Times Square is shot hand-held, which feels curiously distancing, subconciously implying that the Last Man on Earth is being followed by the Last Cameraman on Earth -- but at the same time, the film's mix of present-tense (in fact, very tense) action and flashbacks is well-handled and engrossing. As I cautioned before, I don't know how well I Am Legend will hold up on repeat viewings, or over time -- but while it's happening, I Am Legend is a slick, scary, superbly made action/science fiction/horror film with a lot more art, heart and smarts than you'd expect.

Review: I Am Legend is Decent but Way Too Short

2008-01-12T22:00:00.000-05:00

Dec 13, 2007 |

Laremy Legel

Warner Bros. Pictures

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You know, I figured I would hate this film. The trailers for I Am Legend have been nothing short of odd; the early word on the film was dismal; and there were rumors of the ending being re-shot less than a month ago. All in all I figured it would be a bit of a disaster. So perhaps those low expectations made this come off better than it would have otherwise. Whatever the case, this bad boy is fairly watchable and I won't even be bitter when it banks a large payday this weekend.

The story is based on the novel of the same name, though I'm told by those that have read the book that the stories are so dissimilar as to be considered different works. In this, the movie version, Will Smith is Robert Neville, the last man left on Earth. He's a scientist, and I believe an Army Lieutenant Colonel to boot. The movie jumps back and forth to explain what happened, why he's the only man left... and what Neville is trying to accomplish in the present day.

What really works here is the suspense level. It's difficult to ascertain what's going on, so every corner and dark shadow is filled with dread. Will Smith does well here too: he's a man beset by troubles, clearly coming unglued after years of solitary living in New York City. That's the other cool portion of the movie, imagining a giant city, and what would become of it without people. Evidently you'd get to hunt deer from a sports car! They should have cleared out Brooklyn years ago, eh?

What doesn't work is the depth and logic of the situation. With regards to the depth, there isn't any, this movie flies by at a brisk 92 minutes. It's no wonder they are adding the first six minutes of The Dark Knight on to the front of the film. Which leads to the problem of logic. There are many situations here where you think, "Hmm, I hope they explain/elaborate on this." But nope, whoooosh, it's on to the next setup. It works for keeping the tension up, but not so much for keeping you engaged.

With all that said I'm moderately recommending this film to you and yours. You could do worse on a holiday afternoon. You may roll your eyes a time or two but you probably won't yawn. The film moves well, and the only thing I'm truly appalled by here is the marketing. They've taken pains to hammer home that Will Smith is the last man in NYC, only the film really isn't about that. They should have said "It's just like Die Hard, only with less people!" It would have been more honest, and probably wouldn't have gotten this film so much bad press. As it stands I Am Legend is a decent flick - just not worthy of the book, and not worthy of much thought past the time you spend in the theater.

REVIEW: The power of trailers is legend

2008-01-12T21:54:00.000-05:00

Phelim O'Neill
Friday December 21, 2007
The Guardian

Batman returns... The Dark Knight

If you go to see Will Smith starring in the big-budget adaptation of Richard Matheson's influential apocalyptic vampire novel, I Am Legend, at an Imax cinema, you'll see some spectacular scenes - but perhaps not the ones you were expecting. You'll see an armed robber tear off his mask to reveal an even scarier visage: his whitened cheeks bearing scars cut from the corners of his mouth, with a crude, red smear of lipstick. This terrifying apparition, taking up all of the colossal Imax screen, marks moviegoers' introduction to the Joker, as played by Heath Ledger.

If you've read I Am Legend or seen the previous movie adaptations (The Last Man On Earth and The Omega Man), then you'll recall that Batman's nemesis has thus far been conspicuous by his absence. That's still the case, sadly, but Warners has tagged on to the programme seven minutes of its new Batman movie, The Dark Knight (six minutes being the introduction to the Joker, with the rest made up from snippets of key sequences), way ahead of the movie's July 2008 opening date.

This experiment marks the convergence of two trends in film marketing. Firstly, the practice of delivering exclusive footage with another film. You may recall the fuss when George Lucas's Star Wars: The Phantom Menace trailer hit cinemas. In the US, for many weeks, you could only view it in theatres playing the Denzel Washington thriller, The Siege. Washington's pre-9/11 piece of scaremongering had nothing in common with Lucas's space opera - yet screenings were packed with Star Wars fans who had paid admission simply to catch the two-minute trailer before leaving en masse as the main feature unreeled.

The Phantom Menace trailer leads us to the second of the new marketing schemes. Trailers are traditionally, by and large, as misleading and dishonest as they can legally be: they cut together the best shots of a film without giving anything close to a true representation of what it is about. So now, usually on the internet, it's becoming common to release a few minutes, often from the movie's opening, to give the audience a proper taste of what to expect. This has worked exceedingly well for films with impressive opening sequences that seemed almost tailor-made to stand alone and leave viewers wanting more, such as the remake of Dawn of the Dead or Joss Whedon's feature version of his cancelled TV show Firefly, Serenity. Perhaps that was always the intent.

It was definitely the intent this time: director Christopher Nolan was clearly looking for the big bang of the Imax trailer effect when he made The Dark Knight. Four of the film's big action scenes were filmed in the format, a first for a blockbuster. The air was sucked out of the room by a collective gasp from those attending the preview in London recently as Gotham city appeared in razor sharp detail on a 20-metre screen.

So what has the Dark Knight footage done for the buzz about its parent film? Apart from anything else, it has silenced any doubts viewers might have had about the controversial casting of Ledger as the Joker. It may not sound particularly vital, but the core fan groups of genre - and particularly comic book-adapted movies - are incredibly vocal on the internet and can be merciless on a perceived casting mistake or thematic alteration from source material long before cameras have even stopped rolling. The effect such criticism has is palpable: the studios have run scared since the demolition job aintitcool.com did on Batman & Robin in 1997. And one happy side effect for Will Smith? It may just give I Am Legend the extra push he needs to survive a box office apocalypse.