New Approaches to Contemporary Adaptation

Betty Kaklamanidou

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780814346259
• eBook ISBN: 9780814346266
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

In New Approaches to Contemporary Adaptation, editor Betty Kaklamanidou defiantly claims that "all films are adaptations." The wide-ranging chapters included in this book highlight the growing and evolving relevance of the field of adaptation studies and its many branding subfields. Armed with a wealth of methodologies, theoretical concepts, and sophisticated paradigms of case-studies analyses of the past, these scholars expand the field to new and exciting realms. With chapters on data, television, music, visuality, and transnationalism, this anthology aims to complement the literature of the field by asking answers to outstanding questions while proposing new ones: Whose stories have been adapted in the last few decades? Are films that are based on "true stories" simply adaptations of those real events? How do transnational adaptations differ from adaptations that target the same national audiences as the texts they adapt? What do long-running TV shows actually adapt when their source is a single book or novel? To attempt to answer these questions, New Approaches to Contemporary Adaptation is organized in three parts. Part 1, "External Influences on Adaptation, " delves into matters surrounding film adaptations without primarily focusing on textual analysis of the final cinematic product. Part 2, "Millennial TV and Franchise Adaptations, " demonstrates that the contemporary television landscape has become fruitful terrain for adaptation studies. Part 3, "ElasTEXTity and Adaptation, " explores different thematic approaches to adaptation studies and how adaptation extends beyond traditional media. Spanning media and the globe, contributors complement their research with tools from sociology, psychoanalysis, gender studies, race studies, translation studies, and political science. Kaklamanidou makes it clear that adaptation is vital to sharing important stories and mythologies, as well as passing knowledge to new generations. The aim of this anthology is to open up the field of adaptation studies by revisiting the object of analysis and proposing alternative ways of looking at it. Scholars of cultural, gender, film, literary, and adaptation studies will find this collection innovative and thought-provoking.

I

External Influences on Adaptation

1

Thirteen Ways of Screening American Literature

Thomas Leitch

When The Salesman was nominated for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, its director, Asghar Farhadi, announced that he would boycott the Oscars in protest against Donald Trump’s executive order banning Iranians from entering the United States. The film’s victory on Oscar night allowed Anousheh Ansari, who accepted the award on Farhadi’s behalf, to read a statement Farhadi had prepared:

I’m sorry I’m not with you tonight. My absence is out of respect for the people of my country and those of the six other nations who have been disrespected by the inhumane law that bans entry of immigrants to the U.S. Dividing the world into the us and our enemies categories creates fear, a deceitful justification for aggression and war. These wars prevent democracy and human rights in countries which themselves have been victims of aggression. Filmmakers can turn their cameras to capture shared human qualities and break stereotypes of various nationalities and religions. They create empathy between us and others—an empathy that we need today more than ever.1

Commentators around the world immediately seized on Farhadi’s protest against what he saw as the oppression and inhumanity of the American ban on immigration on travelers from much of the Arab world, and his boycott became front-page news. But I’d like to draw attention to another aspect of his now widely known reaction to his Academy Award: his argument that films create an empathy that crosses national borders by capturing shared human qualities and breaking stereotypes.

Apart from the fact that it’s just as easy for movies to create and exploit stereotypes as it is to break them—a phenomenon abundantly on display in the portrayals of German and especially Japanese nationals in Hollywood films produced during World War II—the most interesting feature of Farhadi’s statement depends not on what it says but on its application to his own film. The Salesman stands out from most winners of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and indeed from most non-American films of any sort, in being an adaptation, however free, of a well-known American literary property. Death of a Salesman, the 1949 Arthur Miller play in which Farhadi’s two leading characters, Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), are acting, turns out to provide a wholly unexpected parallel to the characters’ lives when a structural collapse in their apartment forces them to move into another apartment, whose previous tenant was a woman who departed recently and hastily. One night, a stranger enters the apartment while Rana is taking a bath, assaults her, and then leaves behind some money. When Emad tracks down the assailant, he turns out to be Majid (Mojtaba Pirzadeh), an elderly salesman and client of the prostitute who had formerly lived in the apartment. Locking Majid in a room in the apartment, Emad calls Majid’s family to witness firsthand the revelation of his crime. Before they arrive, however, he realizes that Majid, agonizing over his impending shame, has suffered a heart attack. Instead of telling the story of the assault to Majid’s family, who think Emad has summoned them to the scene of a medical emergency after saving Majid’s life, Emad secretly slaps him, and Majid collapses as he is leaving with his family. After weeks of rehearsing the role of Miller’s downtrodden salesman Willy Loman, Emad is forced to acknowledge that he has played an active role in humiliating and perhaps destroying the literal salesman in a parallel story in which he has turned out to play quite a different role than he would have expected.

Hollywood, as everyone knows, has always had a rapacious appetite for material from non-American cultures. The typical fate of foreign properties adapted to the American screen is colonial appropriation. The national identities and associations of the property’s characters and their world are erased or attenuated, as in Sommersby (1993), a remake of Daniel Vigne’s Le retour de Martin Guerre (1982), and The Birdcage (1996), a remake of Édouard Molinaro’s La cage aux folles (1978), or reified and hypostasized in ways that emphasize, despite Farhadi’s observation, their stereotypical foreignness, as in innumerable Hollywood versions of such foreign classics as Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873–77) and Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831). No wonder, then, that Jennifer L. Jeffers complains that “the ‘Hollywoodization’ of British literary texts”2 amounts to a “colonization of Britain” by its former colony that enables “Hollywood’s invention of Britain by adapting its literature”3 or that Linda Hutcheon concludes that “for Hollywood . . . transculturating usually means Americanizing a work.”4 The work of American cultural imperialism that Jeffers traces through Hollywood appropriations of English literary sources over the twenty-year period from 1990 to 2010 finds a counterpart in its success in exporting the reterritorialized products. In a recent letter to the New York Times Book Review, for example, Jacqueline Chappel noted that “the market for translations from English far outpaces the market for translated works into English.”5

It is all the more surprising, then, that The Salesman should represent a deviation from a pattern that is itself a glaring exception to the pattern of American cultural hegemony: the remarkable absence of adaptations of American novels, plays, and stories from foreign cinemas. This dearth was documented some forty years ago in Gerald Peary and Roger Shatzkin’s collections The Classic American Novel and the Movies6 and The Modern American Novel and the Movies,7 whose combined eighty-five-page filmographies of adaptations of American novels include only twelve non-American films. The sixteen-page list of adaptations that concludes The Classic American Novel and the Movies includes just two foreign adaptations: Dzhimmi Khiggins, Georgi Tasin’s lost 1928 Soviet adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s 1919 novel Jimmie Higgins, and Prinz und Bettelknabe, Alexander Korda’s 1920 German adaptation of Mark Twain’s 1882 The Prince and the Pauper. The more extensive sixty-nine-page filmography of The Modern American Novel and the Movies adds ten more much better-known foreign adaptations of American properties: Ossessione (1942), based on James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934); Mr. Arkadin (1955), based on Orson Welles’s “Man of Mystery,” a 1952 episode in the radio serial The Adventures of Harry Lime (1951–52); Purple Noon (1960), based on Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955); High and Low (1963), based on Ed McBain’s King’s Ransom (1959); Laughter in the Dark (1969), based on Vladimir Nabokov’s 1932 novel; Ten Days’ Wonder (1971), based on Ellery Queen’s 1948 novel; Shoot the Piano Player (1960), based on David Goodis’s Down There (1956); The Bride Wore Black (1968), based on Cornell Woolrich’s 1940 novel; Mississippi Mermaid (1969), based on William Irish’s Waltz into Darkness (1947); and Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me (1972), based on Henry Farrell’s 1967 novel.

A great deal has changed in the forty years since Peary and Shatzkin did their head count. But one thing that has remained is the relatively small number of foreign films that adapt American literary properties. Of the thirteen essays Iain Robert Smith and Constantine Verevis collect in Transnational Film Remakes,8 only two—Kenneth Chan’s examination of Yimou Zhang’s A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (2009)9 and Rashna Wadia Richards’s study of Sanjay Gupta’s Kaante (2002)10—deal with remakes of American films, and in both of these cases the earlier films, Blood Simple (1984) and Reservoir Dogs (1992), are based on original screenplays rather than works of American literature. Part of the reason for this neglect is clearly the United States’ tendency toward wholesale cultural assimilation in the name of what Jeffers has identified as a deliberately constructed national universalism that seeks to identify America with global values.11 The United States has such a long history of having welcomed émigrés from around the world—a history that made it all the more inviting for Farhadi to call out the extraordinary restrictions on immigrants from Arab countries—that it has hardened into a cultural ideology of the melting pot, or the salad bowl, or the patchwork quilt: three metaphors that emphasize different aspects of hyphenate-Americanism while remaining constant in their emphasis on the American national project as assimilationist to its very foundations. Hollywood itself has been periodically renewed by the arrival of émigré screenwriters and directors, such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Jean Renoir, Robert Siodmak, and Douglas Sirk. Many of these filmmakers, even after settling in America, have maintained a continued interest in the novels and plays of their native lands. During Alfred Hitchcock’s first decade in Hollywood, for example, all his adaptations—Rebecca (1940), based on Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel; Suspicion (1941), based on Francis Iles’s Before the Fact (1932); Spellbound (1945), based on Francis Beeding’s The House of Dr. Edwardes (1928); The Paradine Case (1947), based on Robert Hichens’s 1933 novel; Rope (1948), based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play; and Stage Fright (1950), based on Selwyn Jepson’s Man Running (1947)—were based on English novels except for Under Capricorn (1949), which was based on the 1937 novel by the Australian Helen Simpson. The locales of Spellbound and Rope were changed from England to America, and Hitchcock would later set both Vertigo (1958), based on Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s French novel D’entre les morts (1954), and Family Plot (1976), based on Victor Canning’s English novel The Rainbird Pattern (1972), in San Francisco. The rest of these films retained their English settings; Strangers on a Train (1951) marked the first time that Hitchcock adapted an American source for a film set in America since The Mountain Eagle (1927). Although he did not display anything like Hitchcock’s Anglophile preservationism, Ernst Lubitsch still continued to the end of his career to adapt European plays into such apparently all-American films as The Shop Around the Corner (1940), That Uncertain Feeling (1941), and Heaven Can Wait (1943). For whatever reason, Lubitsch’s and Hitchcock’s experiences as expert importers and rebranders of foreign properties find no parallel in stories of American filmmakers who have sought their fortunes abroad by exporting American literature.

As Farhadi points out, foreign filmmakers who do turn their attention to American literary properties may well seek to capture shared human qualities and break stereotypes of various nationalities and religions. A brief survey of foreign adaptations of American literature, however, indicates that the truth is more complicated than that, not because foreign filmmakers have other goals but because there are so many ways to pursue these goals, some of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Inclusivity and Possibilities
• Part I. External Influences on Adaptation
• Part II. Millennial TV and Franchise Adaptations
• Part III. ElasTEXTity and Adaptation
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index