Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood

Transforming Children's Literature into Film

Robyn McCallum

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781137395412
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

This book features a cutting edge approach to the study of film adaptations of literature for children and young people, and the narratives about childhood those adaptations enact. Historically, film media has always had a partiality for the adaptation of 'classic' literary texts for children. As economic and cultural commodities, McCallum points out how such screen adaptations play a crucial role in the cultural reproduction and transformation of childhood and youth, and indeed are a rich resource for the examination of changing cultural values and ideologies, particularly around contested narratives of childhood. The chapters examine various representations of childhood: as shifting states of innocence and wildness, liminality, marginalisation and invisibility. The book focuses on a range of literary and film genres, from 'classic' texts, to experimental, carnivalesque, magical realist, and cross-cultural texts.

© The Author(s) 2018

Robyn McCallumScreen Adaptations and the Politics of ChildhoodPalgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39541-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: ‘Palimpsestuous Intertextuality’ and the Cultural Politics of Childhood

Robyn McCallum¹

(1)

Sydney, Australia

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Film and television adaptations of literary texts for children play a crucial role in the cultural reproduction and transformation of childhood and youth and hence provide a rich resource for the examination of the transmission and adaptation of cultural values and ideologies . Historically, film media has always had a partiality for adaptation of literary sources, especially of canonical or ‘classic’ literary texts and of children’s texts, with some of the earliest film adaptations being of children’s novels (for example, Cecil Hepworth’s 1903 silent-film version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and five silent versions of Treasure Island between 1908 and 1922—now all presumed lost).¹ As Linda Hutcheon , a key commentator in the field of adaptation studies, puts it, ‘there are few stories that have not been lovingly ripped off’ (2006, 177). There are a numerous reasons for this partiality, which this study explores, but an obvious effect is the commodification and capitalisation of texts for young people within the cultural economy. With many recent film adaptations of both ‘classic’ and popular texts attracting large budgets and mass audiences , the genre constitutes a substantial economic commodity within film and literary industries, but is also a powerful way of transmitting, sustaining and reshaping the cultural capital that literary texts bring with them. Thus, film adaptations of literary texts for children and young people have also played, and continue to play, a crucial role in the culture wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Following Hutcheon , adaptation is to be thought of as a form of ‘repetition without replication’ (176). Hutcheon’s coinage, ‘palimpsestuous intertextuality’ (21) captures the ‘multilaminated’ (21) nature of adaptations whereby texts are inscribed with the traces and memories, or palimpsests , of other intersecting texts that resonate through ‘repetition without replication’ (176). This way of understanding adaptation is particularly appropriate to scholarship related to children’s textual culture, given the radically intertextual nature of the primary material and the prevalence of ‘retold’ stories within that material (Stephens and McCallum, 1998; Lefebvre, 2013; Müller, 2013). As a repetition , an adaptation may serve to affirm and reinforce cultural assumptions associated with the pretext and hence ensure its status as cultural capital, that is, as telling a story and embodying values and ideas that a society sees as having cultural worth. Thus, the impulse to tell a story over and over in different media, across different cultures may be an expression of a need to assert basic ideologies and values. However, the differing modes of reader/viewer engagement that visual and literary media enact necessitate that change is inevitable, and any adaptation will reshape and reinterpret its pretext, often in the light of contemporary and local issues and concerns. Adaptation, thus, enacts an ongoing dialogue between literary and film texts, their audiences and the discourses around those texts and audiences . Furthermore, film adaptations, especially those aimed at young audiences , can lead to further adaptations with the production of computer games, novelisations and other merchandising. In the case of popular contemporary fiction, film adaptations may prolong the shelf life of a novel; adaptations of older texts may in turn renew that shelf life, and lead to further novelisations and adaptations. Adaptation, in other words is not only a business in itself, but also a process that results in a seemingly endless and intricate web of intertextuality. Thus, the study of adaptation is not simply a matter of comparing the book and the film—there are a whole range of other texts and media that mediate and intersect with these texts. For a viewer familiar with the adapted text, adaptation is an ongoing dialogical process in which the familiar text is compared with the text being experienced, but also with a plethora of other texts (Stam, 2000, 63). Further, while viewers familiar with the adapted text will compare the work they already know with the one they are experiencing, an adaptation, like the work it adapts, is always framed in a context—a time, place, society and culture—and ‘can hence reveal as much about the concerns of its own time as those of the original text’ (Cartmell et al., 2000, 4). Four key questions that concern me throughout this study are: what are the functions of film adaptations for the survival, transmission and change of cultural ideologies ; how does contemporary film culture impact on the production and reception of literary texts; what is the contemporary appeal of adaptation in general; and why do film-makers continue to return to the same texts and genres?²

The application of contemporary adaptation theory to children’s texts has scarcely begun, but has the capacity to articulate the complex relations between literary, film, television and other media texts, their young audiences and their cultural and ideological contexts. I have remarked elsewhere that film studies remain something of a Cinderella in the academic field of child and adolescent literature research (McCallum, 2006, 73). Likewise, texts produced for children and teenagers are late to arrive to the ballroom of film and adaptation studies, despite being a primary resource for film-makers since the early twentieth century. Folk and fairy-tale films, especially those made by the Disney Corporation , have received significant critical attention, though this often takes the fashionable form of ‘Disney bashing’ (for example, Bell et al., 1995; Cartmell, 2007; Giroux, 1999). In her discussion of Deborah Cartmell’s chapter ‘Adapting Children’s Literature’ (2007), Anja Müller , however, acknowledges that while ‘Disney is undeniably the most prolific adaptor’ for the child audience , ‘it is by far not the only adaptive mode available (as [Cartmell ] could make believe)’ (2013, 3). While Jack Zipes (2016, 1) bemoans the lack of critical attention that fairy-tale films have received, folk and fairy-tale films have fared much better than adaptations of children’s literary texts in general, with Zipes’ work making perhaps the most significant contribution to that body of work (1979, 1994, 2011, 2016). Other, recent publications have also turned their attention to fairy -tale films from outside the Disney tradition, for example, Pauline Greenhill and Eva Matrix’s edited collection, Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity (2010); Zipes’ comprehensive cross-cultural history of fairy-tale film , The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy Tale Films (2011); and Zipes’ most recent edited collection, Fairy Tale Films Beyond Disney (2016, with Pauline Greenhill and Kendra Magnus-Johnston ). There have been many excellent studies of film adaptation in recent years, including : Aragay (2005), Bortolotti and Hutcheon (2007), Cartmell and Whelehan (1999, 2000, 2007, 2014), Elliot (2003), Frus and Williams (2010), Hutcheon (2006), Leitch (2003, 2007, 2008a, b), Naremore (2000a, 2000b), Sanders (2006), Stam (1992, 2000, 2005), Stam and Raengo (2004) and no doubt many others . However , only a small number of such studies include more than a token chapter on a children’s film—needless to say, it is usually a Disney film.

While John Stephens and I did not actually use the term ‘adaptation’ in Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature (1998), that study has been retrospectively described as being ‘a decade ahead of its time of publication’ in introducing adaptation studies to children’s literature scholarship (publisher’s blurb for paperback edition, 2014). Our focus then was on how traditional stories are retold within new genres to express changing cultural times and conditions, and our corpus was primarily literary texts (though we analysed a small number of film texts). While we were aware of an increased interest in adaptation studies during the 1990s, having written articles and book chapters, both together and separately , on film adaptations (Stephens and McCallum, 1996, 2002; McCal...