From Fidelity to History

Film Adaptations as Cultural Events in the Twentieth Century

Anne-Marie Scholz

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781785330346, 9780857457318
• eBook ISBN: 9780857457325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Scholarly approaches to the relationship between literature and film, ranging from the traditional focus upon fidelity to more recent issues of intertextuality, all contain a significant blind spot: a lack of theoretical and methodological attention to adaptation as an historical and transnational phenomenon. This book argues for a historically informed approach to American popular culture that reconfigures the classically defined adaptation phenomenon as a form of transnational reception. Focusing on several case studies— including the films Sense and Sensibility (1995) and The Portrait of a Lady (1997), and the classics The Third Man (1949) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)—the author demonstrates the ways adapted literary works function as social and cultural events in history and how these become important sites of cultural negotiation and struggle.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction — Adaptation as Reception: How Film Historians Can Contribute to the Literature to Film Debates
• Part I — Post-Cold War Readings of the Receptions of Blockbuster Adaptations in Cold War West Germany 1950–1963
• Chapter One — "Eine Revolution des Films": The Third Man, The Cold War, and Alternatives to Nationalism and Coca-Colonization in Europe
• Chapter Two — The Bridge on the River Kwai Revisted: Combat Cinema, American Culture, and the German Past
• Chapter Three — "Josef K.. von 1963": Orson Welles's Americanized Version of The Trial and the Changing Functions of the Kafkaesque in Postwar West Germany
• Part II — Postfeminist Relations between Classic Texts and Hollywood Film Adaptations in the U.S. in the 1990s
• Chapter 4 — Jane-Mania: The Jane Austen Film Boom in the 1990s
• Chapter 5 — Thelma and Sense and Louise and Sensibility: Challenging Dichotomies in Women's History through Film and Literature
• Chapter 6 — Jamesian Proportions: The Henry James Film Boom in the 1990s
• Conclusion — A Case for the Case Study: The Future of Adaptation Studies as a Branch of Transnational Film History
• Appendix 1 — Mediating Apparent and Latent Content
• Appendix 2 — Model of Adaptation as a Process of Reception
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index