Showing papers in "Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance in 2007"

Translating the City: A Community Theatre Version of Wim Wenders'Wings of Desirein Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Abstract: In Alan Lyddiard’s 2003 adaptation of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire the setting of the late-1980s Berlin was fully translated into the present-day Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Designed by Neil Murray and incorporating John Alder’s original film footage, the production also featured members of the community in conjunction with the Northern Stage ensemble. Partly forming a retrospective analysis of the process from my point of view as the company and production dramaturg, this essay explores the ways in which the Newcastle production functioned as an exercise in ‘translating a city’. The account of the adaptation process is framed by an analytical discussion of the original text and its transition into a particular socio-political context, in conjunction with an interrogation of the phenomenology of translation and Wenders’ deliberate synaesthetic approach to the material. Finally, the article seeks to conceptualize the text with regard to its apparent interand cross-cultural mobility. The central, ongoing paradox of the film [...] is that of pictures and words. [...] Wings establishes this polarity at the very outset with images of the eye, the handwriting and the voice-over narration. The tension between word and image emerges from the very genesis of the film; it is the creation of Peter Handke, a writer, and of Wim Wenders, a visual artist. Together they balance a literary script with classic cinematography. (Caldwell and Rea, 1991: 5) Despite the fact that individual characters of the film may be more inclined towards either words (such as the storyteller Homer) or images (Marion’s past as well as her sense of identity are expressed in terms of photographs), in their analysis of Wings of Desire, David Caldwell and Paul W. Rea go on to establish that the film never quite gives precedence to one over the other. The tackling of this tension between words and images – as well as all the other binary oppositions inherent in the film: high vs low, male vs female, black-and-white vs colour, past vs present etc. – is interpreted by the critics as being a means of transcendence over the trappings of postmodern fictions of their time. 57 JAFP 1 (1) 57–70 © Intellect Ltd 2007 1. Caldwell and Rea (1991) also point out that Homer is named after a blind poet. 2. In the trailer scene, she is surrounded by photographs while pondering the possibility of a reinvented identity through a photomat. Keywords

Art of the past: adapting Henry James's The Golden Bowl.

Abstract: This article deals with James Ivory’s screen adaptation of Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl. The analysis draws on the use of fine art motifs in the mise-en-scene and the use of symbolic art objects as a way of adapting and condensing James’s textual description.