Literature-film Quarterly 

About: Literature-film Quarterly is an academic journal published by Salisbury University. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Movie theater & Film director. It has an ISSN identifier of 0090-4260. Over the lifetime, 1012 publications have been published receiving 3505 citations. The journal is also known as: Literature/film quarterly & LFQ.

In the First Place

Abstract: The cinema's centenary is a time for reflection. My thoughts would be cooler were it not for the fact that I have been studying the silent era longer than it lasted. To put it another wayfor the second half of the century I've been obsessed by its first third. I am often asked if I'm interested in anything else. Do I go to modern films? Of course, I reply between clenched teeth. Do they imagine a scholar of ancient Rome refuses to read a newspaper? Anyway, I'm not a scholar. I've had no academic training and none of my work has been remotely "correct," either politically or theoretically. (I only hope some of it has been historically!) Another question I am often asked is, "How did you get interested in the first place?" And it is the answer to that I would like to share with you on this auspicious occasion. You have seen those films about English public schools. Long shadows across vast lawns, cut-glass accents, impeccable behavior. They all tend to be absurdly nostalgic; the public school was designed to train men for public service, for the colonies, and for a life at sea; and most were very tough indeed. Before boys went to public school, they were indoctrinated in preparatory schools. These had the object of getting as many boys as possible through the public school entrance exam, and upon that rested their reputations. They tended to be educational battery-farms. Certainly, mine was. It was situated on Crowborough, Sussex-a mile or two from the town, and close to a golf course. This was significant, because if you were foolish enough to run away, you were quickly spotted by the tradesmen's vans which roared out in pursuit like a sheriff's posse. Boys ran away quite frequently because the regime was exceedingly unpleasant, and I recall the sound of those motors as the vehicles gathered in the drive, and the sound of the beating administered to the culprit when their mission had been successfully completed. One joined this school at seven. I had come from a relatively relaxed institution, run by three Victorian ladies as war work. I had been sent there at three because of the bombing in London, where my parents lived. I was transferred to the new place early in 1947, when I was eight. It was a shock to pass from a place where everyone was friendly to an institution, run on military lines, where you called the master "sir" and where the prevailing mood seemed to be fear. Besides, the winter of 1947 proved to be the coldest of the century, and post-war austerity measures meant that we had practically no heat. Not that that meant anything to our headmaster-a stout man, jolly but brutal. He felt he should toughen us up, and sent us out to the football pitch wearing nothing but football kit. That would not have been so insane had we been playing football, but we were merely watching from the touchlines while the school team played a rival prep school in temperatures way below zero. Far worse than standing shivering in the snow were the aches and chilblains that resulted from contact with the one hike-warm radiator. The chapel was turned into a cinema-which seems appropriate in retrospect-and the headmaster mounted a Pathescope 9.5mm projector on a high desk. He rented the films from the Wallace Heaton film library, and he selected the dramas, comedies, and cartoons from the Pathescope catalogue. I knew what "cinema" meant. My mother had taken me to Snow White, and I had run out as soon as I had seen the witch. (That was the only occasion that anyone had to plead with me to get back into a cinema.) I had even sat unblinking through the newsreel of the liberation of Belsen, being terrified out of my wits not by that which I could not understand, but by the Russian fairy tale which followed. So I knew the cinema was a place for powerful emotions. These shows were silent. The headmaster could not, apparently, afford a sound projector (despite our extortionate fees), and so what we saw were the films of our parents' era. …

Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry

Abstract: [T]he great innovators of the twentieth century, in film and novel both, have had so little to do with each other, have gone their ways alone, always keeping a firm but respectful distance. George Bluestone, Novels into Film (63) I would suggest that what we need instead is a broader definition of adaptation and a sociology that takes into account the commercial apparatus, the audience, and the academic culture industry. James Naremore, "Introduction: Film and the Reign of Adaptation" (10) Even a casual observer of the field of adaptation studies would perceive that the discipline is clearly suffering from intellectual dolours. Long regarded as the bastard offspring of literary studies and film theory, adaptation studies has struggled to achieve academic respectability since its inception in the 1950s. The field's insistence on studying screen culture was perceived as threatening by English departments predicated on the superiority of literary studies. Simultaneously, adaptation studies' residual attachment to print culture alienated it from the burgeoning discipline of film theory, whose adherents proposed jettisoning an indelibly hostile literary studies paradigm in favor of valorizing film as an art form in its own right. But more worryingly, adaptation studies is currently experiencing a welter of criticism not only from outside its own ranks, but also from within. Adaptation scholar James Naremore laments the "jejune" and "moribund" nature of contemporary adaptation studies ("Introduction" 1, 11). According to Robert B. Ray, the bulk of adaptations criticism constitutes a "dead end," "useless" in its stale models and trite suppositions (39,46). Similarly, Robert Stam-prolific scholar behind a recent three-volume series on adaptation for publisher Blackwell-asserts that adaptation studies as it currently stands is "inchoate," hamstrung by the "inadequate trope" of fidelity criticism, whereby screen adaptations are judged accordingly to their relative "faithfulness" to print originals ("Beyond Fidelity" 76, 62). For Thomas Leitch, "adaptation theory has remained tangential to the thrust of film study," resulting in a discipline that "has been marginalized because it wishes to be" ("Twelve Fallacies" 149, 168).1 Kamilla Elliott, another recent addition to this chorus of disciplinary lament, regrets "the pervasive sense that adaptation scholars lag behind the critical times" (4).2 Viewed in an optimistic light, such comments together suggest that adaptation studies as a field is currently bubbling with intellectual ferment, and is ripe for a sea-change in theoretical and methodological paradigms. Surveyed more pessimistically, remarks such as these suggest a field flailing to find some cohesion and to revivify its academic prospects. Regardless of which perspective is adopted, there is a substantial irony evident: as adaptation increasingly comes to comprise the structural logic of contemporary media and cultural industries, leading adaptation scholars publicly question the adequacy of the field's established paradigms to comprehend what is taking place. Adaptation studies appears deeply internally conflicted: the right discipline, at the right time, lumbered with an obsolete methodology. Insider critics of adaptation studies base their disparaging verdicts on the discipline's production of a seemingly endless stream of comparative case-studies of print and screen versions of individual texts (Ray 39). This methodology of comparative textual analysis underpinned adaptation studies' founding critical text-George Bluestone's Novels into Film-and has since ossified into an almost unquestioned methodological orthodoxy within the field. Adaptation critics seek similarities and contrasts in book-film pairings in order to understand the specific characteristics of the respective book and film mediums, in what Naremore has termed an obsessive "literary formalism" ("Introduction" 9). Frustratingly, such studies routinely produce conclusions that provide in fact no conclusion at all: comparative case-studies overwhelmingly give rise to the frankly unilluminating finding that there are similarities between the two mediums, but also differences, before moving on to the next book-film pairing to repeat the exercise. …

Twice-Told Tales: The Rhetoric of the Remake

Abstract: At first glance, movie remakes-new versions of old movies-may seem no different from other film adaptations of earlier material. But the peculiar nature of the relationships they establish with their earlier models and with their audience makes them unique among Hollywood films, and indeed among all the different kinds of narrative. Short stories and novels are often adapted for stage or screen; ballets are sometimes recreated or rechoreographed; comic strips are occasionally revived by new artists; plays are reinterpreted by each new set of performers; but only movies are remade. Hollywood does not have a logical monopoly on remakes, since a given short story, for instance, can inspire two or more dramatic adaptations, but the movies' voracious appetite for material has produced a series of twice-told tales utterly characteristic of Hollywood, with no close analogue in or outside the movies. Only remakes are remakes. The uniqueness of the film remake, a movie based on another movie, or competing with another movie based on the same property, is indicated by the word property. Every film adaptation is defined by its legally sanctioned use of material from an earlier model, whose adaptation rights the producers have customarily purchased. Adaptation rights are something the producers of the original work are held to have a right to sell, with the understanding that either their sale will not impair the economic potential of the original property (a film-rights sale may actually increase the number of copies of a novel printed and sold) or that the price of purchasing adaptation rights reflects the probable loss of the original property's appeal (as in the case of musicals, whose runs are normally killed by the appearance of a film version). But of all the different types of adaptations, only remakes compete directly and without legal or economic compensation with other versions of the same property. It is clear that remakes necessarily entail adaptation to a new medium, for a remake in the same medium would risk charges of plagiarism. How could a lyric poem be remade by another poet? Either the effect of particular words and images would have to be sacrificed, in which case the remake would be so loose as to be unrecognizable, or the new poem would have to follow its model so closely as to be actionable.1 But adaptations to a new medium do not encounter these problems because of a legal distinction between the original work itself and its status as property. Once Warner Brothers had acquired the adaptation rights to The Maltese Falcon, they were entitled to borrow anything they liked from the novel-characters, settings, scenes, even dialogue, in addition to the plot-on the theory that the rights to this material were properly disposable as subsidiary rights, though not to be identified with the novel itself. Even such a close adaptation as John Huston's 1941 film, Warners' third adaptation of the novel, was clearly distinct from the novel, a distinction clear to anyone who could tell the difference between a book and a movie. But remakes differ from other adaptations to a new medium because of the triangular relationship they establish among themselves, the original film they remake, and the property on which both films are based. The nature of this triangle is most clearly indicated by the fact that the producers of a remake typically pay no adaptation fees to the makers of the original film, but rather purchase adaptation rights from the authors of the property on which that film was based, even though the remake is competing much more directly with the original film-especially in these days of video, when the original film and the remake are often found side by side on the shelves of rental outlets-than with the story or play or novel on which it is based. Although we might describe any story as parasitic on its models, remakes are parasitic on their original films in a uniquely legalistic way. Since a successful remake supersedes its original for all but a marginal audience watching it for its historical values, remakes typically threaten the economic viability of their originals without compensating the producers of the original in any way. …

From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film

Abstract: From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film Edited by Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991. 387 pp. Illustrated. $45.00 (cloth), $14.95 (paper). I received this book on the day that the Persian Gulf War began, Operation Desert Storm, the war, according to President Bush, that will create a "new world order." Dittmar and Michaud begin their introductory essay to this collection of essays about Vietnam War films, "This book is about power. Implicitly, it is about the power to make war and to destroy lives. Explicitly, it is about the power to make images that may displace, distort, and destroy knowledge of the history in which those lives participated." It was both instructive and unnerving to read the twenty essays in this book while listening to American "officials" censoring and manipulating the words and images associated with the present war. Dittmar and Michaud also remind us that the title of their book "is meant to draw attention to the process whereby aspects of that war [Vietnam] have been appropriated into particular modes of representation by sectors of the American cultural industry." The essays are arranged into four thematic categories: "Wide Angles: History in the Remaking," "Close-ups: Representation in Detail," "Other Frames: Subtext and Difference," and "Other Forms: Documenting the Vietnam War." The book includes two appendices, "Chronology: The United States, Vietnam and American Film," and "Selected Filmography: The Vietnam War on Film." While the essays vary in style and approach, they share a concern for the relationship between history and its representation in film. This collection of essays focuses on how films are, the editors state, "bound by the commodity status of films produced under the conditions of capitalism." The Vietnam War and historical specificity have been influenced by American culture, ideology, world historical events, and the techniques of film production itself. These and other factors helped to shape every film about the Vietnam War from Green Berets (1968) to Full Metal Jacket (1987). The first essay, "Historical Memory, Film and the Vietnam Era" by Michael Klein points to how revisionism and reinterpretation take place in a historical era. He reminds the reader of how historical myths about the Civil War era were represented in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939). Keeping in mind that Hollywood did not produce many Vietnam movies until nearly a decade after America's involvement in the war, Klein and other authors explore how the nation's political and public atmospheres play a deciding role in the content and images included in Vietnam War films. Klein discusses how Hollywood encodes the generic melodramas with an "eye to ideology." The Deer Hunter ( 1978) is "pervaded by racist and Cold War stereotypes." Hollywood's demonological approach to Asians in general, and Vietnamese "Communists" in particular has generated countless "vigilante" style characters who simply must fight the "yellow peril" with means other than conventional warfare. Klein uses Platoon as an example of a film that "substitutes a psychological and metaphysical interpretation for a historical understanding of the genocidal aspects of the war." Leo Cawley's essay, "The War About the War: Vietnam Films and the American Myth," discusses the "mindless military rambunctiousness" of Americans and their love of John Wayne super-troopers and military technology as depicted in Hollywood war films. Cawley, a combat veteran in Vietnam, reminds us that most soldiers do not like super-troopers and that technology was not all that relevant in the Vietnam War. "In Vietnam films, experience is masticated into the form most easily incorporated into American mythology," Cawley asserts. Part of this mythology is also discussed by Harry W. Heines in "They Were Called and They Went: The Political Rehabilitation of the Vietnam Veteran. …

Genre Film: A Classical Experience

Abstract: In their book An Illustrated Glossary of Film Terms. Harry M. Geduld and Ronald Gottesman define "genre" as a "category, kind, or form of film distinguished by subject matter, theme, or techniques." They list more than seventy-five genres of film, both fiction and non-fiction. There are categories within categories and categories which overlap and are not mutually exclusive. In light of the difficulty of accurately defining the individual genres, I would rather side-step the problem by considering the Fictional Genre Film as a single category which includes all that is commonly held to be genre film, i.e. the Western, the Horror film, the Musical, the Science Fiction film, the Swashbuckler, etc., in order to show that all of these films have a common origin and basic form. Bound by a strict set of conventions, tacitly agreed upon by filmmaker and audience, the genre film provides the experience of an ordered world and is an essentially classical structure predicated upon the principles of the Classical world view in general, and indebted to the Poetics of Aristotle in particular; in the genre film the plot is fixed, the characters defined, the ending satisfyingly predictable. Because the genre film is not realistic, because it is so blatantly dramatic, it has been condescendingly treated by many critics for its failure to be relevant to contemporary issues, philosophies, and aesthetics. Yet the truth of the matter is that the genre film lives up to the guiding principle of its Classical origins: "there is nothing new under the sun," and truth with a capital "T" is to be found in imitating the past. The contemporary and the particular are inimical to the prevailing idea in Classical thought that knowledge is found in the general conclusions which have stood the test of time. Thus originality, unique subject matter, and a resemblance to actual life are denigrated as values, while conformity, adherence to previous models, and a preoccupation with stylistic and formal matters are held to be the criteria for artistic excellence. The subject matter of a genre film is a story. It is not about something that matters outside the film, even if it inadvertently tells us something about the time and place of its creation. Its sole justification for existence is to make concrete and perceivable the configurations inherent in its ideal form. That the various genres have changed, gone through cycles of popularity, does not alter the fact that the basic underlying coordinates of a genre are maintained time after time. From Porter's The Great Train Robbery to The Cowboys or True Grit, the Western has maintained a consistency of basic content; tne motifs, plots, settings, and characters remain the same. What is true of the Western is also true of the Adventure film, the Fantasy film, the Crime film, and the Musical, or any fictional genre one can identify. Any particular film of any definable group is only recognizable as part of that group if it is, in fact, an imitation of that which came before. It is only because we have seen other films that strongly resemble the particular film at hand that we can say, "Yes, this is a Horror fMm or a Thriller or a Swashbuckler." Consciously or unconsciously, both the genre filmmaker and the genre audience are aware of the prior films and the way in which each of these concrete examples is an attempt to embody once again the essence of a well-known story. This use of well-known stories is clearly a classical practice. Homer, the Greek dramatists, Racine, Pope, Samuel Johnson, and all the other great figures of the classical and neo-classical periods used prior sources for their stories. The formative principle behind the creation of classical art has always been the known and the familiar. The Greeks knew the stories of the gods and the Trojan War in the same way we know about hoodlums and gangsters and G-men and the taming of the frontier and the never-ceasing struggle of the light of reason and the cross with the powers of darkness, not through firsthand experience but through the media. …