Filmic Adaptation

Filmic Adaptation

Adaptation, Circulation, and the Canon: Pride and Prejudice in the Marketplace

Gwendolyn Blume, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison

In Franco Moretti’s recent work on the canon, he uses an evolutionary model to suggest that novels which survive do so on the basis of formal devices which prove successful. In this paper, I introduce the question of adaptation into this evolutionary model – specifically, film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice (including Joe Wright’s 2005 production), contemporary rewritings (including Bridget Jones’s Diary) and sequels (including Internet fanfiction) – in order to think further about the relationship between adaptation and audience. I distinguish an adaptation from an intertext as theorized by Kristeva in that an adaptation appeals to the market value of the original, to the names Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice as representing a brand, so that the promise of an adaptation is that it will give the audience more of what they liked the first time. The subsequent issues of circulation, gender, class, and the institution of the reader question not only the myth of a coherent text which has endlessly followed translation and adaptation, but also the myth of a coherent culture which has allowed distinctions between high and low culture to continue.

An Uneasy Convergence: “Scar” Literature and French Auteur Theory in Dai Siejie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Lyon Evans, Viterbo Univ.

For the MMLA's upcoming convention in Chicago (Nov. 2006) on High and Low Culture-- and the suggested topic, novel into film-- I would like to propose a paper on the relation between the novel by Dai Siejie (published in 2000 in French and translated into English the same year), _Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress_, and the film version of the novel (same title, Chinese with English subtitles), written and directed by Dai himself, shown in New York in the fall of 2005, and now out on video. The novel is an instance of what is termed "scar literature": works published since the opening of China in 1979 that address the ordeal of the Cultural Revolution (1965-75) and its impact on the lives of the Chinese people, especially those who became a target of the Red Guards and those (principally intellectuals and their children) who were "sent down" into the countryside for their supposed bourgeois counter-revolutionary tendencies.

Although my dissertation and publications are in American literature, I became interested in contemporary China when I spent a spring 20000 sabbatical teaching English language and American literature and culture to Chinese English majors at the Luoyang Institute of Technology (since renamed the Henan University of Science and Technology) in Luoyang, Henan Province, in north central China. I fell in love with China that semester-- so much so that I have returned for short-term teaching and lecturing experiences during summer vacations four times since then. I also developed a class in Nonwestern Literature which I have added to my rotation of classes at my home university in Wisconsin, and I have devoted a great deal of my spare time in recent years to reading literary, historical and cultural texts about ancient and modern Chinese civilization.

Dai's novel interested me because it's highly readable and teachable and gives undergraduate students at my university a good introduction to the Cultural Revolution. Additionally, compared to most of the other works of scar literature, Dai's novel manages to be light-hearted and whimsical despite (or in the midst of) the bleakness of the story: two city youth are sent down to the countryside in a remote Sichuan Province village with little expectation that they will ever be free to return to their families or resume their education. The narrative-- in which the young men's lives are transformed when they discover a suitcase full of banned western novels (translated into Chinese)-- also cleverly and subtly explores such "high culture" themes as the liberating and subversive power of reading, the erotics of reading, the relation between the text and the body, and so forth. (Dai, a Chinese emigre to France in 1984, has learned well from Roland Barthes and the narratologists and post-structuralists.) Finally, the novel constitutes a kind of meta-comment on its own creation, as the (unnamed) first person narrator, one of the sent-down youths who discovers and reads banned books in the suitcase, is transformed from bumbling to masterful storyteller, his mastery reflected in structural changes in the narrative as well as in its content.

Dai, who was himself sent down into the Sichuan countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and who left China for Paris to study film theory, made several films in France before publishing his first novel in 2000. This backstory makes the film version of _Little Seamstress_ especially interesting and suggestive: it's not a typical Hollywoodish pop culture novel-into-film-- the novel was not turned over to another screenwriter for adaptation, in the Hollywood fashion (as in, e.g., _Brokeback Mountain_),but was adapted and filmed, in the French auteur manner, by Dai himself. Juxtaposing the novel and the film thus invites consideration of the auteur's choices and meditations in two media. What can we learn by the comparison of the two?

The film version of _Little Seamstress_, I will show, differs from the novel in its conspicuous alterations in the plot (I'll analyze them and explain how the plot shifts subtly affect the viewer's relation to the story), as well as in the addition of a postscript (in the film-- but not in the novel-- the protagonist returns to the Sichuan village from his home in France two decades later). These changes suggest a deeper truth about Dai's situation and his art: Translated into 25 languages but not Chinese, and banned in his native China, _Little Seamstress_, the novel, is a subversive work that, for all its humor and whimsy, strikes at the heart of the Communist regime in China and challenges its legitimacy in fundamental ways. The film version, by contrast, appears to be more of a gesture at reconciliation. Dai has made a movie that the Chinese authorities would scarcely be able to object to. (For example, the "nude love-making scene" in the novel is absent in the film, and the sexuality of the young peasant women, so integrally related to our heroes' awakening as they read banned French novels in the book, is also toned down.) The meta-textuality of the novel also finds no evident counterpart in the film; Dai does not seem to have sought out a cinematic equivalent of his novel's textual experimentalism. Yet this very absence most likely would make the film more palatable to a mainland Chinese audience. The concluding postrcript (added to the film), in which the Francophile hero revisits his native China, can be viewed as a gesture of optimism and reconciliation, perhaps one of co-optation.

The foregoing summary of my views of the relation between Dai's novel and his film is still rough-- there's a lot to work out-- but my abstract should give you an idea of where I want to go with, how I propose to develop, the "novel into film" topic , itself an aspect of the High versus Low (or Popular) Culture focus of the 2006 MMLA conference.

Rewriting the Rules: Writing Elite Models Out of Film Genre, Writing the Game Movie In

Allison McGuffie, Univ. of Iowa

allison-mcguffie@uiowa.edu

Traditional definitions of film genres are largely based on elite models which continue to valorize “high Culture films” and marginalize “low culture movies.” According to traditional hierarchies, movies adapted from video games – a merging of already “low” cultural forms – are seen as poor examples of established genres, such as action or horror. Consequently, game movies, such as Resident Evil, Final Fantasy or Mortal Kombat, are evaluated by the standards of disparate genres and are routinely subject to harsh judgments from popular critics.

Maintaining cultural hierarchies through the strategic definition and use of film genres is performed at the expense of those who make up the audience for game movies, especially those who identify with gaming subculture. Recognition of the game movie as a separate genre, deserving of its own evaluative standards, is needed to give legitimacy to an audience which is otherwise disenfranchised and invisible in the realm of film criticism.

Rather than attempt to valorize game movies through traditional models, this paper rewrites the formula by which film genres are defined – incorporating social, industrial and textual factors to give meaning to the genre – thereby minimizing elite standards and producing a legitimate space for game movies.