Jonathan Bignell’s conference: “Adventures between TV and film, and between Britain and America”

Jonathan Bignell’s keynote address broached the central topic of the relationship between film and television by focusing on the link between Ian Fleming’s iconic character James Bond and the adventure series of the 1960s. As his talk made perfectly clear, the topic is a very rich one, as it reveals largely unknown affiliations both between television and film and between British and American productions. To a large extent, the overlap was due to practical circumstances. Though Ian Fleming’s..

Literature and series

The study of “literature on screen” is not new: indeed, this terminology has long been used for the study of adaptation, perhaps most notably in Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan’s Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. What is less widespread, however, is the association of literature with television’s “small screen” – because of its serial storytelling, television adaptation has long been relegated to limited-run miniseries (what I’ve called short-form adaptations), and the study o..

Jonathan Bignell’s conference: “Adventures between TV and film, and between Britain and America”

Jonathan Bignell’s keynote address broached the central topic of the relationship between film and television by focusing on the link between Ian Fleming’s iconic character James Bond and the adventure series of the 1960s. As his talk made perfectly clear, the topic is a very rich one, as it reveals largely unknown affiliations both between television and film and between British and American productions. To a large extent, the overlap was due to practical circumstances. Though Ian Fleming’s..

Short and sweet? Structuring Humor and Morality in American Sitcoms

Seinfeld (NBC, 1989-1998), perhaps the most popular sitcom of recent years, famously insisted it was a show about nothing, about the pettiest details of everyday life. Though Seinfeld remains most outspoken about its obsession with trivia, the series in fact simply exaggerated one of the founding principles of the situation comedy: its humor is rooted in the mundane nature of the everyday. This focus on minutiae extends to the very nature of its humor; from The Honeymooners (CBS, 1955-1978) to Modern Family (ABC, 2009-present), show writers have relied on quick repartee and clever one-liners to keep the audience laughing. Interestingly, the rapid-fire nature of this fundamentally domestic comedy is in marked contrast to the very serious aspects of the sitcom, the morally motivated soliloquies that intend to teach characters a lesson. The disparity of bursts of humor and extended principled soliloquies constitute the crux of this paradoxical art form, whose unity stems from its relatability (whether it be in terms of inside jokes about the American Zeitgeist or the familiarity of its characters and setting). I would like to examine this structural dichotomy, both as it was established by classic sitcoms, and as it has been redefined and subverted by more contemporary versions.Seinfeld (NBC, 1989-1998), dont le sitcom éponyme est sans doute l’un des plus populaires de ces dernières décennies, avait l’habitude de dire que c’était une émission sur rien, sur les détails insignifiants de la vie quotidienne. Senfield se manifeste avant tout par cette obsession pour ce qui est futile, mais en réalité, cette série ne fait qu’exacerber l’un des principes fondateurs du comique de situation, et son humour est ancré dans la banalité du quotidien. On retrouve ces aspects dans l’humour de ces émissions, et depuis The Honeymooners (CBS, 1955-1978) jusqu’à Modern Family (ABC, 2009-présent), les scénaristes se sont appuyés sur le sens de la répartie pour faire rire les spectateurs. De fait, il existe un écart entre les répliques comiques débitées à toute allure et les aspects plus sérieux du sitcom, à savoir les soliloques à teneur morale qui ont pour objet de donner une leçon aux personnages. La disparité entre l’humour et les principes moraux des longs soliloques constitue le cœur de cette forme artistique paradoxale, dont l’unité provient de sa « relatabilité » (qu’il s’agisse de blagues de connivence sur le Zeitgeist américain ou de la connaissance des personnages et du contexte). Cet article analyse cette dichotomie structurelle, s’intéressant à la fois à la manière dont les sitcoms classiques l’ont établie et à la manière dont elle a été redéfinie et subvertie par ses avatars contemporains

L’art de l’illusion chez Elizabeth Bowen

Tout lecteur des romans d’Elizabeth Bowen se rend rapidement compte que l’illusion est l’un des thèmes centraux de son écriture. Ses romans mettent souvent en scène la confrontation de personnages naïfs, pleins d’illusions, à un monde hostile et désabusé ; sur le plan plus purement littéraire, elle met en scène une perception subjective des personnages en la contrastant avec un narrateur omniscient et objectif, ce qui met l’accent sur les illusions de la perception du personnage. Mais, dans l..

La subversion du descriptif dans les romans d’Elizabeth Bowen

Philippe Hamon, dans l’introduction de son ouvrage sur le descriptif, rappelle le peu de considération généralement accordé à la description. En effet, elle est souvent perçue comme superflue, comme un temps d’arrêt que marque l’auteur avant de revenir à l’essentiel, à savoir « l’action » du roman. Toutefois, malgré son caractère en apparence interstitiel, la description peut aussi être le lieu d’enjeux bien plus importants pour le roman que l’on pourrait le croire de prime abord. Ainsi, dans..

Mind the Gap: The Big House in Cinematic Representations of the Anglo-Irish War

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High Fidelity: Adapting Fantasy to the Small Screen

In an article in The Atlantic, Alyssa Rosenberg compares HBO series Game of Thrones to True Blood in an attempt to pinpoint the ways in which the first succeeds where the older series fails. In the end, the author determines that it all comes down to fidelity: Alan Ball’s show has added to the cast and the themes without building a convincing world for them to people, while Game of Thrones has remained true to the George R.R. Martin novel from which it draws its name, streamlining and adding to the characterization, rather than the character list. Of course the fact that fidelity is the core issue argued here is ironic for several reasons: not only is it at odds with everything that adaptation theory has argued for decades, but historically filmmakers originally turned to less “high literature” source texts in order to avoid the necessity to be faithful to a text made sacred by the canon, thus spawning some of the more successful if less faithful noir films. Beyond this, Ball himself has argued against fidelity, insisting that as the novel is in the first person, he has to tell everyone’s story, and that he wants readers of the original Charlaine Harris novels to be surprised. As such, I would like to examine the way that each approaches this specific issue of echoes of the source text in the finished product. Ultimately, I will argue that True Blood seeks to increase the echo, by creating a constant distance not only from its source text but also from its characters and the events its recounts. After all, True Blood recounts a world much like our own, that just so happens to be populated by supernatural creatures – by creating various defamiliarizing elements (including invented episodes, but also comic or outrageous effects to distance the viewer from the characters’ emotions), the show creators force us to pull back from the story and consider its implications. Game of Thrones, on the contrary, wants to pull the reader in, minimizing this “echo”: when creating a world more typical of the fantasy genre, with religions, languages, and political hierarchies that are familiar to the characters but not the viewer, a distancing effect would be disastrous to the suspension of disbelief necessary to enter these new worlds.I will also argue that the “source text” is not singular in either case – the two series adapt not just a novel or series of novels, but a tradition. True Blood cannot be studied separately from the long tradition of vampire texts equating vampirism with sexuality, and certainly is set up in echo (and contrast) to the more recent phenomenon of teenage vampire romances, where the “messy” aspects of sex (and its inevitable moral and political ramifications) become manifest in the death and gore characteristic of the series. Likewise, Game of Thrones clearly harkens back to that founding text of the fantasy genre, The Lord of the Rings (as well as its film adaptation), and replaces Tolkien’s nostalgia with a voluntarily “gritty” realism, where rape, murder, corruption and general injustice makes it an echo of our own imperfect society. As such, we can argue that though the two series take very different approaches to the idea of fidelity, their end goal seems to be similar: they seek to heighten the viewer’s awareness of the political ramifications of these fantasy worlds, and so acknowledge the echoes to be found in the world outside the television screen

Prurient pleasures : Adapting fantasy to HBO

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