luestone and his Novels into Film :
George Bluestone, a pioneer in critical film studies, barely at the age of mid-20s, began to write about how film-makers, directors and screenwriters turn great movie into a film. He called this artistic process- “the mysterious alchemy”. Novels into Film is his impressive critical work, first published in 1957. Bluestone begins a discussion of limits of both the novel and the film. He presents a radical analysis of the limitations, techniques, and potentialities of both novel and film. In addition to a theoretical analysis, he examines in detail the metamorphosis of six novels into film: The Informer, Wuthering Heights, The Grapes of Wrath, Pride and Prejudice, The Ox-Bow Incident, and Madame Bovary—focusing
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Like the ballet, it relies heavily on movement and music. Like novel, it usually presents narrative depicting characters in a series of conflicts. Like painting, it is two dimensional, composed of light and shadow....” and his study attempts to gauge these characteristics. According to him the filmmaker merely treats novel as a raw material and creates his/her own unique world out of it. Bluestone believes that film-maker is an independent artist, “not a translator of an established author, but a new author in his own right (p. 62).” According to him, the adapter "looks not to the organic novel whose language is inseparable from its theme, but to characters and incidents which somehow have detached themselves from language (p. …show more content…
63).” Novels into Film is based on in-depth research into film archives and libraries and on interviews with the screenwriters, directors, and producers who worked on these films. The majority of the book is comprised of essays that entail close, formalistic readings of both the cinematic and literary text in academic studies in the first half of the twentieth century.
Sergei Eisenstein and his essay “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today”:
Sergei Eisenstein was a Soviet film Director and film theorist. He was pioneer in theory and practice of montage.
Film Form: Essays in Film Theory and The Film Sense are two major books of Sergei’s writings. Film Form is filled with a number of essays that deal with Eisenstein’s aesthetics and ideas on film. “Through Film and Theatre”, “A Dialectic Approach to film Form”, “Methods of Montage” etc are the essays included in the book. “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today” explores the journey of montage structure from
November 1998, written for FILM 220: Aspects of Criticism. This is a 24-week course for second-year students, examining methods of critical analysis, interpretation and evaluation. The final assignment was simply to write a 1000-word critical essay on a film seen in class during the final six-weeks of the course. Students were expected to draw on concepts they had studied over the length of the course.
Neill, Alex. “Empathy and (Film) Fiction.” Philosophy of film and motion pictures : an anthology. Ed. Noel Carrol and Jinhee Choi. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 247-259. Print.
The novel ‘Jasper Jones’ written by Craig Silvey and the film ‘Dressmaker’ directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse have connected to the audience in very similar ways. The main ways that they have done this is through plot, characteristics and setting. By looking into each of these conventions it will widen the knowledge and have deeper in-depth on how authors and directors use them.
Phillips, Gene D. Conrad and Cinema: The Art of Adaptation. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1995.
Jacobs, Lewis. “Refinements in Technique.” The Rise of the American Film. New York: Teachers College Press, 1974. 433-452. Print.
Whenever books are adapted for film, changes inevitably have to be made. The medium of film offers several advantages and disadvantages over the book: it is not as adept at exploring the inner workings of people - it cannot explore their minds so easily; however, the added visual and audio capabilities of film open whole new areas of the imagination which, in the hands of a competent writer-director, can more than compensate.
During the course of this essay it is my intention to discuss the differences between Classical Hollywood and post-Classical Hollywood. Although these terms refer to theoretical movements of which they are not definitive it is my goal to show that they are applicable in a broad way to a cinema tradition that dominated Hollywood production between 1916 and 1960 and which also pervaded Western Mainstream Cinema (Classical Hollywood or Classic Narrative Cinema) and to the movement and changes that came about following this time period (Post-Classical or New Hollywood). I intend to do this by first analysing and defining aspects of Classical Hollywood and having done that, examining post classical at which time the relationship between them will become evident. It is my intention to reference films from both movements and also published texts relative to the subject matter. In order to illustrate the structures involved I will be writing about the subjects of genre and genre transformation, the representation of gender, postmodernism and the relationship between style, form and content.
...s appeared not so much to matter as the fact that he developed new techniques, devised camera approaches and sought always to bring out the potential of a still developing form. That he forgot--or overlooked--to bring the Marxist message to one of his films two years ago brought him that fatal kiss of all--the accusation from the authoritative Soviet magazine, Culture and Life, that his productions had been short on the prescribed Soviet requirement of art and interpretation of history” ("Sergei Eisenstein is Dead in Moscow”, New York Times, 1948) . In film, Eisenstein was known for his development of the montage sequence, his unusual juxtapositions, and his life-like imagery. In life he was known for his propaganda and belief in the plight of the working class. Eisenstein left an inevitable mark on his community, his time, the shape of a sub-culture, and his art.
The only real way to truly understand a story is to understand all aspects of a story and their meanings. The same goes for movies, as they are all just stories being acted out. In Thomas Foster's book, “How to Read Literature Like a Professor”, Foster explains in detail the numerous ingredients of a story. He discusses almost everything that can be found in any given piece of literature. The devices discussed in Foster's book can be found in most movies as well, including in Quentin Tarantino’s cult classic, “Pulp Fiction”. This movie is a complicated tale that follows numerous characters involved in intertwining stories. Tarantino utilizes many devices to make “Pulp Fiction” into an excellent film. In this essay, I will demonstrate how several literary devices described in Foster's book are put to use in Tarantino’s film, “Pulp Fiction”, including quests, archetypes, food, and violence.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is one of the most respected and admired novels of all time. Often criticized for lacking substance and using more elaborate camera work, freely adapted films usually do not follow the original plot line. Following this cliché, Roland Joffe’s version of The Scarlet Letter received an overwhelmingly negative reception. Unrealistic plots and actions are added to the films for added drama; for example, Hester is about to be killed up on the scaffold, when Algonquin members arrive and rescue her. After close analysis, it becomes evident of the amount of work that is put into each, but one must ask, why has the director adapted their own style of depicting the story? How has the story of Hester Prynne been modified? Regarding works, major differences and similarities between the characterization, visual imagery, symbolism, narration and plot, shows how free adaptation is the correct term used.
The reason Sergei Eisenstein is such an important figure in the development of the language of cinema is his ability to use montage as a useful propaganda film tool and his theoretical contributions in early Soviet film. Sergei believed that the meaning of cinema did not lay in the individual shot by itself but the process of editing several shots to form a continuous whole, which became referred to as “montage.” This would make the viewer think about the connection between two unrelated images to form symbols, new thoughts, or metaphors to the scene. Though Sergei tried to create meaning with steady rhythm in his films through the editing and juxtaposition of unrelated theatrical images, his shots did not achieve rhythm but collided together. Which created the montages that are depicted with violence in “Strike.”
In the presented essay I will compare the style of work of selected artists in the montage of the film. I will try to point out some general regularities and features of Soviet cinema. At the same time I will try to capture especially what is common in their systems and similar or conversely what differ. For my analysis, I will draw on the feature films of the Soviet avantgarde, namely these are the movies - The Battleship Potemkin (S. Eisenstein, 1925), Mother (V. Pudovkin, 1926) and The Man with a movie camera (D. Vertov, 1929).
Film and literature are two media forms that are so closely related, that we often forget there is a distinction between them. We often just view the movie as an extension of the book because most movies are based on novels or short stories. Because we are accustomed to this sequence of production, first the novel, then the motion picture, we often find ourselves making value judgments about a movie, based upon our feelings on the novel. It is this overlapping of the creative processes that prevents us from seeing movies as distinct and separate art forms from the novels they are based on.
When adapting a novel, there are three different ways directors can translate that into a film. They may take on the literal, traditional or radical interpretation of their adaptation of the novel; in Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride and Prejudice, he takes on the traditional interpretation. This translation demonstrates the same ideas, central conflicts, and characters as those of Austen’s novel 1813 novel, Pride and Prejudice. Linda Costanzo Cahir, the author of Literature into Film, gives sufficient evidence to prove that this adaptation is in fact a traditional one.
“Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine, some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything’s okay. I don’t make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything’s not okay.” - David Fincher. David Fincher is the director that I am choosing to homage for a number of reasons. I personally find his movies to be some of the deepest, most well made, and beautiful films in recent memory. However it is Fincher’s take on story telling and filmmaking in general that causes me to admire his films so much. This quote exemplifies that, and is something that I whole-heartedly agree with. I am and have always been extremely opinionated and open about my views on the world and I believe that artists have a responsibility to do what they can with their art to help improve the culture that they are helping to create. In this paper I will try to outline exactly how Fincher creates the masterpieces that he does and what I can take from that and apply to my films.