Slaughterhouse-Five: The Novel and the Movie
In 1972 director George Roy Hill released his screen
adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (or The
Children's Crusade; A Duty Dance With Death). The film made
over 4 million dollars and was touted as an "artistic
success" by Vonnegut (Film Comment, 41). In fact, in an
interview with Film Comment in 1985, Vonnegut called the
film a "flawless translation" of his novel, which can be
considered an honest assessment in light of his reviews of
other adaptations of his works: Happy Birthday, Wanda June
(1971) "turned out so abominably" that he asked to have his
name removed from it; and he found Slapstick of Another Kind
(1984) to be "perfectly horrible" (41,44). (This article was
writen prior to Showtime's Harrison Bergeron, and Fine
Line's Mother Night). A number of other Vonnegut novels have
been optioned, but the film projects have either been
abandoned during production or never advanced beyond an
unproduced screenplay adaptation, indicating the difficulty
of translating Vonnegut to the silver screen. So why does
Slaughterhouse-Five succeed where others fail? The answer
lies in how the source is interpreted on screen. Overall,
while there are some discrepancies that yield varying
results, the film is a faithful adaptation that succeeds in
translating the printed words into visual elements and
sounds which convincingly convey the novel's themes.
While Vonnegut's literary style is very noticeable in
Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel as a whole differs from the
majority of his other works because it is personal with an
interesting point of view techniq...
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...kle every time I watch that film,
because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote
the book" (Film Comment 41). Whether or not someone who has
not read the novel could get some meaning from the film is
hard to decide, but if one considers that it would take just
about as long to watch the movie as it would to read the
book, the decision should be obvious.
Works Cited
Bianculli, David. "A Kurt Post-mortem on the Generally
Eclectic Theatre." Film Comment Nov.-Dec. 1985: 41-44.
Loeb, Monica. Vonnegut's Duty-Dance With Death. UMEA, 1979.
Nelson, Joyce. "Slaughterhouse-Five: Novel and Film."
Literature/Film Quarterly. 1 (1973): 149-153.
Slaughterhouse-Five, dir. George Roy Hill, with Michael
Sacks, Universal Pictures, 1972.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell
Publishing, 1968.
Sullivan, G. D., Georgeson, M. A., & Oatley, K. (1972). Channels for spatial frequency selection and detection of single bars by the human visual system. Vision Research, 12, 383-94.
Hubel and Wiesel defined the classic receptive field as a restricted region of the visual cortex. If a specific stimulus fell into this area, this may drive the cell to evoke action potential responses (Zipser, Lamme & Schiller, 1996). By shining orientated slits of light into the cat’s eye, they were able to discover that each cell had its own specific stimulus requirements (Barlow, 1982). Different cells differed from each other in many ways; some preferred a spe...
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut tries to make sense of a seemingly meaningless world by creating a novel whose narrative is more a conjunction of events instead of a linear story. Vonnegut beings his novel with a confession about why he wrote this book, he starts, “all this happened more or less” (Vonnegut 1). As a reader it is alarms are signaled when the author themselves makes an omission about the reality of the tale about to be told. He spends the first chapter giving an autobiographical view into what shaped his life and how this book needed to be written. Vonnegut says he thought he would have a lot to say about the bombing in Dresden that “all [he] would have to do would be to report what [he] had seen” (2). But instead “not many words about Dresden came from [his] mind then—not enough of them to make a book, anyway” (2). So here Vonnegut makes it clear this novel is not explicitly an anti-war book but rather an attempt at making sense of how life
..., 1994). If the extra-retinal signal is altered by the OKN signal, both the eye movement velocity and the perceived velocity alter accordingly. Other evidence does not support an optokinetic potential model, since the predicted changes to optokinetic potential were not observed when background contrast and spatial frequency were manipulated (Sumnall, Freeman & Snowden, 2003). However, the concept that stimulus characteristics which initiate reflexive eye movements could interfere with the voluntary smooth pursuit signal is interesting. The optokinetic-potential model is here considered as an extension of the classical model, since the extra-retinal origin of the pursuit estimate is maintained. Other models have questioned the purely extra-retinal nature of the pursuit speed estimate, and an alternative which includes reafferent information has been proposed.
Imagine experiencing the events of your life in a random order. How would you view your life if it seemed more like a collection of moments rather than a story? In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim is a chaplain’s assistant during World War II who claims to be "unstuck in time." Billy seemingly jumps from one moment in his life to the next without his control or consent. Billy also believes that aliens, known as Tralfamadorians, abducted him. These events may seem silly considering all of the serious and grim experiences that Billy faces in the war, but they are far from comical. Billy Pilgrim 's time travels and experiences on Tralfamadore are not real experiences, but rather coping mechanisms Billy has created.
Vision plays a huge role in the lives of non-human primates. Non-human primates have exceptional binocular vision, due to forward-facing eyes with overlapping visual fields (Prescott). This binocular stereoscopic color vision allows primates to see the world in terms of height, width, and depth, also known as three-dimensional vision (Haviland et al. 2010). Highly developed vision allows the later arboreal primates to judge depth, distance, and location when moving at speed from branch to branch (Haviland et al. 2010). This bino...
Blindsight is often understood as supporting certain claims concerning the function and the status of the phenomenal qualities of visual perceptions. In this talk I am going to present a short argument to show that blindsight could not be understood as evidence for these claims. The reason is that blindsight cannot be adequately described as a special case of seeing. Consequently, it is not possible to draw inferences from it concerning the role of the phenomenal qualities for seeing.
Baruch Spinoza once said “Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” He compared free-will with destiny and ended up that what we live and what we think are all results of our destiny; and the concept of the free-will as humanity know is just the awareness of the situation. Similarly, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five explores this struggle between free-will and destiny, and illustrates the idea of time in order to demonstrate that there is no free-will in war; it is just destiny. Vonnegut conveys this through irony, symbolism and satire.
My scientific concept is how sight effects balance. Balance is the equal distribution of weight. “Balance is controlled by the vestibular system, which includes the eyes, the inner ear, and other sensory systems of the body” (asha.org). The visual system interacts with the vestibular system by using the
Muller, N. G., Bartelt, O. A., Donner, T. H., Villringer, A. & Brandt, S. A. (2003). A physiological correlate of the “zoom lens” of visual attention. The Journal of Neuroscience, 23(9): 3561-3565.
As with the mental map experiments, the fact that reaction time depends directly on the degree of rotation has been taken as evidence that we solve the...
Athletes must accomplish amazing feats of balance and coordination of the body. As scientist, Mikhail Tsaytin discovered in the 1970s, acrobats can successfully make a two person human tower in the dark, but after adding a third acrobat, not even the most talented can maintain the balance required to keep the tower intact while in the dark (1). What does darkness have to do with it? The point is that balance relies on at least three signals coming from the body, and one of those is sight. Once you eliminate one of these signals, the body cannot accomplish the required task. In addition to sight, signals coming from muscles and joints, called proprioceptors are sensitive to changes in position. The third contributor to the human tower and the topic of discussion of this paper is the vestibular system. A three-person human tower in the dark must not have enough information coming from the vestibular and proprioceptive systems to function without vision, whereas the two-person tower did have enough information.
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