The History of French Literature on Film
Andrew Watts author Kate Griffiths author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:24th Dec '20
£130.00
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This comprehensive history of cinematic adaptations of French literature analyses the reworking of a key body of writing from the silent era to the present.
French novels, plays, poems and short stories, however temporally or culturally distant from us, continue to be incarnated and reincarnated on cinema screens across the world. From the silent films of Georges Méliès to the Hollywood production of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary directed by Sophie Barthes, The History of French Literature on Film explores the key films, directors, and movements that have shaped the adaptation of works by French authors since the end of the 19th century. Across six chapters, Griffiths and Watts examine the factors that have driven this vibrant adaptive industry, as filmmakers have turned to literature in search of commercial profits, cultural legitimacy, and stories rich in dramatic potential. The volume also explains how the work of theorists from a variety of disciplines (literary theory, translation theory, adaptation theory), can help to deepen both our understanding and our appreciation of literary adaptation as a creative practice. Finally, this volume seeks to make clear that adaptation is never a simple transcription of an earlier literary work. It is always simultaneously an adaptation of the society and era for which it is created. Adaptations of French literature are thus not only valuable artistic artefacts in their own right, so too are they important historical documents which testify to the values and tastes of their own time.
Kate Griffiths and Andrew Watts pass the baton of adaptation between them, chapter to chapter, and never flag in their 125-year relay race through film history. They focus on French literary sources because so many producers, directors and spectators—not just French ones—have always done so. Across wildly distinct periods of national and transnational history, French literature has been passed around, becoming itself a highly valued cultural relay. It has been honored, toyed with, profited from, and often re-energized in an unregulated fairground economy that the authors delight in exposing. * Dudley Andrew, R. Selden Rose Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University, USA *
Bold in its historical and transnational scope, incisive in its argument, and illuminating in its analysis, The History of French Literature on Film is a milestone achievement – a study of deep value to researchers in adaptation studies, film studies, translation studies, and cultural history. Griffiths and Watts offer a vision for how we should value adaptation for its intrinsic innovation and also, crucially, for what the adaptive process reveals of our world and times, present and past, as it shapes and is shaped by social, economic, interpersonal, political, aesthetic, contextual, and diasporic pressures and possibilities across cinema’s long history. Important revisionist readings of ‘Tradition of Quality’ cinema and 1970s porn bring fresh angles to film studies, and to wider research in ‘middle-brow’ cultures and postcolonial studies. Expert discussion, abundant insights, and sheer clarity of prose make this a compelling title for readers in search of a sense-making study of the agency and the porosity of film adaptation across the long twentieth century. * Susan Harrow, Ashley Watkins Professor of French, University of Bristol, UK *
This rich and thought-provoking volume will instantly become required reading for anyone teaching, or studying, screen adaptations of French literature. * French Studies *
ISBN: 9781501311840
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 608g
328 pages