Vooys. Jaargang 26

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Review: A New Path Through the Field
Joost Broeren
15. 120/122

Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 1.1 (November 2007). Richard J. Hand & Katja Krebs (eds.). Bristol: Intellect, 80 pp., ISSN: 17536421. <http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals.php?issn=17536421>

Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies 1.1 (March 2008). Deborah Cartmell, Timothy Corrigan & Imelda Whelehan (eds.). Oxford (UK): Oxford Journals, 78 pp., ISSN 1755-0645 (online) / 1755-0637 (print).

Over the past few years, the field of adaptation studies has seen a development similar to the one translation studies went through in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Discussion started on whether or not adaptation studies constituted a separate field, or should be a part of literary studies, media studies or communication studies. This discussion, while not completely resolved, has seemingly been decided in favour of the former; this is exemplified by the fact that in recent months two new journals on the subject of adaptation were launched. Thus the discourse slowly moved towards discussions on what constituted this emerging field, and what directions its research should take. The link to translation studies is not just an institutional one, however: the issue of ‘fidelity’ is central to both disciplines. Appropriately, it is exactly this issue that becomes the biggest difference between the two journals.

In their editorial for the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, Richard Hand (University of Glamorgan) and Katja Krebs (Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries) explicitly refer to translation studies as one of adaptation studies' ‘closely related field[s] of enquiry’, hoping to ‘see the beginning of a constructive relationship that will further our understanding of the creatively, ideologically, politically and socially charged process or rewriting and reshaping all that is adaptation.’ (Journal: 4) However this relationship remains underdeveloped in the five essays and four reviews that make up the issue. Too often the words ‘translation’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘appropriation’ are used as simple synonyms - even while Kara McKechnie's (University of Leeds) review of Julie Sanders' Adaptation and Appropriation praises the author for successfully ‘defining the borderlines between adaptation and appropriation’, and for her ‘functional and well thought through’ categorization of the different types of relations between source and adaptation.

Nevertheless, some essays use the link to translation studies to their

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advantage. Foremost among these is Pedro de Senna's (Buckinghamshire New University) ‘In Praise of Treason: Translating Calabar’. De Senna theorizes three different versions of Chico Buarque and Ruy Guerra's play Calabar: In Praise of Treason through Oswald de Andrade's concept of ‘anthropophagy’, or cultural cannibalism. The play was originally written in 1973 when Brazil was still under stringent military rule after the 1964 coup d'etat. After ‘the opening’, the relative democratization of the country in 1979 preceding the official reconstitution of democracy in 1988, Buarque and Guerra restaged the play with a more post-colonial outlook. This is the first form of adaptation that De Senna chooses to focus on. The second is the translation of the play from Portuguese into English which he undertook himself in 2000, ‘as an academic exercise’. It is this attention for rewriting and translation as adaptation that makes De Senna's contribution the most thought-provoking piece in the journal.

In addition to the link with translation studies, what constitutes the most original aspects of the articles in the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance is the last word in its title: the theatre. Jim O'Loughlin (University of Northern Iowa) investigates both theatrical and cinematic adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin around 1900; Freda Chappie's (University of Sheffield) account of Russian appropriations of Shakespeare's Macbeth into A Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk includes a novella, an opera based on that novella, and a film based on that opera; and Duska Radosavljevic (University of Bristol) looks at the theatrical adaptation of Wim Wenders' film der himmel über berlin (1987) which she worked on as a dramaturg. This abundant attention for the theatre is a refreshing change of perspective for the field of adaptation studies, usually so preoccupied with the (one-way) transfer between literature and cinema.

Even more refreshing is Oxford Journals' Adaptation, which counts among its international editorial staff our contributor Jan Baetens as well as eminent names from the emergent field. Although its subtitle (‘The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies’ - a result of the journal's affiliation to the recently founded Association of Literature on Screen Studies) would seem to suggest otherwise, Adaptation sets out to abolish the exclusive attention on literature to screen adaptation even more explicitly. In their editorial, Deborah Cartmell (De Montfort University), Timothy Corrigan (University of Pennsylvania) and Imelda Whelehan (De Montfort University) make clear their intentions:

The journal offers an opportunity for the two disciplines to ‘talk to each other’, not as Literature and Film, but as literature on screen and ‘screen’ on literature, not demonstrating how the two arts are or are not similar, but how they contribute to and enrich each other through an understanding of the translation of one art into another and the commingling of the ‘literary’ and the ‘cinematic’ across both. (Adaptation: 3)

While the editors of the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance explicitly state that ‘[t]he intention of this journal is not to be prescriptive as regards the themes and issues it deals with’, Adaptation sets out to steer the field of adaptation studies in new directions, ‘to reset, contest and expose the existing boundaries’ between the fields of literary and media studies. (Adaptation: 4) They deliberately set out to go off the beaten track, forging new paths through the field. Even so, the issue of the fidelity of an adaptation to its source and the comparative textual analysis adaptation studies has habitually

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employed seem harder to shake off than the editors and writers would like. For instance, in her contribution Simone Murray (Monash University) attempts to sidestep it by investigating the ill-fated adaptation of Murray Bail's novel Eucalyptus. By focusing on this ‘phantom adaptation’, she hopes to ‘force [adaptation studies] to engage with potential alternative methodologies for understanding how adaptation functions or - just as interestingly for the present purpose - it fails to function.’ (Adaptation: 6) She is largely successful in her interesting account of how and why Eucalyptus did not become a film, as the slated adaptation was cancelled the day before shooting was planned to commence, incorporating both the book's and the proposed film's positions in the Australian and international literary and cinematic field, and their connotations of ‘Australianness’. Yet she still feels the need to include an extended footnote elaborating on the differences and similarities between the novel and Jocelyn Moorhouse's screenplay adaptation of it.

Nevertheless, Adaptation's orientation to the future of the field leads to inherently ‘fresher’ research than that in the Journal... - Murray's phantom adaptation; Kamilla Scott's (Lancaster University) slightly long-winded but intriguing investigation of gothic film parodies as ‘parodies of parodies of parodies’ (Adaptation: 24); Jeremy Strong's (Writtle College, Essex) article on team films as a cinematic formula in which ‘it is almost entirely forgotten that in the beginning there had been some books’ (Adaptation: 56), in effect turning the source novels into film novelisations. But perhaps the most fulfilling contribution in a theoretical sense, and in the sense of furthering the emergent field of adaptation studies, is Thomas Leitch's (University of Delaware) review article, which closes the journal. Leitch combines reviews of about a dozen recent books and articles on the subject into a fourteen-page ‘state of the art’ of adaptation studies. Oddly enough, Leitch points out the inherent logical problems of the phrase ‘literature on screen’ in the article's introduction, which could be constructed as a slight sneer at the journal's chief editors. Perhaps he is right: it would serve Adaptation if its subtitle reflected the forward-looking, interdisciplinary and refreshing perspectives its content has to offer.