11:56 a.m.
Dear all,
I hope you are having, or are about to have, a lovely easter!
Next week on our IMS seminar, we will be visited by Jamie Sherry, who will give a
presentation on “Closing visual codas: Infidelities, Diversions and Radical Practices in
Adaptations”.
Abstract
This paper will partially question how the screenplay functions as a bridging tool in the
‘liminal’ phase between two media, and the ways in which this extra narrative layer
conforms to postmodern storytelling techniques in which the extraneous details of
production performance become critically important to the film viewer’s reception (in
adaptations such as The Five Obstructions (2003) and Under the Skin (2013)). These
arguments are informed by Christine Geraghty’s position that adaptations “differ from
other fiction films because they emphasize rather than hide the performance that that is
involved in putting a script on screen,” and that in doing so they “create a gap in which
we can see the act of making fiction.” This will serve to highlight the industrial
function of the adapted screenplay as adaptation performance, and consider broader notions
of film practice that exert influence on the production of remediated film. This paper
will argue that various practices undertaken during production form a meta-narrative of
performance that infiltrate audiences’ reading of the film. This paper will also examine
these multiple acts of distancing by evaluating the increasingly and accumulatively
unfaithful adapted screenplays. The paper will cast its net wide to consider the functions
of resolution and closures in film adaptations, considering cinematic, visual codas in
place of literary resolutions. Film adaptations such as Sunrise (1927), Apocalypse Now
(1979), Stalker (1979), Where the Wild Things Are (2009), We Need To Talk About Kevin
(2011) and Under the Skin (2013) provide valuable discourses on the process of
remediation, and the techniques used by cinema to provide resolution, closure, and
continuation.
Biography
Jamie Sherry is Reader in English at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, working within
the Centre for Adaptations, and co-organising the Association of Adaptation Studies annual
conference since 2007. He is co-editor for the Journal of Screenwriting and is a steering
committee member for the Screenwriting Research Network. Jamie is also a practicing
screenwriter and script-editor for UK film and media production companies, including
Working Title, BBC Films and Screen Yorkshire. He has published research on the industrial
and theoretical processes of adaptation through production and screenwriting and will
publish the monograph Screenwriting Film Adaptations: The History, Practice and Theory of
the Adapted Screenplay on Palgrave Macmillan in 2022.
The seminar is, as always, on Wednesday, April 7, at 10.15 – 12.00 (CEST) on zoom:
https://lnu-se.zoom.us/j/940933326
Best wishes,
Signe – on behalf of IMS
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Signe Kjaer Jensen
PhD student in Comparative Literature
Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS)
Linnæus University
Department of Film and Literature
351 95 Växjö
Sweden
https://lnu.se/personal/signe.kjaerjensen/
signe.kjaerjensen at lnu.se<mailto:signe.kjaerjensen at lnu.se>