Papers by christine geraghty
Palgrave studies in adaptation and visual culture, 2024
Abstract
This afterword considers the relationship between adaptation studies and television stu... more Abstract
This afterword considers the relationship between adaptation studies and television studies. It argues that adaptation studies has neglected television’s extensive use of adaption and suggests a number of reasons for this. It offers a list of topics for consideration, including Origins, National context, Commerce, Access / Archives, Heterogeneity, Authorship, Genre, Stardom, Televisual Aesthetics, Audiences, Technological Change and Continuity.
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Jun 1, 2011
films can be studied. In a sense, these chapters stand on their own, loose from the following one... more films can be studied. In a sense, these chapters stand on their own, loose from the following ones, since they deal with film in general and not exclusively with historical films. The pertinence is that the author also here pleads for the historisation of the film’s meaning. He takes distance from the semiotic theories that assign an immanent significance to films. He has a rather low opinion of the ‘Lactusserianistic’ paradigm (p. 13) wherein the meaning of films is being subjected to structuralistic (L. Althusser) or psycho-analytic analysis (J. Lacan), without any interest in the ways in which a concrete public happens to conceive the meanings of these films. He pleads for a ‘historical materialist approach’, whereby it is examined ‘how viewers might have been able to interpret films in a historical moment of exhibition, taking into account the subject matter and its treatment in itself, and the wider social context, the debates and discourses of the time which those viewers would have been familiar and which would have provided frames of reference within which to make meanings from the material provided by the film’ (p. 19). Films need to be placed in a discursive context that invariably remains heterogeneous and contradictory while likewise evolving in time. The author dislikes the concept Zeitgeist to imbue films with meaning, since it issues from the reductionist and misleading idea of the existence of social and cultural consensus. The theory from Chapter one is applied to an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), wherein the author demonstrates that this particular movie generated a host of different meanings amongst the audiences, depending on the discursive context wherein the story was set: during the 1950s, a popularised medical discourse about virility; during the 1960s, a film-analytic discourse; during the 1970–1980 years, a cine-psychoanalytic discourse. All of such readings are ‘true’. It is the task of the film-history researcher ‘to trace the diachronically changing meanings of the film as it removed from one discursive context and repositioned within another at different times’ (p. 99).
This article uses Joe Wright's 2007 adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement to argue that one ... more This article uses Joe Wright's 2007 adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement to argue that one of the key features of adaptations is the foregrounding of the media. It suggests that this feature is a way of creating a ' knowing ' audience (as discussed for instance by Hutcheon and Leitch) out of fi lmgoers who cannot be assumed to have read the original book. The article analyses how Atonement (2007) presents writing, cinema, and television in the three sections of the fi lm and comments on how these media are presented to the audience formally as well as through the complex narrative. It concludes with some comments on the fi lm's ' happy ending ' , suggesting that this foregrounding may, for some viewers, be at the expense of mainstream cinema's traditional investment in emotion.
Adaptation, Mar 20, 2020
This article examines changes in casting practices which have begun to put black, Asian, and mino... more This article examines changes in casting practices which have begun to put black, Asian, and minority ethnic actors more regularly on British screens and in more significant parts. In the context of calls for improving BAME involvement at all levels of the film and television industry, I look in particular at how colour-blind casting has begun to have an impact on British cinema. The article looks initially at how calls for the campaign for changes entwine with the British tradition of public service broadcasting and examines the socially conscious criteria for casting introduced by the BBC and the BFI in 2016. I suggest that some of the ambiguous expectations of audiences in relation to colour-blind casting are similar to the potentially contradictory aspirations placed on institutions which receive public funding. In order to examine these issues in some detail, I draw on textual and paratextual analysis to demonstrate how frames of reference for understanding new approaches to casting can be found in recent period adaptations, a British genre strongly associated with whiteness by actors and critics. The examples discussed span the decade: Wuthering Heights (Arnold, 2011), Lady Macbeth (Oldroyd, 2016), and Mary Queen of Scots (Rourke, 2018). The analysis demonstrates that while casting for the public good is becoming more common it nevertheless remains a complicated and controversial strategy.
Screen, Jun 1, 1995
Cagney and Lacey is something of a cause celebre in the annals of television for women - a progra... more Cagney and Lacey is something of a cause celebre in the annals of television for women - a programme which was apparently conceived with an overt commitment to feminist causes, created its audience by working with women's organizations like the National Organization for ...
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Jun 1, 2012
British Film Institute eBooks, 2012
British Film Institute eBooks, 2012
Television & New Media, Nov 1, 2010
Routledge eBooks, Jan 4, 2002
British Film Institute eBooks, 2012
Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies, Aug 26, 2022
Feminist Media Studies, Dec 28, 2020
Elana Levine’s terrific new book is accessible and authoritative, of interest to anyone concerned... more Elana Levine’s terrific new book is accessible and authoritative, of interest to anyone concerned with the study of television, and an excellent demonstration of how to handle a complex media studi...
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Papers by christine geraghty
This afterword considers the relationship between adaptation studies and television studies. It argues that adaptation studies has neglected television’s extensive use of adaption and suggests a number of reasons for this. It offers a list of topics for consideration, including Origins, National context, Commerce, Access / Archives, Heterogeneity, Authorship, Genre, Stardom, Televisual Aesthetics, Audiences, Technological Change and Continuity.
This afterword considers the relationship between adaptation studies and television studies. It argues that adaptation studies has neglected television’s extensive use of adaption and suggests a number of reasons for this. It offers a list of topics for consideration, including Origins, National context, Commerce, Access / Archives, Heterogeneity, Authorship, Genre, Stardom, Televisual Aesthetics, Audiences, Technological Change and Continuity.