Papers by Deborah Cartmell
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen
Talking Shakespeare
Translating Othello’s self-defence for marrying Desdemona to stage or screen presents a number of... more Translating Othello’s self-defence for marrying Desdemona to stage or screen presents a number of difficulties. Even though more likely to wink at Othello’s misdemeanour because he is so needed in the war, the Duke is remarkably ‘liberal’ in siding with Othello over Brabantio, that is, with a black man over a white man. What seems a magnificent, even unbelievable, success will be considered within the context of recent readings and the two mainstream film adaptations of the play: those of Orson Welles (1952) and Oliver Parker (1995).
At the root of the biopic’s critical rather than commercial estimation is that it is a genre that... more At the root of the biopic’s critical rather than commercial estimation is that it is a genre that ‘belongs’ to the actor. Drawing on pressbooks, trailers, trade and fan magazines, this chapter considers the foundational queen biopics of the 1930s as strategically designed as star adaptations and rather than regarding these films as depicting historical women thrust against their wills into the public gaze (when all they want is to be “a woman in a man’s arms”), this chapter discusses how these biopics blatantly pander to a fan base, and, through marketing and casting, tell the stories of Hollywood queens: Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (1933), Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress (1934), Katharine Hepburn in Mary of Scotland (1936) and Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette (1938).
Introduction: alien identities - exploring difference in film and fiction, Heidi Kaye, I.Q. Hunte... more Introduction: alien identities - exploring difference in film and fiction, Heidi Kaye, I.Q. Hunter. Satan bugs in the hot zone - microbial pathogens as alien invaders, Peter Hutchings America's domestic aliens - African Americans and the issue of citizenship in the Jefferson/Hemings story in fiction and film, Sharon Monteith see Europe with ITC - stock footage and the construction of geographical identity, Nick Freeman "leaving the West and entering the East" - refiguring the alien from Stoker to Coppola, Paul O'Flinn another time, another space - modernity, subjectivity and the time machine, Jonathan Bignell "the Martians are coming!" - civilisation versus invasion in the "The War of the Worlds" and "Mars Attacks!", Liz Hedgecock vagabond desire - aliens, alienation and human regeneration in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's "Roadside Picnic" and Andrey Tarkovsky's "Stalker", John Moore adaptation, teleportatio...
Introduction: classics across the film/literature divided, Heidi Kaye, Imelda Whelehan. "if ... more Introduction: classics across the film/literature divided, Heidi Kaye, Imelda Whelehan. "if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes" - "Bladerunner" and "Symphonie Pastorale", Nick Peim classic Shakespeare for all - Forbidden Planet and Prospero's books, two screen adaptations of "The Tempest", Sara Martin the red and the blue - Jane Eyre in the nineties, Lisa Hopkins transcultural aesthetics and the film adaptations of Henry James, Martin Halliwell "historical Puritanism" - contemporary cinematic adaptations of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" and Arthur Miller's "The Crucible", Serge Rizzo "Mrs Dalloway and "Orlando" - the subject of time and generic transactions, Lesley Higgings, Marie-Christine Leps "desire projected itself visually" - watching "Death in Venice", Stuart Burrows Leopold Bloom walks and Jimmy Stewart stares - on motion, genre,...
Interpreting Shakespeare on Screen
... There have been several stage adap-- 2 'Miss Austen and Miss Mitford&amp... more ... There have been several stage adap-- 2 'Miss Austen and Miss Mitford', Blackwood's 107 (1870), pp. ... Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation', Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden ...
Choice Reviews Online
Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema.
The English Renaissance in Popular Culture, 2010
There’s remarkably little critical attention given to the coming of sound in the first mainstream... more There’s remarkably little critical attention given to the coming of sound in the first mainstream Shakespeare “talkie,” Sam Taylor’s The Taming of the Shrew (1929). While clearly chosen as a star vehicle for the most famous couple of the silent period, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, as a play ultimately concerned with the silencing of a woman, it can be regarded as both a peculiar and appropriate choice for the first mainstream film to give Shakespeare back (some of) his words. This chapter contextualizes the film within debates about sound versus silent cinema, a debate in which cries for fidelity from publicists and journalists become “louder” than ever before; in this sense, the representation of Shakespeare and the Renaissance is in the spoken words. The fetishization of the period through its language becomes the unique selling point of the film in its publicity materials, a feature that bestows upon this adaptation, and its successors, its popularity, or, in other words, a low rather than high cultural status.
Teaching Adaptations, 2014
F. R. Leavis identified advertising as the lowest and most insidious form of writing and in its b... more F. R. Leavis identified advertising as the lowest and most insidious form of writing and in its blatant underhanded methods and shameless materialism, he put it to use to expose the tackiness of writers who aimed to be ‘popular’, or middle-brow as opposed to high-brow. In Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1930), he attacks writers like Hugh Walpole and Arnold Bennett for stooping to the tactics of advertisers by unapologetically appealing to the lowest possible denominator in order to attract the widest audiences. Leavis’s unwitting legacy to adaptation studies can be traced to this volume and, with Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment (1933): both books teach (or warn against) the menace of popularization. I would like to consider the concerns expressed within these two books, among them anxieties regarding the decay of language, the standardization of literary texts and the distrust for new technologies, within the context of the rise of the talkie adaptation (1927–) and the marketing of film adaptations in the 1930s.
Uploads
Papers by Deborah Cartmell