Film Adaptation

Many of our favorite films began as plays--some as well known as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and some not so well known as You've Got Mail's origin, a 1937 play Parfumerie by Miklos Laszlo. Video Versions identifies nearly 300 films and their theatrical origins, providing readers with an overview of the films and highlighting similarities and differences to the source plays. Perfect for teachers, students, and anyone interested in theater and film, it is the most complete resource available for video versions of plays.

This is the first book-length study for nearly fifty years of the relations between early cinema and nineteenth-century theatre. Incorporating the results of recent reconsiderations of early cinema, Brewster explores what features of nineteenth-century theatre early film-makers borrowed or adapted, and the ways specific characteristics of cinema inflected these borrowings. Theatre to Cinema is a seminal work which will profoundly alter our understanding of early cinema.

One hundred years after his creation by Bram Stoker, Dracula is still fascinating us. This study traces the changing nature of film representations of Dracula, from the early silent adaptations to recent popular dramas. Holte suggests that vampire films and Dracula adaptations have become an independent genre, the dark romance, with its own set of narrative conventions and audience expectations combining horror and eroticism. This engaging study provides readers with a natural history of the vampire, an examination of the work of Bram Stoker, a history and analysis of many film adaptations of Dracula, a survey of contemporary criticism and theory, and an extensive annotated bibliography of vampire film, fiction, and criticism.

This book offers a compelling examination of performed adaptations of Stevenson's masterpiece, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Rose investigates how a single text, adapted many times in the past century, can serve to elucidate certain shifts in cultural attitudes. Providing an analysis of the relation between culture and performance, the author argues that Stevenson's adapters have infused the original story with concerns about issues of race, class, gender, and economics.

The extraordinary range, complexity and power of Marguerite Duras �6 novelist, dramatist, film-maker, essayist �6 has been justly recognized. Yet in the years following her death in 1996, there has been an increasing tendency to consecrate her work, particularly by those critics who approach it primarily in biographical terms. The British and American specialists featured in this interdisciplinary collection aim to resurrect the Duras corpus in all its forms by submitting it theoretically to three main areas of enquiry. By establishing how far Duras�2s work questions and redefines the parameters of literary and cinematic form, as well as the categories of race and ethnicity, homosexuality and heterosexuality, fantasy and violence, the contributors to this volume "revision" Duras�2s work in the widest sense of the term.

Landon's book is wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and near state-of-the-art. It concerns science fiction film and, toward the end, almost becomes SF itself in its provocative speculations on the future of such film. The first part of the book argues that most criticism of SF film has been inadequate because it is based on literary rather than film-specific standards. The second argues that SF film will soon become either obsolete or be totally transformed through new computer technology. Science fiction can be seen to encompass not only SF in print, film, TV and comic books, but has become all-pervasive in contemporary culture.