Cabaret: Utilizing the Film Medium to Create a Unique Adaptation
1994; Salisbury University; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Travel Writing and Literature
ResumoCabaret: Utilizing the Film Medium to Create a Unique Adaptation In the opening of Christopher Isherwood's book Goodbye to Berlin, which records his observations of the city in the early 1930s, the narrator states: I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. . . . Someday all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.' In analyzing director Bob Fosse's Cabaret, which is based upon this book, these words take on a prophetic quality. With this film, the camera metaphor has a more literal significance as the themes set forth by Isherwood are interpreted and developed in a new way through the motion picture camera. Unlike the passive recording mechanism to which Isherwood compares his writing style. Fosse actively employs various techniques exclusive to the motion picture medium which are very effective in conveying the themes of Goodbye to Berlin. Such themes as the growing influence of Nazism, the decadence and subsequent deterioration of Berlin, and the evil of anti-Semitism are reinforced in Cabaret through the use of creative editing, lighting, and camera techniques. As a result, this film, which was the last in a string of theatrical and film adaptations, offers quite interesting interpretation of Isherwood's material. In order to appreciate the significance of the film Cabaret, it is helpful to understand the development of the sources from which it came. Christopher Isherwood was a writer who lived in Berlin from 1930 until 1933 when the Nazis came to power. His writings contain observations of Berlin society at this time and possess autobiographical element. The character of Sally Bowles dates back to a novella by Isherwood published in 1937. In 1939, this story and some thematically related pieces were collected in Goodbye to Berlin, which was itself eventually included in Berlin Stories.2 These writings reflect the themes of Berlin's decadence in atmosphere of deterioration and political turmoil. In 1955, Isherwood's stories were adapted into a stage play by John van Druten titled I Am a Camera. According to the New York Times Theatre Reviews, the play focused mainly upon the impetuous character of Sally Bowles and was more of amusing comedy than a serious adaptation of Goodbye to Berlin.3 This play was itself adapted into a film of the same name, which met with some negative criticism. One reviewer writes that although the play did make some passing pretense of drawing from the Berlin Stories of Christopher Isherwood, a haunting sense of degeneration and impending doom in the German Capital, this film barely recognizes that the Nazi hoodlums were then abroad.4 In 1966, Isherwood's stories once again provided the basis for a theatrical adaptation-this time in musical form. Cabaret, with music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb, was innovative and radical departure from the type of shows that dominated the American musical theatre since Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma premiered in the mid-1940s. It was an uncompromising hard-nosed look at life consistent with the coming of age of America in the 1960s.5 Finally, in 1972, came the film musical Cabaret which, although it shared its title, a few characters, and some songs with the Broadway musical, as well as similar themes, was quite a different thing altogether. Bob Fosse thought that the stage version was weak except for the cabaret numbers and atmosphere, and so returned to the original Isherwood stories as well as the play / Am a Camera for source materials.6 Joel Grey, who played the role of the M.C. both on Broadway and in the film, had to realize one starts from scratch on a movie. You don't recreate, you start over.7 Those involved in making this film seem to have been concerned with being faithful to the thematic content of Isherwood's writing, while at the same time creating something new.8 One critic asserts that by remorselessly discarding everything from their stage source . …
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