Sometimes More is Less: Fellini's Otto e mezzo to Kopit's Nine
1998; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3138/md.41.1.146
ISSN1712-5286
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
ResumoWe are beset by self-defeating translations from genre to genre, suggesting not only a dismaying lack of originality but a failure to recognize that most art is medium-specific, and that to try to dislodge a work from its nature is likely to deform if not destroy it. Recently the movies have come out in a stubborn rash of Jane Austen and Henry James adaptations, while in another direction, many contemporary plays have appeared unsatisfyingly on the screen, purportedly widening the audience for drama but in fact only proving what "they" — that non-theatregoing public — thought they knew all along: theatre is boring and pompous and slow. What other conclusion could the uninitiated come to having seen the cinematic versions of Mamel's Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo (despite the most attractive casts imaginable), or For Gillian on Her Thirty-Seventh Birthday, or Love! Valour! Compassion! or Marvin's Room? with many more on the way: Master Class, The Designated Mourner, The Substance of Fire, Bent, Dancing at Lughnasa, Rent, Chicago and Fences. If the motives fueling this high-risk adaptation impulse are money and popularization, then the most peculiar decision is to take genre translation in the opposite direction, from screen to stage where both audience size and profits diminish radically. Recent experiments in this fad for adaptation include Victor/Victoria, Paper Moan. Big and Cooley High, among a number of others; the most artistically successful is probably Sondheim's A Little Night Music adapted from Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night.
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