Embedded Files
Season 7: Adaptations
kicks off on Saturday 22nd Oct 2016!!
Season 7: Adaptations
intro
Lesbians and gays are experts at adapting, translating, reimaginning, and second-guessing, because for centuries, all of these have been part of our toolkit for survival in indifferent and in hostile environments.
From the very beginning of cinema, adaptations have been popular with production companies: they made films more respectable, and they guaranteed audiences who had read and loved the book. Also from the beginning, and to this day, scriptwriters have been generally undervalued, as shown by their far-away position in film credits (something unthinkable in the theatre), and one of the consequences of this unfortunate policy has been the over-reliance on literary material.
The motives behind film adaptations may be unwholesome, but the results are often miraculous. Water rising under a woman's bed in The Hours (2002), a field of giant blooms in The Colour Purple (1985), the closeup of an eye trying to see in Reflections in a Golden Eye (1987), the luminous pure white of a gentleman's suit in Death in Venice (1971)... These powerful images adapt and condense meaning, and the meaning stays with us.
In this season, we will investigate how queer movies have adapted other texts (novels, short stories, plays, and other movies), sometimes to sanitize them, sometimes to make them gay-er, and sometimes simply to show the world the richness of LGBTQ cultures and the vastness of the queer imagination.
We will take a close look at the originals to compare and contrast how they were adapted in our selected films. Don’t worry, you don’t have to read them all, we’ve done that work for you! You can of course pick the books later, and reach your own conclusions about this strange symbiosis between cinema and literature, an ongoing, sparkling conversation.
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© Dublin Film Qlub 2016.
You are welcome to reproduce this material, but we request that you acknowledge the source.
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image: picture of the Filmbook series by artist Dennis Neuschaefer-Rube
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