Gäst: Jamie Sherry “Closing Visual Codas: Infidelities, Diversions and Radical Practices in Adaptations”

This seminar is in English.

This week we will be visited by Jamie Sherry, who will give a presentation on “Closing Visual Codas: Infidelities, Diversions and Radical Practices in Adaptations”.

Abstract

This paper will partially question how the screenplay functions as a bridging tool in the ‘liminal’ phase between two media, and the ways in which this extra narrative layer conforms to postmodern storytelling techniques in which the extraneous details of production performance become critically important to the film viewer’s reception (in adaptations such as The Five Obstructions (2003) and Under the Skin (2013)). These arguments are informed by Christine Geraghty’s position that adaptations “differ from other fiction films because they emphasize rather than hide the performance that that is involved in putting a script on screen,” and that in doing so they “create a gap in which we can see the act of making fiction.” This will serve to highlight the industrial function of the adapted screenplay as adaptation performance, and consider broader notions of film practice that exert influence on the production of remediated film. This paper will argue that various practices undertaken during production form a meta-narrative of performance that infiltrate audiences’ reading of the film. This paper will also examine these multiple acts of distancing by evaluating the increasingly and accumulatively unfaithful adapted screenplays. The paper will cast its net wide to consider the functions of resolution and closures in film adaptations, considering cinematic, visual codas in place of literary resolutions. Film adaptations such as Sunrise (1927), Apocalypse Now (1979), Stalker (1979), Where the Wild Things Are (2009), We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011) and Under the Skin (2013) provide valuable discourses on the process of remediation, and the techniques used by cinema to provide resolution, closure, and continuation.

Biography

Jamie Sherry is Reader in English at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, working within the Centre for Adaptations, and co-organising the Association of Adaptation Studies annual conference since 2007. He is co-editor for the Journal of Screenwriting and is a steering committee member for the Screenwriting Research Network. Jamie is also a practicing screenwriter and script-editor for UK film and media production companies, including Working Title, BBC Films and Screen Yorkshire. He has published research on the industrial and theoretical processes of adaptation through production and screenwriting and will publish the monograph Screenwriting Film Adaptations: The History, Practice and Theory of the Adapted Screenplay on Palgrave Macmillan in 2022.

You are welcome to join the seminar on zoom by emailing us at ims@lnu.se

Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen