Screening Characters

Characters are central to our experiences of screened fictions and invite a host of questions. The contributors to Screening Characters draw on archival material, interviews, philosophical inquiry, and conceptual analysis in order to give new, thought-provoking answers to these queries. Providing multifaceted accounts of the nature of screen characters, contributions are organized around a series of important subjects, including issues of class, race, ethics, and generic types as they are encountered in moving image media. These topics, in turn, are personified by such memorable figures as Cary Grant, Jon Hamm, Audrey Hepburn, and Seul-gi Kim, in addition to avatars, online personalities, animated characters, and the ensembles of shows such as The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad.

Youth has been represented on screen for decades and has informed many directors' visual, narrative and social perspectives, but there has not been a body of work addressing the richness and complexity of this topic in a French and Francophone context. This volume offers new insights into the works of emerging and well-established directors alike, who all chose to place youth at the heart of their narrative and aesthetic concerns. Showing how the topic of 'youth' has inspired filmmakers to explore and reinvent common tropes associated with young people, the book also addresses how the representation of youth can be used to mirror the tensions - political, social, religious, economic or cultural - that agitate a society at a given time in its history.

Winner of The 2019 Waclaw Lednicki Humanities Award Screening Auschwitz examines the classic Polish Holocaust film The Last Stage (Ostatni etap), directed by the Auschwitz survivor Wanda Jakubowska (1907–1998). Released in 1948, The Last Stage was a pioneering work and the first narrative film to portray the Nazi concentration and extermination camp complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Marek Haltof’s fascinating book offers English-speaking readers a wealth of new materials, mostly from original Polish sources obtained through extensive archival research. With its powerful dramatization of the camp experience, The Last Stage established several quasi-documentary themes easily discernible in later film narratives of the Shoah: dark, realistic images of the camp, a passionate moral appeal, and clear divisions between victims and perpetrators. Jakubowska’s film introduced images that are now archetypal—for example, morning and evening roll calls on the Appelplatz, the arrival of transport trains at Birkenau, the separation of families upon arrival, and tracking shots over the belongings left behind by those who were gassed. These and other images are taken up by a number of subsequent American films, including George Stevens’s The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Alan Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice (1982), and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). Haltof discusses the unusual circumstances that surrounded the film's production on location at Auschwitz-Birkenau and summarizes critical debates surrounding the film’s release. The book offers much of interest to film historians and readers interested in the Holocaust.

George Stevens was the first to know - months before Frank D. Gilroy had even an inkling. As they scouted locations for The Only Game in Town in 1968, Stevens repeatedly handed Gilroy his viewfinder to consider possible scenes. Asked to explain why he was so insistent on this procedure, Stevens answered with certainty, "You're going to direct some day". Gilroy recalled Stevens' words two years later when, unhappy with the limited role of screenwriter, he optioned Desperate Characters by Paula Fox, determined not only to adapt her novel for the screen but to direct the film. Fortunately for film buffs, film historians, film students, and prospective independent film producers, Gilroy is a compulsive diarist who wrote I Wake Up Screening! while he made four independent feature films - each accorded three stars in Leonard Maltin's TV Movies and Video Guide - for a total investment of two million dollars (for all four films!). These intimate logs of the making of Desperate Characters, Once in Paris, The Gig, and The Luckiest Man in the World show clearly that a film school that doesn't include in its curriculum discussions of negotiating with the Teamsters and of raising money by independent producers is leaving out vital parts of the film-making process. Because Gilroy wrote the scripts, raised the money, assembled the production team, directed, opened each of the four films, and even ventured into the murky world of distribution, I Wake Up Screening! is a vast repository of information about film making in general and independent film making in particular. It is not recommended for anyone who wishes to preserve a fairy-tale notion about feature film making. When Gilroy first consideredpublishing these logs, his wife encouraged him. "Do it", she said. "If it stops one person from following in your footsteps it will be worthwhile".

Rather than limiting the cinema, as certain French New Wave critics feared, adaptation has encouraged new inspiration to explore the possibilities of the intersection of text and film. This collection of essays covers various aspects of adaptation studies--questions of genre and myth, race and gender, readaptation, and pedagogical and practical approaches.

In this book, each chapter explores significant Irish texts in their literary, cultural, and historical contexts. With an introduction that establishes the multiple critical contexts for Irish cinema, literature, and their adaptive textual worlds, the volume addresses some of the most popular and important late 20th-Century and 21st Century works that have had an impact on the Irish and global cinema and literary landscape. A remarkable series of acclaimed and profitable domestic productions during the past three decades has accompanied, while chronicling, Ireland’s struggle with self-identity, national consciousness, and cultural expression, such that the story of contemporary Irish cinema is in many ways the story of the young nation’s growth pains and travails. Whereas Irish literature had long stood as the nation’s foremost artistic achievement, it is not too much to say that film now rivals literature as Ireland’s key form of cultural expression. The proliferation of successful screen versionings of Irish fiction and drama shows how intimately the contemporary Irish cinema is tied to the project of both understanding and complicating (even denying) a national identity that has undergone radical change during the past three decades. This present volume is the first to present a collective accounting of that productive synergy, which has seen so much of contemporary Irish literature transferred to the screen.