Brian McFarlane; Clarendon Press, 1996, Oxford

Part I Backgrounds, Issues, and a New Agenda

BACKGROUNDS

Conrad, Griffith, and 'Seeing'

Commentators in the field are fond of quoting Joseph Conrad's famous statement of his novelistic intention: 'My task which I…

Adapting material previously published in another genre is not something that the film industry invented. Classical Greek playwrights adapted myths that had been passed on through an oral tradition; Shakespeare appropriated materials for his plays from various sources. And as soon as the makers of cinema recognized that telling a good story in moving pictures required a “good story,” adaptations of novels, plays, and short stories became commonplace. Shortly…

Documentary and Literal Adaptation

Documentary films seek a form of literal adaptation to be historically sound. But the nature of historical truth achieved by documentary is debatable. Documentary is not a verbatim representation. As noted earlier, conventional wisdom defines documentary as “relating to or found in documents: aiming at presentation of reality . . . broadly factual, objective.” Objective? As historian Erik…

This essay offers an overview of adaptation, an initiation for the educated reader who is not a communications or film specialist. It will reference “The Social and Cultural Construction of Abraham Lincoln in U.S. Movies and on U.S. TV”—but mainly with an eye to the larger issue of cinematographic adaptation itself.

Essentials…

Telling tales A guide to developing effective storytelling programmes for museums Researched and written by Emily Johnsson Edited by Claire Adler We are stories. We make sense of the world through stories. We make meaning out of stories and remember through stories.

2 ISBN 1-905911-01-7 London…

A LETTER FROM THE AUTHOR There are now over 7.18 billion people in the world, and we re more in touch than we ever have been. Technology has brought us closer to each other, giving us the ability to share just about anything with just about anyone, any time. The advent of social media has made the world smaller. We Are Social reports that over 2 billion people worldwide use social media, meaning 28% of the global population is interconnected. 2 billion people…