Midterm Study Guide -- Spring 2008 -- part 2 (films!)

  Now let's have something more than this picture of Martin Sheen as Willard!

At this point, we've seen scenes from three films.  I am going to take out the copy of A Doll's House that the Rockville campus' library has, but I will include any information from that film on the study guide for drama/theater.

Apocalypse Now (1979) dir. Francis Ford Coppola (who also directed The Godfather--parts 1, 2, and 3).  According to Coppola at the time, "This isn't a film about Vietnam.  This is Vietnam."  The cast included Martin Sheen (Willard), Marlon Brando (Kurtz), Robert Duvall (Lt.Col. Kilgore, the officer with the cavalry hat), a very young Laurence Fishburne (Clean, one of the men on the boat), Albert Hall (Chief, the captain of the boat), Frederic Forrest (Chef, another of the men on the boat), Timothy Bottoms (Lance, the surfer on the boat), and Dennis Hopper (the photojournalist/a revision of the Russian in Heart of Darkness).

Jane Eyre (1944) dir. Robert Stevenson.  The novelist Aldous Huxley was among the screenwriters for this film.  In a number of scenes, Jane's narration appears as highlighted text in a book.  Some of this narration is not Bronte's novel but Huxley et al's screenplay.  Similarly, Dr. Rivers, the one adult who is kind to Jane, appears in the film but not in the book.  Joan Fontaine plays Jane as an adult; Peggy Anne Garner plays her as a child.  Orson Welles plays Mr. Rochester, her Byronic employer and later husband.  Margaret O'Brien plays Jane's pupil and Mr. Rochester's illegitimate daughter, Adele.   With this film's deep focus, it is hard to believe that it was filmed on a set and not at an actual castle.

David Copperfield (1999) -- This version of Dickens' novel (the closest thing we'll probably ever get to his autobiography) stars Daniel Radcliffe as the young David Copperfield.  We saw the following scenes: the evening that David is born to his widowed mother (his aunt Betsy Trotwood visits), David's term at a bad school (Ian McKellan plays the foul-tempered teacher), and his visit from Barkis (who will later marry David's nurse Peggotty) and Peggotty's nephew Ham.  At this bad school, David nevertheless meets Steerforth, a spoiled young man who becomes the boy's protector.

Which of these films would you include in a film and literature course?

Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and Other Movies Based on 19th Century Novels

As we finish up our unit on novels and life writing, I thought that I'd show some movies based on canonical 19th century novels.  These movies will make for an interesting bridge between Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter.

The picture above is from the 1944 Jane Eyre starring Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles.  The link below is to a review of the DVD of this movie.  I like that it focuses on both the book and the movie, putting both in context.  By the way, one of the screenwriters for this movie was Aldous Huxley, an important novelist in his own right.

http://www.dvdtown.com/reviews/jane-eyre/4599

Here is the IMDB page for this movie:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036969/

Here British journalist Tanya Gold explains the appeal of Jane Eyre:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=407404&in_page_id=1879
 The picture below is from the most recent version of Jane Eyre:

In 1996, Franco Zeffirelli directed a theatrically-released version of Jane Eyre starring Charlotte Gainsborough and William Hurt.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116684/

Below is a poster from the 1999 version of David Copperfield that we will see in class.

Although this poster dates from the 1970s (it is colorized), it is a great picture of the 1935 version of David Copperfield with W.C. Fields as Mr. Micawber.
For more information about the novel David Copperfield, see this page by David A. Perdue:

http://charlesdickenspage.com/copperfield.html

PBS' site for the 1999 David Copperfield is here. 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/programs/davidcopperfield/index.html

Interviews with the director and the screenwriter respectively are below:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/programs/davidcopperfield/ei_curtis.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/programs/davidcopperfield/ei_hodges.html

If you are more visually oriented, you may enjoy this article:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/programs/davidcopperfield/notes.html

Bleak House is my favorite novel by Dickens:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/bleakhouse/index.html

However, I mustn't neglect Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon (who hated each other):

Or the recent remake of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice:

But, as I've said in class, one often neglects the fact that people other than the British were writing novels and that movies were made of these novels.

See this link for Roger Ebert's review of Cousin Bette, a 1998 film based on one of Balzac's novels:  http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19980612/REVIEWS/806120303/1023

You may find Cousin Bette to be more interesting as it details a forty-something woman's revenge on her family and the man who refused to marry her:

This year Jacques Rivette directed an adaptation of Balzac's novella, The Duchess of Langaise.  However, it was not well-received, and it left the E Street Cinema pretty quickly.

http://www.observer.com/2008/balzac-book-goes-bust-big-screen-atrocities-africa

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08102/872313-42.stm

In 1993, French director Claude Berri made a movie based on Emile Zola's novel Germinal:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107002/



I am surprised that I did *not* see this movie as one of my friends back in the day had liked Zola's novel.  The picture above is a scene from that movie. 

Every so often someone does a film version of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther

http://www.the-sorrows-of-young-werther.com/index2.html

And then there is Tolstoy's War and Peace:

http://www.artdish.com/ubbcgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=39&t=000327

http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid53137.aspx

Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda starred in a Hollywood version of War and Peace.

The Novel Continued

Since my previous entry on the novel (cross-posted from EN 201) emphasizes the origins of this genre, I'd like to post an entry that emphasizes later works.  I will begin with the same definition of the novel that I posted earlier, but we will move in a different direction.  In fact, the picture above (the cover of Mariama Ba's novel in French) represents this different direction!

But let's begin with our definition:

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/novels/history/define.htm

Prof. Taormina's study of the novel emphasizes English-language novels although, as we see in her outline of the 20th century novel, she does not exclude novels from other traditions.

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/novels/history/origins.htm

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/novels/history/19thcent.htm

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/novels/history/20thcent.htm

How does the novel look if we change our positing in time and in culture?

In the early 20th century, a scholar (or scholars) with the initials C. H. C. W. examined the history of the French novel.  Some novelists (Scudery, Rousseau, Balzac, Flaubert) are in our anthology; some (Hugo, Zola) are not.

http://www.bartleby.com/313/1/2000.html

More recently, a professor at Rice University designed this course on the history of the novel in French.  Note that he includes novelists from Africa and the Caribbean in his course:

http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~fren220/


The 19th-century novel (Balzac, Flaubert, Zola) was known for its penetrating, unflinching realism and its authors' efforts to position themselves as scientists and sociologists rather than storytellers or moralists:

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/hum_303/naturalism.html

Twentieth-century French novelists also categorized their work as "Nouveaux Romans" or new novels.  These were even more rigorous, becoming abstract rather than realistic.

http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0260.html

Here is a 2004 essay by a Nigerian novelist on the African novel:

http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/art/2004/2004jun/040625-novel.html

This British publisher has compiled a list of 19th and 20th century Russian novels:

http://www.mantex.co.uk/ou/aa810/rus-19c.htm

http://www.mantex.co.uk/ou/a319/rus-20c.htm

Here is an overview of Chinese literature that mentions the novel's place in this tradition:

http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/china/lit/brief.htm

The American poet and translator Kenneth Rexroth discusses the Chinese novel here.  Note that he is critical of contemporary Western culture:

http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/chinesenovels.htm

I'll end with some sites about magical realism, an international style of the late 20th century and today:

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/MagicalRealism.html

http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_mr.html

And we have not even talked about the genre novel, a term that I suspect will become more and more important as we look back at late 20th & early 21st century literature!