TASC English Literature: Adaptations

This book provides students with a critical and historical introduction to the graphic novel. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey explore this exciting form of visual and literary communication, showing readers how to situate and analyse graphic novels since their rise to prominence half a century ago. Several key questions are addressed: what is the graphic novel? How do we read graphic novels as narrative forms? Why is page design and publishing format so significant? What theories are developing to explain the genre? How is this form blurring the categories of high and popular literature? Why are graphic novelists nostalgic for the old comics? T

"Movie Comics" is the first book to study the long history of both comics-to-film and film-to-comics adaptations, covering everything from silent films starring Happy Hooligan to sound films and serials featuring Dick Tracy and Superman to comic books starring John Wayne, Gene Autry, Bob Hope, Abbott & Costello, Alan Ladd, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. With a special focus on the Classical Hollywood era, Blair Davis investigates the factors that spurred this media convergence, as the film and comics industries joined forces to expand the reach of their various brands. While analyzing this production history, he also tracks the artistic coevolution of films and comics, considering the many formal elements that each medium adopted and adapted from the other. As it explores our abiding desire to experience the same characters and stories in multiple forms, Movie Comics gives readers a new appreciation for the unique qualities of the illustrated page and the cinematic moving image.

From concept to character, from opening scene to finished script, here are easily understood guidelines to help aspiring screenwriters - from novices to practiced writers - hone their craft. Filled with updated material - including all-new personal anecdotes and insights, guidelines on marketing and collaboration, plus analyses of recent films, from American Beauty to Lord of the Rings - Screenplay presents a step-by-step, comprehensive technique for writing the screenplay that will succeed in Hollywood. Discover: - Why the first ten pages of your script are crucially important - How to visually grab the reader from page one, word one - Why structure and character are the essential foundation of your screenplay - How to adapt a novel, a play, or an article into a screenplay - Tips on protecting your work - three legal ways to claim ownership of your screenplay - The essentials of writing great dialogue, creating character, building a story line, overcoming writer's block, getting an agent, and much more.

Two boys play a game. They fight, they laugh, they jump up and down, they play dead. Downstairs, their parents argue. As the shouting gets louder, their bedroom will no longer be able to protect them from the violence of the outside world. Their iconic fate will ensure they enter mythology as two of the most tragic siblings of all time.

In her book, Snyder explores both literature and film as separate entities, detailing the analytical process of interpreting novels and short stories, as well as films. She then introduces a means to analyzing literature-to-film adaptations, drawing from the concept of intertextual comparison. Snyder writes not only from the perspective of a fiction writer but also as an instructor of writing, literature, and film adaptation. She employs the use of specific film adaptations (Frankenstein, Children of Men, Away from Her) to show the analytical process put into practice. Her approach to film adaptation is designed for students just beginning their academic journey but also for those students well on their way. The book also is written for high school and college instructors who teach film adaptations in the classroom.

Building upon the wide range of selections and the extensive historical coverage that marked previous editions, this new compilation stretches from the earliest attempts to define the cinema to the most recent efforts to place film in the contexts of psychology, sociology, and philosophy, and to explore issues of gender and race. Reorganized into eight sections - each comprising the major field of critical controversy and analysis - this new edition features reformulated introductions and biographical headnotes that contextualize the readings, making the text more accessible than ever tostudents, film enthusiasts, and general readers alike. The seventh edition also integrates exciting new material on feminist theory, queer cinema, and global cinema, as well as a new section, 'Digitization and Globalization,' which engages important recent developments in technology and worldcinema.

A critical examination of the long established tradition of adapting classic novels to film or TV screen. It is historically wide-ranging, encompassing novelists from Jane Austen to Michael Ondaatje. The early cinema ransacked literature for stories suitable for retelling in moving pictures. Dickens was particular popular in the silent days and has remained so every since. As the art of the cinema matured, and cinematography, music, special effects and sound were improved, the art of dramatization began to produce high quality version of respected novels. This service to literature was one way the cinema gained respectablity.

"Dialog is one of the best known - and obvious - elements in a film. But the language of cinema is more subtle and sophisticated than dialog alone. From Metropolis to Kill Bill, this remarkable reference guide reveals 100 of the most potent storytelling tools of the film medium. It demonstrates how master screenwriters and directors depend on cinematic devices to pump up action, create characters, and energize a motion picture's plot. Cinematic Storytelling compresses 100 years of film history, outlining the important connection between film technique and storytelling. It shows how the purposeful use of film techniques like lighting, editing, and sound can evoke audience emotions like fear, hatred, or anger without a word of dialog. It demonstrates how character values and themes are expressed cumulatively over time and nonverbally. In this, the reader is given both the critical tools to better understand modern moviemaking and the creative tools to more fully exploit the dramatic potential of the medium."--Jacket

After examining film's close relation to other narrative media such as the novel, painting, photography, television, and even music, the book discusses the elements necessary to understand how films convey meaning, and, more importantly, how we can best discern all that a film is attempting to communicate. In addition, Monaco stresses the still-evolving digital context of film throughout--one of the new sections looks at the untrustworthy nature of digital images and sound--and his chapter on multimedia brings media criticism into the twenty-first century with a thorough discussion of topics like virtual reality, cyberspace, and the proximity of both to film. With hundreds of illustrative black-and-white film stills and diagrams, How to Read a Film is an indispensable addition to the library of everyone who loves the cinema and wants to understand it better.