The History of French Literature on Film

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French novels, plays, poems and short stories, however temporally or culturally distant from us, continue to be incarnated and reincarnated on cinema screens across the world. From the silent films of Georges Mlis to the Hollywood production of Gustave Flauberts Madame Bovary directed by Sophie Barthes, The History of French Literature on Film explores the key films, directors, and movements that have shaped the adaptation of works by French authors since the end of the 19th century. Across six chapters, Griffiths and Watts examine the factors that have driven this vibrant adaptive industry, as filmmakers have turned to literature in search of commercial profits, cultural legitimacy, and stories rich in dramatic potential. The volume also explains how the work of theorists from a variety of disciplines (literary theory, translation theory, adaptation theory), can help to deepen both our understanding and our appreciation of literary adaptation as a creative practice. Finally, this volume seeks to make clear that adaptation is never a simple transcription of an earlier literary work. It is always simultaneously an adaptation of the society and era for which it is created. Adaptations of French literature are thus not only valuable artistic artefacts in their own right, so too are they important historical documents which testify to the values and tastes of their own time.

Reviews

Kate Griffiths and Andrew Watts pass the baton of adaptation between them, chapter to chapter, and never flag in their 125-year relay race through film history. They focus on French literary sources because so many producers, directors and spectatorsnot just French oneshave always done so. Across wildly distinct periods of national and transnational history, French literature has been passed around, becoming itself a highly valued cultural relay. It has been honored, toyed with, profited from, and often re-energized in an unregulated fairground economy that the authors delight in exposing. * Dudley Andrew, R. Selden Rose Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University, USA *
Bold in its historical and transnational scope, incisive in its argument, and illuminating in its analysis, The History of French Literature on Film is a milestone achievement a study of deep value to researchers in adaptation studies, film studies, translation studies, and cultural history. Griffiths and Watts offer a vision for how we should value adaptation for its intrinsic innovation and also, crucially, for what the adaptive process reveals of our world and times, present and past, as it shapes and is shaped by social, economic, interpersonal, political, aesthetic, contextual, and diasporic pressures and possibilities across cinemas long history. Important revisionist readings of Tradition of Quality cinema and 1970s porn bring fresh angles to film studies, and to wider research in middle-brow cultures and postcolonial studies. Expert discussion, abundant insights, and sheer clarity of prose make this a compelling title for readers in search of a sense-making study of the agency and the porosity of film adaptation across the long twentieth century. * Susan Harrow, Ashley Watkins Professor of French, University of Bristol, UK *
This rich and thought-provoking volume will instantly become required reading for anyone teaching, or studying, screen adaptations of French literature. * French Studies *

Author Bio

Kate Griffiths is Professor of French and Translation Studies at Cardiff University, Wales, UK. She has published widely on the multimedia adaptation of literary sources. Her first book focused on literature and cinema (Zola and the Artistry of Adaptation, 2009) and her second on multi-media adaptation of nineteenth-century texts (Adapting Nineteenth-Century France, 2013). Her third book analysed the relationship between literature and television, (Zola and the Art of Television, 2020) She is currently working on a monograph on the adaptation of world literature on BBC radio. Andrew Watts is Reader in French Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is the author of Preserving the Provinces: Small Town and Countryside in the Work of Honor de Balzac (2007), co-author (with Kate Griffiths) of Adapting Nineteenth-Century France: Literature in Film, Theatre, Television, Radio and Print (2013), and co-editor (with Owen Heathcote) of The Cambridge Companion to Balzac (2017). He has written numerous articles and book chapters on multimedia adaptation, most notably in relation to nineteenth-century French literature.