Fiction on Film

« Fiction on Film. Novel and Drama on Screen » / « Film et littérature :
roman et théâtre au cinéma »

Abstract:

The seminar will be devoted to a study of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road and its
adaptation for the screen.

McCarthy’s postapocalyptic novel The Road chronicles the journey of two survivors, a man
and his son. Equipped with a map in tatters whose fragments they have numbered, they are
making their way to the ocean. The narrative of their meaningless survival from day to day
revisits some of the tropes of the journey West turned into a flight to the East, in which the
different places can be read allegorically. The abandoned house triggers a reflection on the
meaning of the home; the supermarket stands as a vestige of a consumer society without
consumers, where the most ordinary items have become unknown to the child and where our
world only exists as scattered fragments of the past.

In his 2009 eponymous movie, Australian director John Hillcoat adapts for the screen Cormac
McCarthy’s legendary postapocalyptic novel The Road with English-Australian playwright and
screenwriter, Joe Penhall, best known for having adapted Ian McEwan's novel Enduring Love
to film in 2004 and created the Netflix original series Mindhunter (2017-19) on the birth of the
FBI profilers unit. Among other stars, Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee play a father
and his son desperately trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The film received
positive reviews and garnered some prizes, among which a BAFTA nomination for Best
Cinematography.

In this dismal tale of near-extinction, the road functions as a metaphor for the disappearance of
community and the emergence of a bleak form of nomadism. But uncharacteristically, it doesn’t
offer “the Man” (Mortensen) and “the Boy” (Smit-McPhee) any form of hope nor lead to any
display of conventional masculine heroism. The pair’s progress among the ruins of civilization
is some anti-Frontier-like itinerary inscribing on screen the result of Man’s ultimate
estrangement from Nature.

We’ll also focus on film terminology, interpretation of camera movements, use of lighting, and
generic hybridity with incursions into drama and horror – among other categories.

- Se familiariser avec les œuvres, courants et enjeux majeurs de l’adaptation de pièce et roman à
l’écran ainsi que des modes de représentation de la violence et de l’horreur dans le cinéma
américano-britannique contemporain : savoir décrypter les modes de transfert d’un médium à
un autre.

- Renforcer les outils de l’analyse du texte de théâtre, de roman et de film, tant dans une visée
généraliste (être capable de décrypter un texte ainsi que l’image animée, d’en comprendre les
codes sémiologiques et iconographiques et les usages, pouvoir en proposer une discussion en
anglais), que dans l’optique de la préparation aux concours de l’enseignement.

Contrôle continu

1 exposé oral (ou autre devoir) = 40% et 1 partiel en fin de semestre = 60%. Total  = 100%

Contrôle dérogatoire

Écrit de 3h = 100%

Anglais C1 & plus et une bonne maîtrise du français.

Selected Bibliography & Filmography: [To be completed in class]

A/ [Completed in class]

B/ John Hillcoat, The Road (2929 Productions, 2009)

Berger, James. “Twentieth Century Apocalypse: Forecasts and Aftermaths”. Twentieth Century
Literature, Winter 2000, Vol. 46, N° b4, “Literature and Apocalypse”: 387-395.

Blake, Richard A. “Dead End: John Hillcoat's 'The Road'”. America (Vol. 202, Issue 1), Jan. 4,
2010. gale.com/apps/doc/A216352447/BIC?u=txshracd2598&sid=summon&xid=97185094

Fisher, Mark. “Post-Apocalypse Now”, in Post-Traumatic Urbanism, Special Issue, Volume
80, Issue 5, September/October 2010: 70-73.

Peebles, Stacey. Cormac McCarthy and Performance. Page, Stage, Screen. Austin, U. of Texas
Press, 2017.

Stratton, Billy J. “Everything depends on reaching the coast”: Inscriptions of Placelessness in
John Hillcoat’s Adaptation of The Road”. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature,
Culture, and Theory, Volume 70, Number 4, Winter 2014, pp. 85-107.