Cultures de l'image

AU CHOIX, VERSION 1 OU VERSION 2 DU COURS :

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

VERSION 1

Abstract:

Shakespeare’s early revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus (1594) belongs with the spectacular stage violence of the early 1590s, steeped in the plays of Seneca. As in its Roman source, Seneca’s Thyestes, the representation of violence in Titus Andronicus crosses the line into taboo territory (cannibalism). Yet by catering to the taste of early modern audiences for violence for its own sake, the play disturbingly suggests acceptance of, and insensibility to it, disconnecting violence from any moral or cultural framework, as Julie Taymor suggested in her 1999 eponymous film version. Merging ancient and modern, she makes a powerful statement on Shakespeare’s world and our own as a “wilderness of tigers”.

&

Stephen King's 1977 horror bestseller The Shining has been notoriously adapted on screen by Stanley Kubrick in 1980 - and later somehow “corrected” by King himself in the miniseries he worked on with showrunner Mick Garris, Stephen King’s Shining (Warner Bros. TV, 1997). Kubrick chronicles the inscription of violence and abnormality using various narrative, aesthetic and formal strategies which depart from the conventions of the horror film. He tells the disturbing story of Jack’s alcohol addiction and destructive madness which jars in a problematic way with the underlying tale of the supernatural and resident evil, causing a problematic generic tension. In both the film and TV series, we’ll see how these codes and conventions are rooted in a long history of representation of violence harking back to Shakespeare’s work and times.

VERSION 2

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.

Session 1 et session 2
Écrit de 3h = 100% 

Anglais C1 & plus et une bonne maîtrise du français.

VERSION 1 :

Selected Bibliography & Filmography:

A/ Taymor, Julie, Titus, with Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange.

Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Alan Hughes, New Cambridge Shakespeare, 1994.

Artaud, Antonin : Le Théâtre de la cruauté, in Le Théâtre et son double (Paris : Gallimard, coll. Folio, 1964).

Foucault, Michel: Surveiller et Punir (Paris : Gallimard, coll. Tel, 1975).

Montaigne, “De la cruauté”, Essais, II, chap. 11.

Foakes, R.A., Shakespeare and violence, Cambridge, CUP, 2003.

GARRIS, Mick. Stephen King’s Shining, miniseries in 3 episodes, Warner Bros. TV, 1997.

Lehmann, Courtney “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda: How Shakespeare and the Renaissance Are Taking the Rage out of Feminism,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53.2 Screen Shakespeare (Summer, 2002), pp. 260-79.

McCandless, David “A Tale of Two Tituses: Julie Taymor's Vision on Stage and Screen” Shakespeare Quarterly 53.4 (Winter, 2002), pp. 487-511.

Reese, Jack E., The Formalization of Horror in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 21.1 (Winter, 1970), pp. 77-84

Rowe, Katherine A, “Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 45.3 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 279-303

Smith, Molly E., "Spectacles of Torment in Titus Andronicus," Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 36 (1996): 315-31

Willis, Deborah, The Gnawing Vulture": Revenge, Trauma Theory, and "Titus Andronicus" Shakespeare Quarterly 53.1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 21-52.

B/ Allen, Graham. “The Unempty Wasp’s Nest: Kubrick’s The Shining, Adaptation, Chance, Interpretation,” Adaptation, Vol. 8, No. 3: 361-371.

Barry, Robert. “The Shining’s Hauntological Score”, Electric Sheep, 12/14/2010, http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/2010/12/14/the-shining%E2%%80%99s-hauntological-score/

Barthes, Roland. “The Rhetoric of the Image,” reproduced in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977: 44.

Bolt, Barbara. Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2004.

https://www.academia.edu/939327/Art_beyond_representation_the_performative_power_of_the_image.

BROWN, Simon. Screening Stephen King. Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018.

Falsetto, Mario. Stanley Kubrick. A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis. Westport, Conn. & London: Praeger, 1994. 

Flanagan, Mike. Doctor Sleep, with Ewan McGregor, Nov. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgxqJwd4ljQ 

Holland-Toll, Linda J. “Bakhtin’s Carnival Reversed: King’s The Shining as Dark Carnival.” Journal of Popular Culture 33, 2 (Fall 1999): 131-145.

Hutchins, Peter. The Horror Film. Harlow, England, London, New York: Pearson Longman, 2004.

Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. London: Routledge, 1990.

Jaunas, Vincent et Jean-François Baillon. Stanley Kubrick. Nouveaux Horizons. Essais. Revue interdisciplinaire d’Humanités. Pessac: Ecole Doctorale Montaigne-Humanités / Université Bordeaux Montaigne, Hors série 2017.

Johnson, Diane. “Talking about ‘The Shining’ with Diane Johnson.” Chicago Review Vol. 33 N° 1 (Summer 1981): 75-79. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25305098 .

Kagan, Norman. The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick. 3^rd Ed. New York: Continuum, 2000.

Kilker, Robert. “All roads lead to the abject: the monstrous feminine and gender boundaries in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining”, Literature-Film Quarterly 34.1 (Jan. 2006): 54-62.

King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Berkley Books, 1983.

------------------- Doctor Sleep. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013.

-------------------The Shining. New York: Doubleday, 1977. https://novels77.com/the-shining/part-one-prefatory-matters-chapter-1-job-interview-996250.html

Kubrick, Stanley. Fear and Desire, Kubrick Family, 1953.

------------------- The Shining, Warner Brothers, 1980.

Luckhurst, Roger. The Shining. London: BFI Film Classics, 2013. https://www.salon.com/2018/07/08/the-6-stages-of-madness-in-the-shining/ .

McAvoy, Catriona. “The Uncanny, the Gothic and the Loner: Intertextuality in the Adaptation Process of The Shining,” Adaptation Vol. 8, No. 3 (2015): 345-360.

McCaffery, Larry, and Diane Johnson. “Talking about ‘The Shining’ with Diane Johnson,” Chicago Review, Vol. 33, N°. 1 (Summer 1981): 75-79.

Migliozzi, Anna. “The Attraction of evil and the destruction of meaning”, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (2016) 97: 1019-1034.

Naremore, James. "Stanley Kubrick and the Aesthetics of the Grotesque", Film Quarterly, 60, 1 (Fall 2006): 4-14.

Nelson, Thomas Allen. Kubrick. Inside a Film Artist’s Maze. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2000.

Norden, Eric. Playboy Interview: Stephen King, Title Record # 1361800, Playboy, June 1983.

https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2018/03/08/stephen-king-playboy-interview-1983/

Open Culture, http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/stanley-kubricks-annotated-copy-of-stephen-kings-the-shining.html

PAQUET-DEYRIS, Anne-Marie. “Burning Down the House in Kubrick’s The Shining », A Critical Companion to Stanley Kubrick, Elsa Colombani, Ed., Lexington Books, Lanham, Boulder, New York, London, 2020: 37-50.

Rasmussen, Randy. Stanley Kubrick. Seven Films Analyzed. Jefferson, North Carolina & London: McFarland, 2001.

Spadoni, robert. Uncanny Bodies. The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2007.

Walker & al. Stanley Kubrick, Director. A Visual Analysis. New York & London: Norton, 1999.

Wang, Ya-huei. “Archetypal Anxieties in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. K@ta: A Biannual Publication on the Study of Language and Literature Vol. 13, N° 1 (1 Jan. 2011): 112-122.

World Heritage Encyclopedia, http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/eng/The_Shining_(novel)

VERSION 2 :

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.