Adaptation Studies and Learning: New Frontiers by Laurence Raw & Tony Gurr

Author:Laurence Raw & Tony Gurr [Raw, Laurence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2013-04-04T04:30:00+00:00

In many ways, this conception of acting and performance in film adaptation is characteristic of an era that has witnessed great advances in understanding brain structure, processes, and consciousness. Blair comments that “definitions of personhood, reason and emotion are being rethought in light of new information about brain structure and neurochemical processes, and how these manifest in consciousness and behavior” (3). Many actors now “define their focus [in rehearsal and performance] as experiential and emotional, rather than factual or critical, and resist being analytical or technical” (5). Rather than searching for a coherent interpretation of the characters they play on screen, they create a series of contradictory narratives depicting what they conceive as the “real,” or the “truthful,” in a context where “popular forms, media and technologies keep shifting the ground of what we understand those [terms] to be” (23).

Drazan’s film is an adaptation of a stage play about the process of adaptation that occurs when actors probe “deeply into the poetry and mystery of what it means to act and, thus, what it means to be human” (Blair xiv). This kind of approach is also evident in other films not necessarily adapted from source texts—notably, Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, whose performances “appear on screen as concentrated collage fragments” (Baron 48): audiences learn about the characters’ feelings primarily through the actors’ “word choices, intonations, and inflections” (52). Nicolas Cage uses direct and strong movements to portray Charlie Kaufman but flexible and strong movements to play Charlie’s twin brother Donald. Our attention focuses on these movements—not only as a way of understanding the characters but also to “get evidence about the actors’ basic temperaments and the strategies they use to get what they want” (53). As Charlie, Cage uses pressing gestures that are direct, sustained, and strong; as Donald, he uses thrusting movements that are direct, sudden, and strong. In the terms set forth by Bruner, Cage creates the life narratives of his two characters that help to “structure perceptual experience . . . organize memory . . . segment and purpose-build the very ‘events’ of a life” (Bruner, “Life as Narrative,” 694–5). Cage provides a window into his characters’ consciousness: incoherent, contradictory, and perpetually adaptable.

There is no doubt that film actors are “conscious adapters,” creating a series of narratives through gesture and tone to communicate something about their characters to the audiences. Such techniques are especially evident in films like Hurlyburly and Adaptation, in which other elements of the mise-en-scène—plot, lighting, and music—assume subordinate roles.[9] From a 21st-century learning perspective, both films offer good examples of openness in action: the actors create characters by “invit[ing] any experience” into themselves and “respond[ing] to it fully” through gesture, tone, and intonation. By such means, they prove the truth of the assertion that “life’s an adventure [both on and off the screen]. You love the exhilaration of every single moment” (Esper and DiMarco 109). The actors work spontaneously off one another from moment to moment, their reactions dictated by their partners’ behavior. This is

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