Film and Fiction

This course addresses three distinct but related critical problems in the contemporary understanding of film and fiction. The most general is the question of how we might go about linking the practice of criticism in the literary arts with that of the screen arts. Where are the common issues of structure, form, narration, point of view management, and the like? Where, on the other hand, are the crucial differences that lie in the particularities of each domain--the problem that some have labeled “medium specificity” in the arts? The second problem has to do more particularly with questions of adaptation. Adaptation is a fact of our cultural experience that we encounter in many circumstances, but perhaps in none more insistently as when we witness the reproduction of a literary narrative in cinematic or televisual form. Adaptation theory has taught us to look beyond the narrow criterion of “fidelity” as far too limiting in scope. But when we look beyond, what do we look for, and what other concepts guide our exploration? A number of film noir adaptations will serve as our key examples: Ray’s adaptation of Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place, Hitchcock’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, and Visconti’s adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. The third and final problem has to do with the now rampant genre of the “film based on fact,” especially when the facts derive from a particular source text, as in the recent case of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman? Why has this genre become so popular? What are its particular genre markings (e.g., excessive stylization, the use of documentary footage of the actual persons and events involved)? Perhaps most importantly, how does fictionalization shape our sense of the facts in particular cases (the police shooting of an unarmed man in Coogler’s Fruitvale Station or the Abscam Scandal in Russell’s American Hustle? In addition to the required discussions, there will be daily required screenings for the course, and non-daily reading assignments mostly limited to relatively short novels or non-fiction works. Students will write a 3-page paper, an 8-page paper, a couple of posts, and complete a final content-assessment exercise.