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6 - Louis Malle and Uncle Vanya
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- By Angus Wrenn
- Edited by Alexandra Smith, University of Edinburgh, Olga Sobolev, London School of Economics and Political Science
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- Book:
- Film Adaptations of Russian Classics
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 18 November 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 March 2023, pp 144-164
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Summary
To a degree even greater than applies with, for example, opera, cinema is a quintessentially collaborative artform. Almost without exception, a film given a commercial release on any scale is not an expression of even the director’s intentions in isolation, but the product of multiple authors, screenplay writers, camera operators, casting directors, producers and executive producers, post-production and film conglomerate magnates. At the most commercial end of the spectrum a major Hollywood production can even become an exercise in so-called ‘product placement’ and ‘subliminal brand endorsement’, in the shape of James Bond’s Aston-Martin, or Michael J. Fox’s Nike trainers in Back to the Future (1985). Does a film come into existence primarily as an act of artistic expression, or first and foremost to shift popcorn and soft drinks? Scarcely a big budget production by American standards ($1.75 million), Louis Malle’s film Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) might seem a long way from Hollywood films of that sort, but even here, as will be seen, questions of something akin to brand promotion are not entirely irrelevant.
Nonetheless, it is hard to see how this film could be further from the expected Hollywood model, even though Malle filmed in the United States rather than his native France, and he uses an entirely American cast. In the first case, the film is a screen adaptation of a stage play, not a formula favoured by the Hollywood commercial ‘blockbuster’ system, rare exceptions being 12 Angry Men (1957), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), or Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), adapting Edward Albee’s 1962 stage play. However, Vanya on 42nd Street, as an adaptation of a late nineteenth-century classic Russian stage play, involves still further layers in the process of collaboration. In another, political sense of the word, collaboration might be said to explain the fact that Malle spent the later 1970s making films in North America rather than in his native France, and in English.
Chapter Six - “Come and Visit Us in Ten Years’ Time!”: Representation of H. G. Wells on the Russian Stage and Screen
- from Part Two - WELLS IN RUSSIA: POST-WORLD WAR II
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- By Olga Sobolev, London School of Economics and Political Science., Angus Wrenn, London School of Economics since 1997.
- Edited by Galya Diment
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- Book:
- H. G. Wells and All Things Russian
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 06 September 2019
- Print publication:
- 26 July 2019, pp 113-128
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Summary
At the time of Wells's first visit to Russia in 1914, he was already one of England's best known and most widely read authors – his fame resting largely on a series of scientific romances, which were translated into Russian remarkably early, as far back as the end of the 1890s. Even Lev Tolstoy, no admirer of Milton and Shakespeare, was moved enough by his fiction to ask through Aylmer Maude, their mutual friend, to send him a copy of Wells's stories. In 1916 the publishing house of Sytin launched the first edition of Wells's collected writings, 10 volumes of which were released before the 1917 October upheaval. Among others, The War of the Worlds was a continuous favourite and an uncontested bestseller of the day: published in England in 1898, it was translated into Russian the same year, and then reprinted annually up until the 1917 Revolution. The novel drew the attention of Alexander Drankov – a leading pioneer in the domain of Russian filmmaking, who in the early 1910s made an attempt to create the first Russian screen adaptation of Wells's tale, though this was largely unsuccessful due to some insurmountable technical difficulties in producing the working models of Martian vessels.
In Soviet Russia, Wells's literary prominence was not cut short, as happened with so many other ‘capitalist’ Western authors. According to the catalogues of the National Library of Russia (St Petersburg), there are more Russian translations and editions of Wells than of any other prose author writing in English. His enticing social utopianism and his faith in the progress of science continued to have an understandable influence on the generations of the Soviet post-revolutionary authors, including such major figures as Zamyatin and Bulgakov. The situation was different with regard to the reception of Wells in Soviet film-culture. In the country of the illiterate peasant masses, cinema was always seen as a major means of communist propaganda, which was under severe state, and often Stalin's, personal control. The strictness of this censorship was commented upon even by the most sympathetic Western observers. Thus, having stayed in Moscow in 1926– 27, Walter Benjamin, a firm proponent of Marxist ideals, drew attention (in his Moscow Diary, published in Die Kreatur, in 1927) to the extraordinarily politicized culture of the country where, he argued, it was essential to ‘project your thoughts into something like a preestablished field offeree’.
18 - Henry James (1843–1916): Henry James's Europe
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- By Angus Wrenn
- Edited by Michael Bell, University of Warwick
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists
- Published online:
- 28 September 2012
- Print publication:
- 14 June 2012, pp 310-326
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Summary
The inclusion in a survey of European novelists of Henry James, born in New York, and who did not take British nationality until 1915, just a few months before his death, requires some explanation. The fact that he spent only the first year of his forty-one-year permanent, self-imposed exile from the United States in Continental Europe (in Paris), retreating from there to England, would perhaps seem to qualify his grounds for inclusion still further. However, this mere analysis of dates conceals a literary career which James himself always, from the earliest years, conceived in terms arguably more European than that of any other major practitioner of the novel in English in his period.
James was brought to Europe in infancy by his parents, in the 1840s, and then more significantly, for a three-year period, 1855–8, at the beginning of his teens, residing variously in Paris, Boulogne and Geneva, while he returned in 1859 and attended the École Toepffer as well as studying German in Bonn. In the early 1870s (1869–73) he travelled on the Continent, chiefly in Italy rather than France, owing to the Franco-Prussian War waged in this period. In 1875, coming to Europe for the first time unaccompanied as an adult, he endeavoured to settle in Paris, spending a year there until 1876 when, suffering some setbacks in his project to establish himself as a writer of ‘letters home’ reporting for an American journal on the Parisian scene, he moved on to London, where his career was to become established for the remainder of his life.