Manchester University Press French Literature on Screen

This book explores the screen presence of what is arguably the world’s greatest literary tradition. Adaptations of works by authors such as Victor Hugo and Marcel Proust constitute the foundations of French national cinema, but they have also been important for American and British cinema. English-language versions demonstrate the complex relationships between the different texts and media, while providing new ways of exploring studio decisions to present 'foreign' works to American and British audiences. Written by leading scholars in the field, the chapters in this volume offer insightful investigations of the artistic, cultural and industrial processes that have made screen versions of French literary classics a central element of three national cinemas. They also address theoretical concerns about the interdependent relationship between literary and film texts, the status of the 'author’ and the process of interpretation. Through analyses of such varied adaptations as Darryl F. Zanuck’s Les Misérables (1935), Otto Preminger’s Bonjour, Tristesse (1958) and Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016), the contributors engage with a range of current scholarly perspectives, including the performance of the self, the staging of history and political engagement, spatial and temporal rituals of culture, the theatre of sexuality, the actor’s body as encoded site of meaning, and strategies for textual production and exhibition. As the first transnational account of this important cultural development, French literature on screen reveals in detailthe adaptation strategies that brought classic French literature to a global audience. It will be of interests to students and scholars of French literature, film and adaptation studies.