| Although adaptations of existing literary works have accounted for a substantial portion of narrative film production since at least 1910, and the major works of many canonized authors have been adapted over the years since, neither Virginia Woolf's nor Henry James's major works were the subject of theatrical film adaptations until 1992, when Sally Potter's adaptation of Woolf's Orlando appeared. Three more adaptations, including Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady, Marleen Gorris's Mrs. Dalloway, and Iain Softley's The Wings of the Dove, followed over the next five years. Using a polysemic approach to reading these eight texts, several topics they raise are discussed. These include their unique uses of melodrama in a dynamic tension with another mode, such as comedy or realism; how the modernist aesthetic practices apparent in the literary sources are negotiated in the film medium; how gender roles and types, and complications thereof, are portrayed in each work; and the relation of the adaptations to the heritage cinema of their own eras. In addition, as in almost all adaptation studies, significant alterations from source to adaptation are discussed, as well as the many industrial issues inevitably raised in film production, such as star presence and target audiences. Discussion of these topics as they appear in each pair of source and adaptation is preceded by an overview of both melodrama and modernism, in which the particular use of those terms among several competing uses is outlined. Ultimately, both the sources and their adaptations demonstrate that melodrama can exist outside the confines either of the traditional 'blood and thunder' of nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama, and outside the confines of the more narrowly-defined woman's film or weepie; and the films as well are distinguished by their pointed critique of the pasts they present, unlike the heritage film tradition with which they are sometimes mistakenly associated. |
