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2019 | Book

Introduction: “The Making of…,” Adaptation and the (Trans-)Cultural Imaginary Read chapter Read first chapter

The Making of… Adaptation and the Cultural Imaginary

Author: Jan Cronin

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Book Series : Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

This book explores “Making of” sites as a genre of cultural artefact. Moving beyond “making-of” documentaries, the book analyses novels, drama, film, museum exhibitions and popular studies that re-present the making of culturally loaded film adaptations. It argues that the “Making of” genre operates on an adaptive spectrum, orienting towards and enacting the adaptation of films and their making. The book examines the behaviours that characterise “Making of” sites across visual media; it explores the cultural work done by these sites, why recognition of “Making of” sites as adaptations matters, and why our conception of adaptation matters. Part one focuses on the adaptive domain presented by the “Making of” John Ford’s The Quiet Man. Part two attends to “Making of” Gone with the Wind sites, and concludes with “Making of” The Lord of the Rings texts as the acme of the cultural risks and investments charted in earlier chapters.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction: “The Making of…,” Adaptation and the (Trans-)Cultural Imaginary
Abstract
This chapter introduces the “Making of” genre and its relationship with adaptation and the cultural imaginary. Starting with the relationship between paratextuality and adaptation, Cronin outlines the “Making of” genre as an adaptive spectrum. She argues that how we conceive of artistic adaptation has cultural implications, and asserts the illustrative properties of the study’s “Making of” sites in this regard. Cronin suggests a re-evaluation of the concept of palimpsestuousness and its capacity to highlight the opportunities and pitfalls posed by adaptation as readerly and writerly practice. The chapter then provides an overview of “Making of” sites, how they work and the kinds of cultural work they can perform, before introducing the “Making of” domains explored in this study and the rationale for the book’s design.
Jan Cronin

Part I

Frontmatter
Chapter 2. Adapting The Quiet Man
Abstract
Cronin explores the web of adaptive relations that constitutes John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952), using the adaptive history of Ford’s film as a means of thinking about the nature of adaptation as both process and product. The first half of the chapter counters popular conceptions of cultural oppositions in and around The Quiet Man by revealing this particular process of adaptation as a palimpsestuous site of cross (intra and inter)-cultural exchange. The second half of the chapter remediates recurring debates regarding Ford’s film by establishing a core ambivalence in Ford’s work and cultural vision. The adaptive relations and textual dynamics explored in this chapter inform, and are adapted by, the “Making of” The Quiet Man sites explored in later chapters.
Jan Cronin
Chapter 3. Making and Memorializing The Quiet Man in Ireland
Abstract
This chapter challenges the traditional narrative of cultural polarities in and around The Quiet Man by analyzing both the representation of the making of the film in Ireland and the reception of the film in 1950s media and state discourse. Cronin then turns to the memorialization and adaptation of the film and its making in the main contemporary “Making of” The Quiet Man museum in Ireland. These explorations challenge the notion of The Quiet Man’s Irish imaginary as mired in Irish American fantasy. They also initiate the book’s case for museum exhibitions as adaptations, and the book’s consideration of the relationship between adaptation and re-enactment.
Jan Cronin
Chapter 4. The “Making of” The Quiet Man: Popular Studies and Documentaries
Abstract
This chapter navigates a core dynamic of extension and contestation of artifice within “Making of” texts. Engaging with “Making of” The Quiet Man documentaries and popular studies by a range of Irish and international writers and filmmakers, Cronin explores how this dynamic orients the “Making of” genre towards the adaptive mode, and how it informs the genre’s capacity to extend and contest cultural imaginaries. As a result, this chapter profiles the emergence of a trans-cultural imaginary—an amorphous dream of time and place operational across cultures—that infuses the Irish imaginary associated with The Quiet Man.
Jan Cronin
Chapter 5. “Taking Liberties with Reality”: “Fiction” and the “Making of” The Quiet Man
Abstract
This chapter explores Steve Mayhew’s “Making of” novel, Connemara Days (1999), as a fictional counterpart to the “Making of” documentaries and popular studies explored in Chapter 4. It examines the novel’s iteration of the traits and dynamics that emerged across the audio–visual and print “non-fiction” “Making of” The Quiet Man texts, focusing on the novel’s intensification of the adaptive mode. The chapter analyzes the distinction between the conception of adaptation promoted by the novel (adaptation as substitutive continuity) and the conception of adaptation enacted by the novel (adaptation as a blend of contestatory elements), in the context of the novel’s exploitation of the trans-cultural nostalgic imperatives identified in Chapter 4.
Jan Cronin
Chapter 6. The “Making of” Palimpsestuous Adaptation in José Luis Guerín’s Innisfree
Abstract
This chapter examines José Luis Guerín’s 1990 film, Innisfree, as a sophisticated and interrogative version of the adaptive blend of John Ford’s The Quiet Man, the making of Ford’s film and Cong (as the Irish site of that making) produced in the “Making of” texts explored in Chapters 4 and 5. Cronin explores how Guerín’s artistic adaptation depicts both artistic and cultural adaptation as entailing the blurring of boundaries between, and the blending of, contestatory layers, and how Guerín’s work calls attention to the role of artistic adaptation in cultural adaptation. The chapter uses Innisfree to both demonstrate the “Making of” genre’s potential for cultural commentary and illuminate the kinds of critical and cultural eclipses engineered by the “Making of” sites considered in earlier chapters.
Jan Cronin
Chapter 7. The “Making of” Artistic and Cultural Adaptation in Roddy Doyle’s The Dead Republic
Abstract
This chapter situates Roddy Doyle’s 2010 novel, The Dead Republic, as exploring the role that artistic adaptation and its processes play in the formation and operation of authoritative cultural narratives. The chapter shows how Doyle’s theoretically savvy adaptation of The Quiet Man and its making both enacts the greatest (critical) hits of Adaptation Studies and primes the reader to then apply their schooling in matters of artistic adaptation to those of cultural adaptation. Cronin establishes how, by using Ireland as a model for trans-cultural conditions of cultural adaptation, The Dead Republic both depicts the cultural perils of compressing adaptation into re-enactment and asserts attention to the processes of artistic adaptation as instrumental in enhancing our criticality regarding processes of cultural adaptation.
Jan Cronin

Part II

Frontmatter
Chapter 8. Adapting Gone with the Wind
Abstract
This chapter explores the web of adaptive relations between Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, David O. Selznick’s 1939 film and the Atlanta premiere and reception of Gone with the Wind. Cronin charts the cultivation of an authoritative yet amorphous cultural imaginary, the accompanying drive to obscure processes of artistic and cultural adaptation and the status of African American experience and representation as cultural casualties. Dynamics of re-enactment, (elided) adaptation and investment recur across the material examined in this chapter. These are inherited and navigated by the “Making of” sites that are explored in Chapters 9–11.
Jan Cronin
Chapter 9. The “Making of” Gone with the Wind: Popular Studies and Documentaries
Abstract
This chapter explores the response to enthralment by Gone with the Wind in popular “Making of” studies and documentaries, and considers the modes and properties by which readers’ enthraldom is negotiated and facilitated. Cronin highlights the extension of the occlusions, elisions and restrictions regarding slavery by which the film adaptation secured investment in the first place, and the apologist tactics and contestations that form part of a wider and familiar “Making of” scheme of extension through contestation. The chapter looks at the related trajectory towards adaptation within these “Making of” texts, and at the contributions these texts make to understanding of the “Making of” genre and its relationship with adaptation as substitutive practice.
Jan Cronin
Chapter 10. Time Machines?: Dramatizing the “Making of” Gone with the Wind
Abstract
This chapter pairs the 1980 televisual adaptation of Garson Kanin’s 1979 novel Moviola, The Scarlett O’Hara War, with Ron Hutchinson’s 2004 play about the making of Gone with the Wind, Moonlight and Magnolias. In so doing, the chapter induces debate about adaptation and its relation to substitution and re-enactment. Cronin looks at the varying degrees of cognizance regarding the cultural implications of investment in Gone with the Wind that these “Making of” texts display and at the respective panacea they propose. These remedies are then critiqued in relation to the remaining “Making of” sites explored in this study.
Jan Cronin
Chapter 11. Exhibiting the “Making of” Gone with the Wind
Abstract
This chapter looks at what happens when Gone with the Wind and its making are variously consigned to and enshrined in “Making of” museums. It explores the spectrums of adaptation, ambivalence, perpetuation and contestation, and sponsorship and exposure of individual and collective imaginings presented by the three most prolific “Making of” Gone with the Wind museums in the American South. Cronin looks at the various cultural ends to which individual and collective imaginings (along with history, place, and the film and its making) are adapted in these “Making of” sites.
Jan Cronin
Chapter 12. Conclusion: The “Making of” “Middle-earth Aotearoa”
Abstract
“Making of” The Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit) texts present the acme of the cultural risks and investments charted in The Quiet Man and Gone with the Wind “Making of” sites. In the “Making of” texts explored in this chapter, an existing nexus of people, past and place is effaced to accommodate, in the land itself, the inscription and instantiation of a trans-cultural imaginary. “Making of” texts depict the “branding” of Aotearoa New Zealand as “Middle-earth” through an adaptive process, where that adaptive status is obscured to promote an organic revelation of Aotearoa New Zealand as found “Middle-earth.” Cronin concludes with the question of ethical participation in the “Making of” genre, seeing the matter as commensurate with how we think about adaptation itself.
Jan Cronin
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
The Making of… Adaptation and the Cultural Imaginary
Author
Jan Cronin
Copyright Year
2019
Electronic ISBN
978-3-030-28349-0
Print ISBN
978-3-030-28348-3
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28349-0