Throughout the twentieth century, Hollywood has often looked to Broadway for dramatic material, and this trend has continued into the 1980s. Hollywood adaptation significantly alters the message and the ideological dimension of the original play. By choosing four plays which contain strong ideological messages and by comparing them with their adaptations, this study aims to discover the extent to which and how these plays are transformed. Since the transformation generally involves a weakening of the plays' political or social message, the comparative analysis attempts to reveal how the dilution of message is achieved. / Chapter I establishes semiotic methodology as a tool for the analysis. The theories of theatre semiotics proposed by Keir Elam and Martin Esslin concentrate on the ideological dimension of theatrical signs. The analysis of film will employ the feminist theory which designates the Hollywood film as an imaging system which objectifies women, together with Bill Nichols's theory on the ideological aspect of genre films. Chapter II discusses the aspects of feminist theatre in 'night, Mother and Crimes of the Heart. The film versions of these plays are compared with the original plays in Chapter III, in order to explore how feminist messages are diluted in the adaptation through the use of conventional Hollywood cinematography. Chapter IV examines the message of the impossibility of genuine human relationships in Sexual Perversity in Chicago and the political messages concerning the deaf in Children of a Lesser God. Chapter V, dealing with the film versions of these plays, discusses how the Hollywood genre film fractures and dilutes the political messages of the original plays by imposing conventional narrative structure. The semiotic analysis in each chapter leads to a conclusion in Chapter VI: in the first two films, the transformation and dilution of the messages are achieved largely by the conventional use of cinematic language, while in the latter films the change of structure and the imposition of the genre frame affect the ideology. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 50-08, Section: A, page: 2306. / Major Professor: Karen L. Laughlin. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1989.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_78048 |
| Contributors | Lee, Hyung Shik., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 312 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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