Abstract
This chapter addresses another element of canonical authorship which adaptations may foreground and subsequently obfuscate: audience foreknowledge about narrative events and famous passages of dialogue. It positions this anamorphic process within a reflexive context, derived from the idea of metacinema developed in Chapter 5 and from theoretical approaches to how perception operates in relation to the illusory movement of still images in cinematic projection. Adapted narratives can include visual clues about this foreknowledge, which are signifiers of artifice, but are also simultaneously suppressions of the verbal into the seemingly un-authored visual. The drama of foreknowledge, then, like the dramas of vision and of authorship, is an inherently anamorphic process. The chapter also explores how adaptations can subvert foreknown narrative conclusions and how this process is executed in an anamorphic manner which draws attention to, and subsequently obfuscates, the subversion.
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Filmography
Birth of a Nation, The. 1915. Directed by D.W. Griffith. USA: Epoch.
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She’s the Man. 2006. Directed by Andy Fickman. USA: DreamWorks.
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United 93. 2006. Directed by Paul Greengrass. USA: Universal.
William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. 1996. Directed by Baz Luhrmann. USA: Twentieth Century Fox.
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Geal, R. (2019). The Drama of Foreknowledge. In: Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16496-6_7
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