Abstract
Claude Chabrol’s Le cri du hibou, his 1987 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Cry of the Owl (1962), reveals an affinity between novelist and filmmaker that relies less on an atmosphere of menace and an array of aberrant psychologies than on an understanding that irony informs the human condition. But while Highsmith exercises a modernist, existential mode of irony, and an attendant authorial detachment, Chabrol deploys a style of playful wit that inverts thematic motifs and undermines generic roles and yet concurrently expresses an acceptance of the human foibles and ironic entanglements that characterize his cinematic realm.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsWorks Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia. 1951. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. New York: Verso, 2005.
Bell, Ian A. “Irony and Justice in Patricia Highsmith.” Watching the Detectives: Essays on Crime Fiction. Eds. Ian Bell and Graham Daldry. Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1990, 1–17.
Chabol, Claude. “La peau, l’air et l’inconscient.” Cahiers du Cinéma 83 (1958): 24.
Conrad, Joseph. An Outcast of the Islands. 1896. New York: Penguin, 1981.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1899. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Demons. 1872. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. “What Is Enlightenment?” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, 32–50.
Greene, Graham. “Foreword.” 1970. Eleven. By Patricia Highsmith. New York: Grove Press, 1989, ix–xii.
Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang. London: BFI, 2000.
Harrison, Russell. Patricia Highsmith. New York: Twayne, 1997.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Magny, Joël. Claude Chabrol. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1987.
Neupert, Richard. A History of the French New Wave Cinema. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.
Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Plato. The Apology. Trans. Hugh Tredennick. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961.
Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. 1913. Trans. Lydia Davis. New York: Penguin, 2002.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. 1943. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1956.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. 1938. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions, 1964.
Schenkar, Joan. The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Ed. R. A. Foakes. London: Thomson, 1997.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McFarland, D. (2018). Adapting Irony: Claude Chabrol’s The Cry of the Owl. In: Schwanebeck, W., McFarland, D. (eds) Patricia Highsmith on Screen. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96050-0_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96050-0_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96049-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96050-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)