Cinephile 11.3- Adaptation, Translation, Permutation 

Alisha Mernick, Tes.com

Adapting and translating works across media platforms and national borders has long been an integral part of cinema, television, and other screen media. Source narratives can be transformed into entirely new works, or faithfully reconstructed; they can carry on the tradition of the old or pave the way for the new. Film and other screen texts may reverberate through their own subsequent adaptations, and these reconsiderations often take the source into a new area of discourse – represented through the devices of a different genre, produced under different cultural conditions, or reconsidered at a different time. Adaptations filter works through the lens of variable and shifting cultural priorities, concerns, and ideologies.  Cinematic and other screen works are both innovative sites for these amended expressions, and the sources of adaptations for pieces in other media. Adaptation, translation, and permutation are three processes integral to these transmedial, transnational, and transcultural movements. As works are embedded into and produced by our global modernity, they are inevitably bound up in acts of adaptation, translation, and permutation, offering rich products of the dialectic of old/new, past/present, same/other.

Cinephile 11.3 is looking for papers exploring the themes of adaptation, translation, and permutation. Most particularly, Cinephile is looking for essays focusing on how certain works are transformed as they move transmedially and transnationally, through different forms, cultures, and languages. Writers should focus on capturing and analyzing these movements and how they change the perception and reception of certain artworks.

Adaptation encompasses movements in several directions. Writers looking closely at this area are encouraged to look at both source-to-screen and screen-to-alternative-media movements. Papers examining adaptation might also look at how certain works are adapted across cultures and generations through remakes and reboots.

Writers exploring adaptation might also take up how adaptation can function as translation, as a process of shifting forms of communication. Such papers could also examine the process of translation within globalized modernity, within and between postcolonial nations, and as a function and tool of capitalism and neoliberalism.

Papers exploring a work’s permutations, or “a way, especially one of several possible variations, in which a set number of things can be ordered or arranged” (OED), can examine how works are altered slightly, re-viewed, and re-perceived within different contexts to generate alternative meanings. These papers might look at parody, pastiche, fanart, fanfiction, etc.

Some topics that are encouraged (but not limited to) are:

• Adapting novels, plays, graphic novels, and other literary works for the screen
• Adapting screen works into Broadway plays and musicals (e.g. Kinky Boots, An American in Paris, Aladdin, Waitress, Newsies, Hairspray)
• Shakespeare adaptations
• British comedy and crime television in North America
• The rise of the graphic novel in film and television
• Live broadcasting of Broadway and West End plays
• Remakes and reboots of film and television works
• Netflix revivals (Twin Peaks, Gilmore Girls, Fuller House/Full House, Arrested Development)
• Transnational remakes and translations (e.g. J-Horror, South Korean revenge and comedy films, contemporary Danish television)
• Translation between cultures and the promise of understanding/threat of misunderstanding
• YouTube parody videos and virality
• Postmodern screen works and intertextuality
• Fanart, fanfiction, and consumer-generated narratives
• Dubbing and sound theory
• Subtitling and the global/transnational/diasporic audience
• Videogame theory
• Art installations (interactivity, multimedia exhibitions, clashing of high/low art, etc.)

We encourage submissions from graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty. Papers should be between 2,000-3,500 words, follow MLA guidelines, and include a detailed works cited page, as well as a short biography of the author. Submissions should be directed toward submissions@cinephile.ca and general inquiries toward info@cinephile.ca. Submissions are due by July 22nd, 2016.
Cinephile is the University of British Columbia’s film journal, published with the continued support of the Centre for Cinema Studies. Previous issues have featured original essays by such noted scholars as Lee Edelman, Slavoj Žižek, Paul Wells, Murray Pomerance, Ivone Marguiles, Matt Hills, Barry Keith Grant, K.J. Donnelly, and Sarah Kozloff. Since 2009, the journal has adopted a blind peer-review process and has moved to biannual publication. It is available both online and in print via subscription and selected retailers.

Incoming editors: Matthew Gartner and Amanda Greer