Papers by Miguel Angel Gonzalez Campos
Una de las areas que han experimentado recientemente un mayor auge dentro de los estudios shakesp... more Una de las areas que han experimentado recientemente un mayor auge dentro de los estudios shakespeareanos es el analisis de las adaptaciones a la pantalla que se han realizado de las obras del dramaturgo isabelino. La presente tesis doctoral se engloba claramente dentro de esta tendencia y lleva a cabo un estudio exhaustivo de la presencia de The Tempest en la pantalla, tanto en el medio cinematografico como en el televisivo. Descartando el concepto de "fidelidad" como principio taxonomico, este trabajo presta atencion a otras afinidades estructurales y tematicas para organizar el amplio corpus de adaptaciones. Se lleva a cabode esta manera un recorrido por todas las adaptaciones de la obra a lo largo de los casi 100 anos de historia de The Tempest en la pantalla, en los cuales se han realizado todo tipo de versiones y recontextualizaciones de la obra. Asi, desde westerns como Yelow Sky (Willian Welman, 1948) o peliculas de ciencia ficcion como Forbidden Planet (Fred McLeod Wilcox, 1956) pasando por recreaciones posmodernas como Prospero's Books (Peter Greenaway, 1991) y la particular adaptacion de Derek Jarman o derivativos de inspiracion marcadamente humanista como los dirigidos por Paul Mazursky o Krzysztof,The Tempest ha dado lugar a una enorme variedad de recreaciones que viene a poner de manifiesto la vigencia y riqueza de un texto que, a pesar de sus siglos de historia, sigue siendo fuente de inspiracion para numerosos cineastas del siglo XX. Por otro lado, en el estudio exhaustivo de cada adaptacion se incluye tambien una consideracion de la misma en relacion con las tendencias y enfoques criticos dominantes en cada momento historico para explorar las posibles conexiones e interrelaciones entre la vision de The Tempest que se ha ido forjando en el mundo academico y critico, por un lado, y las lecturas de la obra que dejan translucir los distintos textos filmicos.
SEDERI: yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies, 1998
After one century of filmed Shakespeare there is no doubt that The Tempest is one of his plays th... more After one century of filmed Shakespeare there is no doubt that The Tempest is one of his plays that have always been adapted in very free ways. The countless liberties that filmmakers have taken when adapting The Tempest are explained by the fact that this is "one of Shakespeare's most unrealistic plays" (Vaughan 1991: 200) and, as Jonathan Bate points out, "the play that more than any other enacts the power of imagination" (Bate 1989: 4). As if it were the character of Ariel, the spirit of imagination and fantasy ready to take whatever shape is necessary to perform any entrusted task, The Tempest has undergone all kinds of metamorphosis in the hands of the different directors who have approached the play. In this way, The Tempest has been transformed into a Western, a comedy in contemporary Greece, a drama, an underground film or a deconstructive artefact. 1 Probably one of the most original and fascinating recreations of the play is the science fiction film Forbidden Planet directed by Fred McLeod Wilcox in 1956. In this picture we find a very particular version of The Tempest in which the island of Prospero becomes the planet Altair IV in the year 2257 and the sailors happen to be members of a rescue expedition that arrive in the planet in a spaceship. There they will find doctor Morbius, who lives with his daughter Altaira and Robby, his mechanical servant. At first sight the parallelism between the play and the film is clear: Morbius would be an updated Prospero and Altaira would constitute a new Miranda who, knowing no man except his father, falls in love with Commander Adams, the equivalent to Ferdinand in the film. Equally, Robby would be Ariel, Caliban would become a post-Freudian Monster of Id and in the Cook we can clearly recognise the character of Stephano. However, for most critics, aside from these parallelisms between some characters, there are no more similarities between The Tempest and Forbidden Planet (Vaughan 1991: 204). Without suggesting, of course, that the film is a literal version of The Tempest, it is my claim that there are a great number of elements in the film taken directly from the play, which have gone unnoticed for most critics because they appear significantly transformed. As I have pointed out, the character of Morbius keeps unquestionable similarities with Prospero. Both are figures that, isolated from the rest of mankind, have devoted their lives to the study of some books which have granted them an extraordinary, almost supernatural, power. In both cases we also find a voluntary final renouncement to their power and knowledge. Although apparently different, the
SEDERI: yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies, 2000
Dykinson eBooks, Dec 30, 2022
II Estudios sobre traducción e interpretación: Actas de las II Jornadas Internacionales de Traducción e Interpretación de la Universidad de Málaga, Málaga 17-20 de marzo de 1997, Vol. 2, Tomo 2, 1998 (TOMO 2), ISBN 8477852553, págs. 681-687, 1998
Sederi Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society For English Renaissance Studies, 2000
SEDERI: yearbook of the Spanish and …, 2002
Oceánide, 2022
Futures Studies as a multidisciplinary academic field developed in the last decades has emphasize... more Futures Studies as a multidisciplinary academic field developed in the last decades has emphasized the meaningful and revealing nature of the images of the future originating in every society. In this sense, Piotr M. Szpunar and Karl K. Szpunar (2016) underline the close relationship between recalling the past and imagining the future and suggest a mutual influence and interdependence between both processes. The purpose of this article is to apply the concept of “collective future thought” coined by these authors to the analysis of The Giver (1993) by Lois Lowry, which depicts a future dystopian society where memories of the past, as a powerful and threatening artifact, are kept away from the members of the community. This novel has been extensively analyzed as a dystopian text from many different perspectives. However, no critical attention has been paid to the way Lowry explores the close interrelationship and interdependence between the visions of past and future created by a soc...
SEDERI: yearbook of the Spanish and …, 1996
In his 1977 pioneering study of Shakespeare and film, entitled precisely Shakespeare on Film, Jac... more In his 1977 pioneering study of Shakespeare and film, entitled precisely Shakespeare on Film, Jack J. Jorgens established a useful distinction between presentation, interpretation and adaptation as three possibilities for cinematic versions of plays and novels, in decreasing degree of faithfulness to the original work (12-14). In this sense, Alden Vaugham and Virginia Mason Vaugham point out that "Adaptation seems to have been the key to successful cinematic representation of The Tempest" (200). In fact, the filmmakers that have approached this play have always adapted it very freely to the silver screen. Even the films that are most easily recognizable as presenting Shakespeare's work, Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991) and Derek Jarman's Tempest (1980), have taken great liberties. In Jarman's film, for instance, the wedding masque takes the form of a show in which Elizabeth Welch sings a version of "Stormy Weather" while the rest of the characters dance happily. Significantly enough, a film clearly acknowledged as a cinematic presentation of The Tempest, Forbidden Planet (Fred McLeod Wilcox, 1956), takes place in outer space.
SEDERI: yearbook of the Spanish and …, 1997
On 29, May, 1985 millions of people saw live on TV a terrifying show of horror and violence from ... more On 29, May, 1985 millions of people saw live on TV a terrifying show of horror and violence from the Heysel Stadium in Brussels. What was supposed to be a spectacle to enjoy, a football match, became a scene of blood and death like the play-within-a-play of some Elizabethan revenge tragedies. This episode, which reminded viewers that barbarity is a timeless inherent feature of our human soul, inspired Michael Nyman's Memorial, which is the main musical theme of Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989). This connection is not accidental since precisely in this film Greenaway examines human horror as seen in the tragedy of the Heysel Stadium. Some critics have mentioned the influence of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore on The Cook and, in fact, Greenaway himself acknowledges it, but the film shows not the influence of a particular play but of the whole genre, the Elizabethan and Jacobean Revenge Tragedy, whose conventions Greenaway follows closely in order to impregnate his film with what Susan Bennett calls "a Jacobean sensibilityî (104). Greenaway himself says that You are being invited to watch the film as a play, a performance. You're not to take it seriously, but you are to engage in the ideas. Like Jacobean drama, it has a very savage content, bringing it front stage for examination." (quoted in Bergan 27-28).
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Papers by Miguel Angel Gonzalez Campos