Screening the Stage

This book examines the historical, cultural, and aesthetic relationships between theater and film. As we enter the 21st century, almost all artists, students, and critics working in theater will have had earlier and greater exposure to film than to theater. In fact, film has become central to the way in which we perceive and formulate stories, images, ideas, and sounds. At the same time, film and video occupy an increasingly significant place in theater study, both for the adaptation of plays and for the documentation and preservation of theatrical performances. Yet far too often theater and film artists, as well as educators, make the jump from one medium to the other without being fully aware of the ways in which the qualities of each medium affect content and artistic expression. This book is intended to fill such a gap by providing a theoretical and practical foundation for understanding the effect that film and drama have had, and continue to have, on each other's development. Moreover, this study provides a history of the relationship between drama and cinema, starting with the pre-cinematic, late 19th-century impulse towards capturing spectacular action on the stage and examining the artistic and commercial interaction between movies and plays, both in popular and experimental work, throughout the 20th century. Important subjects treated in this book include stage versus screen acting, the adaptation process itself, the theatrical as well as the cinematic avant-garde, and the « portability or adaptability of dramatic character.