LIVE FILM PROGRAM (ALSO AVAILABLE ONLINE THROUGH ZOOM & VIMEO)
Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016, 130min.)
Christopher Llewellyn Reed, chair, film & moving image department, Stevenson University
Dutch director Paul Verhoeven gave us some of the highest-octane action thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s, among them RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), Basic Instinct (1992), and Starship Troopers (1997). He also made the box-office and critical disaster that was the 1995 Showgirls. And though Verhoeven eventually decamped to Europe, his love of sex and violence traveled with him, as witnessed by the 2006 Black Book. His last two films were made in France, with the 2016 Elle kicking off this latest career chapter. Adapted from French author Philippe Djian’s 2012 novel "Oh...", the movie gives Isabelle Huppert a juicy role as a video-game designer whose love of perverse sexuality is put to the test when she herself becomes a victim of assault. Rather than retreat in submission, however, she takes matters very much into her own hands. Vive la révolution!
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Film Series Overview - Take 2: Cinematic Adaptations of the Written Word
Adapting any creative work from one medium into a vastly different one is always tricky. Readers of literature, in particular, tend to feel a very strong ownership of any source novel or story that gets the cinematic treatment, and often complain about how much the book has been altered—usually not for the better—in its transformation. But writers and film directors work under vastly different imperatives, and what is good as text may not be good as image, and vice versa. The best adaptations are often those where, faithful or not to the book, the director has a vision, and the movie has a raison d'être beyond the mercenary. Join us as we examine six provocative literary adaptations and explore how the written word translates to the screen. And don’t worry: if you don’t have time to read the original text, we’ll explain how the films compare and contrast with their sources. In order, our movies are Luce (Julius Onah, 2019), Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016), The Furies (Anthony Mann, 1950), Purple Noon (René Clément, 1960), Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995), and Border (Ali Abbasi, 2018).