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Film Adaptations Of Charles Dickens' Stories

ramonmercado

ramonmercado

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There may be an appropriate thread for this, if so, mods please move this post. Vid at link.

Earliest Charles Dickens film uncovered
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17298021

The Death of Poor Joe courtesy of BFI

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The oldest surviving film featuring a Charles Dickens character has been discovered, in the year of the 200th anniversary of the author's birth.

The Death of Poor Joe, which dates back to March 1901, was discovered by British Film Institute (BFI) curator Bryony Dixon, in February.

Until now the earliest known Dickens film was Scrooge or Marley's Ghost, released in November 1901.

"It's wonderful to have discovered such a rare and unique film," Ms Dixon said.

"It looks beautiful and is in excellent condition. This really is the icing on the cake of our current celebration of Dickens on Screen."

The Death of Poor Joe will be screened as part of the Dickens bicentennial celebrations on 9 March and 23 March at London's BFI Southbank.

The film organisation said it is also planning to release the footage on a DVD at a later date.

Accidental find

Ms Dixon stumbled across the find as she carried out research on early films of China.

A catalogue entry referred to The Death of Poor Joe, which she recognised as a reference to the character Jo in Bleak House.

After checking on the BFI's archive database, she found the film was listed as part of a collection under an alternative title of Man Meets Ragged Boy, which had been wrongly dated 1902.

The film, which is just one minute long, depicts Joe dying in the freezing snow against a churchyard wall.

As he falls to the ground a local watchman tries to help him and cradles him as he dies.

The footage, which was directed by film pioneer George Albert Smith, was handed to the BFI in 1954, by a collector in Brighton who had known Smith.

The BFI said it believes the director's wife, Laura Bayley, played Joe and the character of the watchman was played by Tom Green. The footage is believed to have been shot in Brighton.

The BFI said the storyline has similarities with Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl, which features a child dying in the snow and the tragic death of 'Poor Joe', the crossing sweeper in Dickens' Bleak House.
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There was a feature on this on today's BBC TV Breakfast programme. It was apparently filmed in the director's back garden against a flimsy painted backdrop, which you can see wobbling slightly. Pure cinematic magic. 8)
 
The Personal History of David Copperfield: A wonderful comic romp through the Dickens classic. The Fourth Wall vanishes in the film's opening scenes as Copperfield (Dev Patel) effectively becomes Dickens as he performs a public reading of David Copperfield, a bit like Little Women. The elder Copperfield then attends his own birth and is an observer/commentator of and on his young boyhood. The Fourth Wall continues to vanish as characters gain agency, rewrite their roles and even demand that they be dropped from the plot.

The comedy has an edge though as the horrors of Victorian life as exposed by Dickens is vividly illustrated through child labour and people living in the streets. The eviction of Mr Micawber (Peter Capaldi being Mad Hatterish) is comically portrayed but the laughter dies in your throat as Micawber ends up in the debtors prison and his family in the workhouse. Tilda Swinton is wonderful as the eccentric donkey-phobic Aunt Betsey with Hugh Laurie as the kite flying (on several levels) Mr Dick. Ben Whishaw makes Uriah Heep's demanour criminal as well as creepy from the outset, but a criminal nature more appreciated by the audience than his victims.. His takeover of Wickfield's business and embezzling of Aunt Betsey's fortune is eerily reminiscent of the antics of the con-artist family in Parasite.

Beautifully filmed in pastel colours by cinematographer Zac Nicholson with Victorian England gloriously recreated by Cristina Casall, Nick Dent, Charlotte Drickx and Suzie Harman in Production Design/Art/Set Decoration/Costumes. A masterpiece adaptation by writer/director Armando Ianucci. 9/10.
 
https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/great-expectations-bbc-steven-knight-1235591523/
Charlotte Moore, chief content officer at the BBC, has defended the decision of screenwriter Steven Knight, best known for “Peaky Blinders,” to spice up Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations” in his television adaptation, now airing on the British broadcaster, and streaming on Hulu in the U.S.

Referring to a sadomasochism scene in the show, in which a naked Mr. Pumblechook (played by Matt Berry) is seen being whipped by housewife-turned-dominatrix Mrs. Gargery (played by Hayley Squires), Moore said that Knight “believes absolutely everything [in the show] comes from what was alluded to” by Dickens in the novel.

Moore, speaking Thursday to the Broadcasting Press Guild in London, added that “you have to really understanding what [Dickens] would have felt able to write about [in the Victorian era] and read between the lines.” Another of Knight’s embellishments in the show is that Miss Havisham, played by Olivia Colman, is portrayed as a sadistic opium addict.

In an interview with the BBC last month, Knight said he wanted to view the story through a modern lens. “You couldn’t write about certain things in Dickens’ time: certain elements of sexuality, crime, disobedience against the crown and state. What I tried to do was imagine if Dickens was writing the story now and had the freedom to go to those darker places, what would he do? If he had been liberated to write the things that were going on that he wasn’t allowed to write about.”

Pressed on why the BBC had chosen to update a classic text in this way instead of commissioning new work, Moore said: “Because I think it’s a great way to bring loved texts to new audiences, and to find new interpretations.” She added that it was important to “push the boundaries of storytelling,” and “reinvent [classic novels] for a modern age.”

Asked what creative gaps existed in the scripted arena, Moore said that she and Lindsay Salt, director of BBC Drama, had greenlit a lot of thrillers, but she would like dramas in other genres like romance and comedy, and relationship dramas like Abi Morgan’s “The Split,” which “had a very different tone.”

She added: “We are always looking for different tones and genre that we haven’t [done before]. You’re always looking for things that will surprise you.”
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Referring to a sadomasochism scene in the show, in which a naked Mr. Pumblechook (played by Matt Berry) is seen being whipped by housewife-turned-dominatrix Mrs. Gargery (played by Hayley Squires), Moore said that Knight “believes absolutely everything [in the show] comes from what was alluded to” by Dickens in the novel.
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Oh, well, that's all OK then if he believes it.
 
MrRING said:
https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/great-expectations-bbc-steven-knight-1235591523/

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“You couldn’t write about certain things in Dickens’ time: certain elements of sexuality, crime, disobedience against the crown and state. What I tried to do was imagine if Dickens was writing the story now and had the freedom to go to those darker places, what would he do? If he had been liberated to write the things that were going on that he wasn’t allowed to write about.”
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Exactly. In OliverTwist, for example, we see orphaned and abandoned boys being trained by the criminal Fagin to pick pockets. What would girls in that position be learning? How has Nancy stayed so pure? (Or has she?)
 
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