IMS seminar with Sabrina Vellucci

IMS seminar with Sabrina Vellucci from Roma Tre. 

“Bending the Code”: Adapting Tennessee Williams’s South for the Screen”

Starting from the mid-1940s, Tennessee Williams’s experiments and poetic innovations on the stage would shape a peculiar transnational/transcultural South that became the privileged setting and subject of his cinematic imagination. This presentation will focus on two of Williams’s adaptations, The Rose Tattoo (1955) and Baby Doll (1956), and explore how, revising dominant Hollywood types, the protagonists become self-fashioning characters whose outspoken desires question the patriarchal and racial hierarchies of the culture they inhabit. The process of adaptation from stage to screen, as well as Williams’s reworkings of his previous versions of the texts, testify to the disruptive potential of his “steamy Southern Gothic,” while also exposing – through the negotiations between playwright directors and producers, and the plots’ ambivalent endings – the contradictions and hypocrisies of postwar racial and gendered discourses.

If you would like to attend the seminar online, please send an email to ims@lnu.se