Adapted For the Screen: Modern Chinese Literature And Film

Adapted For the Screen: Modern Chinese Literature And Film Name Institutional affiliations Date Adapted for the screen: modern Chinese literature and film “The obsessed” adapted into “Jo Dou” Adaptation occurs when artists adapt a literary article, which may include stories, poems and novels and give them another genre or even a different medium. Fuxifuxi was a novel written by Liu Heng, and it was written in primitiveness of rural life and also in a noncanonized written tradition. However, it was dialogically and dialectically founded on the modern Chinese literature CITATION Fos13 \l 2057 (Foster, 2013). The Novella Fuxi Fuxi (the obsessed) was later adopted by known international director Zhang Yimou in 1990. The name Fuxi Fuxi was changed to Judou, a film that received an Oscar nomination in 1991 under the Best Foreign Film category. The film also won various international film awards. Zhang Yimou was a fifth generation Chinese filmmaker and had participated in a nationwide intellectual movement which happened in the mid and late 1980s. Jo Dou was also the first movie to be banned by the Chinese government. The banning of this movie aroused a tremendous controversy in the film industry especially in the West and the East. Most foreign and Chinese scholars do not consider the novel Fuxi Fuxi which is the source of this movie but have remarkably relied on the movie itself. The adaptation process was impressive and when well interpreted helps the audience understand the roots of the story. The film and the novel share the same themes even though they have been interpreted differently. This paper is going to look at various themes in the film and how Yimou Zhang adopted and incorporated the thematic and technical element, oedipal complex, an element that had never been known before in the Chinese tradition. Zhang’s western influenced skills and the adaptation process of Jo Dou The 1980s was a period referred to as a cultural self-reflection. Zhang was then introduced and exposed to the western literary trends. These skills enabled the producer to translate works of foreign literature which had been produced by the then young Chinese writers and artists and were considered to have an inferior position in the modern Chinese culture CITATION Jia13 \l 2057 (Jiang & Ivanhoe, 2013). Zhang among other fifth-generation filmmakers criticised these young writer’s structural character, cultural structures, and experiences and compared them with the contemporary radical ideologies and politics. By attacking the traditional way of telling stories and bringing in modernity, they cleared all the obstacles on the path to modernity but had to keep Chinese culture in these productions. Fuxi fuxi /Jo Dou can then be analyzed as having an essential thematic continuity purposed by Zhang who is a producer of the fifth generation filmmaking CITATION Jia13 \l 2057 (Jiang & Ivanhoe, 2013). Zhang left behind a legacy of modern Chinese literature because Jo Dou is one of his works that show how strongly he was influenced by the western writing in the way he exhibits his themes and techniques. Zhang ensured that what he produced in China was as good as that which was created in the west. Jo Dou is a movie that reveals adaptations of m...