When Beckett on Film Migrated to Television
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18485/kis.2019.51.169.5Keywords:
Beckett, intermediality, television, film, theatre, media, drama, Britain, Ireland, audienceAbstract
In the migration of drama from one medium to another a text is reshaped, and different audiences are addressed by adaptations because of the process of remediation. This article evaluates the significance of the intermedial migrations that happened to the Beckett on Film project in which Samuel Beckett’s 19 theatre plays were performed on stage, then filmed for an international festival, then shown on television in the UK, USA, Ireland, and elsewhere. The analysis focuses on the television versions and shows how their distribution and reception contexts framed their meanings in different ways and assess how medial migration destabilized the object of analysis itself at the same time as the work became able to address multiple audiences and fulfill different cultural roles.
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