Word: novella
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...minutes, with no interval, and uses only four singers, plus two speaking actors. The full orchestra has been reduced to 15 musicians. Everything unnecessary to the plot has been jettisoned in an effort to return to the sunbaked spirit of the original Prosper Mérimée novella. Gone are the choruses of soldiers and cigarette girls, as well as most of the opera's secondary characters. Instead, the focus is on the hotheaded Basque dragoon Don José and his fatal passion for the dark-eyed gypsy Carmen. Brook has even given the work a new title...
...year. Whether from a lack of imagination and originality, or simply from a resurgent interest in adapting fiction and drama, original screenplays are becoming harder to find. The translation from another medium is often an awkward, difficult task. Lee Grant's screen adaptation of Tillie Olsen's classic 1961 novella about an aging Jewish immigrant couple facing the problems of elderly life haunted by the lasting effect of Nazi torture treats her subject with admirable restraint and sensitivity...
...ADAPTED SCREENPLAY especially triumphs in its portrayal of the relationship between Eva and her granddaughter Jeannie. Unlike Jeannie's minor role in Olsen's novella. Joyce Eliason and Alex Lytie, authors of the screenplay, developed the granddaughter's character fully, allowing her to unearth Eva's "other" personality: that of a casual, free-spirited, and highly intellectual woman. The authors successfully show the mutual infatuation of relationships that span generations...
...problem here is a familiar one: reverence for a literary source, a delicate novella by Tillie Olsen, has rendered its adapters dumbstruck. Trying to remain faithful to her realistic surfaces and unable-except through uninformative flashbacks-to reveal the inner workings of Eva's sensibility, the film makers have avoided anything that might be melodramatic or even openly emotional. All the suffering in Tell Me a Riddle is thus stoic, all triumphs without joy. Movement is glacial, dialogue wooden, characterizations blurred. One has a feeling that this project-brought to fruition without the financial support of the film industry...
Georgi Vladimov, 49, is another exceptionally talented writer who has been cut down in mid-career and who is being hounded by the KGB. One reason for the persecution is his celebrated novella, Faithful Ruslan, which has circulated all over the country in samizdat; it was published in the U.S. last year by Simon & Schuster. Ruslan tells of a concentration-camp dog, pitilessly trained to guard convicts, that becomes a stray when most of the Stalinist camps are closed down in 1956. Ruslan, and other dogs of his kind, keep a vigil at the local railway station, hoping...