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Where a story is set shapes what a story means—and who gets to tell it. This section of Film, New Media, and Culture examines how adaptations of nineteenth-century British literature use space as a tool for cultural argument, working with four films across nearly a century of filmmaking—James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), Pride and Prejudice (2005), Jane Eyre (2011), and Sherlock Holmes (2009).
Adaptation is never neutral. Every film inherits a cultural moment and transforms it. This course asks students to read those transformations through the formal tools of film analysis: how mise-en-scène places characters in landscapes that define them; how cinematography frames space to reveal power; how sound locates us in a world before a word is spoken; and how editing moves us through geography in ways that argue for how that world is organized.
All four films will be screened together in class. Watching a complete film with an audience is itself an analytical act—you notice and think differently when you watch together. That shared experience is the foundation of everything else we do, including building collaborative digital maps using COVE Editions, a digital humanities platform.