Tennessee Williams a Streetcar Named Desire [DVD] [1995] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

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Stanley later questions Blanche about her earlier marriage. Blanche had married when she was very young, but her husband died by suicide. This memory causes her obvious distress. We later learn she suffers from guilt due to the way she had reacted to finding out her husband's homosexuality and his fatal reaction. Stanley, worried that he has been cheated out of an inheritance, demands to know what happened to Belle Reve, once a large plantation and the DuBois family home. He tells Stella about the Napoleonic Code which, in those days, was a legal right of a husband over his wife's financial affairs. Blanche hands over all the documents pertaining to Belle Reve. While looking at the papers, Stanley notices a bundle of letters that Blanche emotionally proclaims are personal love letters from her dead husband. For a moment, Stanley seems caught off guard over her proclaimed feelings. Afterwards, he informs Blanche that Stella is going to have a baby. The last film I am going to analyze is Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, produced in 2013. The movie follows the life of a woman who, after losing her husband and all her fortune, has to move to her sister’s and cope up with the difficulties this new life brings. The film’s star, alongside Alec Baldwin, was Cate Blanchett, who played the protagonist, Jasmine. In fact, the critics liked her acting so much that she received the Academy Awards for The Best Leading Actress in 2013. The performance of the actors was praised by many critics, among them Mark Kermode, who described the movie as rather an average production but one in which “performances are [being] worthy of stand-up-and-cheer ovations all round” (2013, The Guardian).

In 1998, PBS aired a taped version of the opera adaptation that featured the original San Francisco Opera cast. The program received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Classical Music/Dance Program. [40]There is yet another crucial factor behind the popularity of movie stars. With the rise of the television and cinema the number of theatregoers slowly started to decline. Films meant new opportunities for the aspiring actors and actresses even to those who did not attend to film academies before. The most important difference between a theatre play and film production is time: in the theatre the audience experience the plot as it is, in the present while when one watches a film it is happening in the past – even though it decives the viewer by presenting the plot either in the present, past or future. Moreover, a long process of editing takes place before the release of a certain film which lets the director – who can be considered to be the ’auteur’ of the movie—to cut, alter or extend the scenes. André Gaudreult, French philosopher coined the terms ’filmic diegesis’ and ’monstration’ with which he attempts to explain the difference between a filmic production and theatre. Gaudreult says that monstration is the process which “precedes narration, that is, the image comes before editing” (Dragon 2008, 27). According to him, film has two separate levels: the image (mimesis) and the editing of that image (diegesis) (27). Monstration has an important role in shaping the image of a character, for example, Chaplin’s figure “captured by the camera precedes the formation of the Chaplin character as a narrative construct” (27). In other words, monstration and narration are both essential parts of the shaping of an often iconic character like Chaplin. The play was set entirely at the Kowalski apartment, but the story's visual scope is expanded in the film, which depicts locations only briefly mentioned or non-existent in the stage production, such as the train station, streets in the French Quarter, the bowling alley, the pier of a dance casino, and the machine factory.

From the first scene, Blanche is nervous and jittery. She is reluctant to be seen in the glare of light and seems to have a drinking problem. She is also deceptive and is critical of her sister and brother-in-law.

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In 1955, the television program Omnibus featured Jessica Tandy reviving her original Broadway performance as Blanche, with her husband, Hume Cronyn, as Mitch. It aired only portions of the play that featured the Blanche and Mitch characters. The name of the town where Blanche was from was changed from the real-life town of Laurel, Mississippi, to the fictional "Auriol, Mississippi". Marlon Brando is often displayed shirtless, in one of the first occurrences for a Hollywood movie. [9] Censorship [ edit ] In Europe, more specifically in Spain, director Pedro Almodóvar’s movie, All About my Mother (1999) became a great success despite the fact that Almodóvar treated the issue of homosexuality and transgender people in an explicit way. The Spanish director did not use as such the plot of Streetcar in his film but has referred in many cases, especially in crucial moments, to Williams’s play that connects, thus the drama in an intertextual manner with the film. The movie, which had multiple nominations and awards, among them six Goya Awards (Premios Goya) in Spain, won also the Golden Globe, BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Awards) and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film in 2000. All About my Mother is considered to be one of Almodóvar’s finest works which questioned and redefined the previous movie making system in Spain. Abstract: This paper discusses the issue of censorship in Hollywood and beyond from the onset of the Production Code Administration through the Rating System alongside with that of the classical stardom. I will map the ways in which censorship and stardom developed and changed in time from the 1950s to the 2010s through various film adaptations of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). I am going to analyze the first film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire directed by Elia Kazan in 1951, then its 1984 adaptation directed by John Erman along with the 1995 version directed by Glenn Jordan, followed by Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother (1999), and finally, Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, which came out in 2013. By examining the above listed films, my focus will also be on various methods of adapting Williams’s play to film and on the ways in which these adaptations actually altered the dramatic plot and how the issue of censorship and stars have altered, in turn, various adaptations.

A highly publicized and acclaimed revival in 1992 starred Alec Baldwin as Stanley and Jessica Lange as Blanche. It was staged at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where the original production was staged. This production proved so successful that it was filmed for television. It featured Timothy Carhart as Mitch and Amy Madigan as Stella, as well as future Sopranos stars James Gandolfini and Aida Turturro. Gandolfini was Carhart's understudy. [15] The personality of the star meant the artists themselves in their private lives, at least that image they showed to the public combined with the fictional character(s) they played. The persona meant a “durable image manifested repeatedly in the media” which belonged to the person no matter if it was just “an adjustment of the self to the contingencies of media exposure” (King, 2015, 11). It was important, therefore, to give a great performance in a movie since the audience would recognize the actors as the characters they were impersonating and later they would refer to them as such, creating a double identity, a persona for the artist. If the actor’s career was rising, the persona would become “a self-sufficient public image” (King, 2015, 12). It was the studios’ best interest, therefore, to protect the actors’ persona and hide if it was only a pose, an image for the public eye (King, 2015, 12). However, there were times when the artists’ private lives and personalities did not match with their public personas. This mismatch was also a question of identity. But with the rapid development of the media, the appearance of gossip journals and tabloids and the rising number of paparazzi, especially from the 1970s, it was immensely difficult to preserve any such dual identities. Therefore, the star image has become truly complex, including “everything that is publicly available about them” (Dyer 1986, 2) and consisting of the opinion of the critics, journalists, the “way the image is used in […] advertisements, novels, [and] pop songs” (3). What is more, another important factor for a star’s image is the pool of different film genres he or she plays in and the type of characters he or she portrays. In this regard, Richard Dyer pointed out that a star cannot be fully unique due to her or his image that appear (stereo)typical to the audience. Put it differently, “it is never possible for any individual member of the audience to comprehensively know all the textual sources through which a star’s identity is represented” (McDonald 2000, 7) with the only tool which displays them to the world being the media and the different films they play in. Due to various images stars have, they can be put in different categories such as ’stars as capital’ which, according to Paul Mcdonald means that The 1993 version of the film extends the conversation that Blanche has with a visiting newspaper boy, making it clear she is strongly attracted to him. It also adds details from Blanche's description of the suicide of her young husband; it is now more clear, although still somewhat oblique, that he was a homosexual, and she killed him with her taunts.Gumuchian, Marie-louise (April 2, 2023). "Paul Mescal, Jodie Comer win prizes at London theatre's Olivier awards". Reuters . Retrieved April 2, 2023.