![]() ![]() Knightley, for example, during an extended undressing and re-dressing montage, in which a fop chain hangs suggestively from his trousers before a servant carefully removes them and his stockings, briefly exposing Knightley’s lower half before dressing him again. Many of the film’s most striking scenes combine the accoutrements of a supposed-authentic Georgian world with joltingly modern visual coding in which the traditional is deliciously subverted to humorous effect, and where looking itself becomes a mode of consumption both within and beyond the plot. ![]() ![]() While certainly present in Austen’s original text, in the hands of de Wilde questions of self-presentation and the material and visual forms of sociability gesture explicitly to our own cultural and technological moment. Aside from the levels of historical verisimilitude sought by other productions, this is a film for the modern, social-media-saturated age, in which visual culture-itself a commodity-is consumed at a phenomenal rate. The director, for example, reportedly drew her comedy inspiration from 1930s Hollywood comedies like His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby alongside eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century print culture, specifically her own private collection which she shared with designer Quinn in the earliest stages of production. Indeed, EMMA.’s production designer Kave Quinn (who, like its director de Wilde, has previously worked on music videos and commercials) cited the text as a major influence when making design choices.ĭe Wilde’s construction of a filmic visual culture is distinctly intertextual and intermedial. Its genealogy is clearly traceable to Sofia Coppola’s 2006 Marie Antoinette, famed for its vibrant look, its subversion of portraiture of the French queen by contemporary artist Jenna Gribbon and, of course, those anachronistic Converse sneakers. ![]() Perhaps the most striking element of EMMA., beyond the gratuitous period in the title, is its distinctive aesthetic the bright colours, the remarkable costuming and the soft, tiny details (Emma’s ringlets, the minute decoration on her lace collars). We might think of Sally Hawkins’s Anne Elliot looking directly into the camera in Persuasion (2007) or, most recently, Theo James’ Sidney Parker emerging naked from the sea in Sanditon (2019). As David Monaghan has it, long gone are the days of pre-1990 “unobtrusive and conservative camera and editing techniques” and an “unwillingness to rethink Austen’s novels in visual terms.” Now, in revisiting EMMA., I find de Wilde’s rendition of Austen’s novel an intriguing text within an increasingly creative, playful and intertextual landscape of period drama one that regularly asks questions about our responsibilities in representing the past, the abilities of the cinematic screen to reinvent canon, and the visual literacies of its audience.ĮMMA. is, of course, not the first Austen adaptation to receive playful treatment. Most recently, I have written a chapter on canonistic disruption in Sanditon (2019) and Austenland (2013), as well as work on Outlander (2014-), Bridgerton (2020-) and Céline Sciamma’s stunning 2019 Portrait of a Lady on Fire. The pandemic has given ample opportunity for many of us to revisit similar works. In the months since, I have been thinking about the visual and material cultures of adaptation and, specifically, what happens when the long eighteenth century is translated to the twenty-first-century screen. On this initial viewing, I came away less than enchanted by its sickly-sweet palette and apparent prioritising of style over substance, which left me with the impression of a luscious but ultimately vacuous production. Consequently, the eponymous heroine, famously “handsome, clever and rich,” has provided ample fodder for actresses including Romola Garai, Kate Beckinsale, Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, Gwyneth Paltrow and, most recently, Anya Taylor-Joy.Īutumn de Wilde’s hotly anticipated EMMA. is the latest in a long line of cinematic and televisual iterations, and the last film I saw in the cinema before the pandemic hit in early 2020. From Michael Barry’s live BBC broadcast in 1948 to its modern reimagining in 1990s America in Clueless, from Rajshree Ojha’s Aisha (2010) to the YouTube series Emma Approved (2013), the trembling hierarchies, hot summers, and gossiping residents of Highbury have rarely been off our screens. Emma has long been my favorite of Austen’s novels (with the exception, perhaps, of Persuasion) and a text most readily open to adaptation. ![]()
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