READAPTATION: the book series
ReAdaptation: the book series, 2008, paperback books, tape, paper, digital video, color, sound.
After reading about the making of "McTeague," I was interested in what would happen if I cut feature length films down to a few seconds. Would they become incoherent or would we fill in the missing pieces? Erich von Stroheim attempted a literal adaptation of Frank Norris’ novel “McTeague” in 1924 with his film, “Greed.” The resulting film was over sixteen hours long. A cut of the film only eight hours long, then one running to four hours, appeared. Finally the studio itself cut the film to around two hours, resulting in a finished product that was entirely incoherent. Since that time, few directors have been foolish enough to put everything in a novel into a film. Therefore, elision is nearly mandatory.
"Amy Hicks’ short-form videos based on film adaptations of classic literature look at the modern myths of monsters created or enabled by technology, connecting the aforementioned evolution to common fears of annihilation."
— Anuradha Vikram, Former Program Director, Headlands Center for the Arts
SF Chronicle Art Critic Ken Baker says, "…ingenuity informs Amy Hicks' video that treats three novels - "I, Robot," "The Stepford Wives" and "Frankenstein" - like flip books, patching into them passages of the Hollywood movies derived from them."
"ReAdaptations: the book series...takes canonical creation texts—Frankentstein, The Stepford Wives, Asimov's I, Robot—and covers their pages with pasted-on stills from the film adaptations. With stop-motion animation in the old fashioned "flip-book" style, she brings the stories to an uneasy half-life somewhere between the authors' original concept and the filmmakers' creation distortions. As always, the stories we tell take on lives of their own not unlike robots."
—Michael S. Gant, METROGUIDE Arts
The videos are screened next to the adapted and manipulated books. Represented here are 30 second excerpts of five books.