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, Program Director, Headlands Center for the ArtsSF 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.
The shorts in this series are adaptations of adaptations. These canonical creation texts—Frankenstein, The Stepford Wives, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Asimov’s I, Robot—live again in an uneasy half-life between book and movie, word and image, silence and sound.
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.
Intrigued by Erich von Stroheim’s dilemma, I decided to explore the process of adapting one form to another by literally inserting scenes from a movie into the book that inspired its making. In ReAdaptation: the book series I appropriate text, images, and sound from popular stories and readapt adaptations to consider how elision and incoherence challenge the narrative of a popular story, replete with its full slate of signifiers.
Culled from the science fiction genre, the subjects I have chosen to readapt—Jaws, Frankenstein, I Robot, The Stepford Wives, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Blade Runner—pit robots, mechanized creatures, or reanimated beings against human hopes, fears, and dreams of a better future. In ReAdaptation I delete, omit, and compress the narrative by using the book itself as the guide to the length of the new hybrid movie. The number of pages in the book determines the total running time. After analyzing the book and movie, I re-edit a few select seconds from the movie. I tape the selected images into the book thereby suppressing or covering up the written word. The book, with hundreds of new insertions, bulks up and mutates. Utilizing stop motion, a very primitive cinematic special effect, I animate this new altered object, giving birth to a creation that dwells amongst the robot, android, and misunderstood creature.
ReAdaptation is also a metaphor for how imagination conflicts with reality, or, how what we envision when we read differs from what we are provided in sound and image on screen. It challenges our memories of reading and watching sci-fi stories and our ever changing relationship with the idea of beings created through the means of science and technology (fifty years separates Asimov’s more optimistic vision from Alex Proyas’ pessimistic version of I Robot). These sci-fi novels and movies collide and reshape cultural iconography as we revisit classic stories again and again. Not only have each of these books been adapted into movies but often they have been remade more than once with updated belief structures and new cinematic technologies—portraying shifts in collective consciousness. The cinematic remake does not necessarily reflect the author’s original intent but instead reflects contemporary beliefs and fears. In ReAdaptation I attempt to consider the author’s and the director’s intent as well as the cultural significance of the work in less than one minute of screen time.