UC Irvine

This dissertation is a series of case studies that develop an approach to film adaptations that take seriously the intersection of film’s formal properties and adaptation’s capacity to speak to the context of its emergence. Film adaptation is usually understood as a transitive act, where film adapts a source text (X adapts Y), but film adaptation can also be understood as in intransitive act, where film adapts to its contemporaneous situation (X adapts to Y). As such, studies in adaptation must consider both aspects, not just on how a film adaptation adapts a source text but how it adapts to a particular space and time. Building on adaptation studies scholars such as Linda Hutcheon, Thomas Leitch, and Robert Stam and history scholars Hayden White and Robert Rosenstone, this dissertation formulates an in/transitive framework that attends to the process and capability of film adaptations as objects of contestation, re-inscription, and witnessing in the Philippine context. What can the titular adapted object of Nick Joaquin’s A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino and its ensuing film adaptations tell us about the crisis of Philippine identity after its colonial and imperial history? What can the repeated retelling of the lives of heroes of the Philippine Revolution reveal about the gendered formulation of Philippine nationalism? In spectacularizing the lives of everyday people, to what extent can biographical adaptation serve as witness to topical histories as well as the contemporary conditions that impact Filipinos? Ultimately, this dissertation approaches Philippine film adaptations as a collection of works that historiophotically document the postcolonial Philippine story “so far” through the various contextually situated formal processes of literary, history, and real-life adaptations.