What goes into turning a literary classic into popular TV drama? That’s the question at the heart of a DMU research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in partnership with the British Library.
‘Transforming Middlemarch’ traces the journey from book to screen of George Eliot’s groundbreaking novel, drawing on the scripts, notes and correspondence of celebrated screenwriter Andrew Davies, who adapted Middlemarch for the BBC in a 6-part series starring Juliet Aubrey, Douglas Hodge, and Rufus Sewell first aired in 1994.
2022 marks the 150th anniversary of the first, serialised, publication of Middlemarch, set in a fictionalised Coventry at time of the great Reform Bill. So it is a timely choice from the extensive back catalogue of the prolific Davies, who donated his personal archive to DMU’s Special Collections in 2015. Middlemarch (1994) also marked a watershed for the BBC. In partnership with WGBH (Boston), Michael Wearing (Head of Drama) gambled what was then a risky £6m on a lavish production shot on film and set on location (in Rome and the Lincolnshire town of Stamford) that was big on period detail. In turn, it spawned a raft of BBC Education resources, a (then unusual) ‘making of…’ documentary, and lively arts show critics’ debates; and it boosted Stamford’s tourist trade with location tours and a repertoire of visitor souvenirs. Following its success, Davies’ next BBC heritage adaptation was Pride and Prejudice (best remembered for that scene of Mr Darcy’s dip in the lake which doesn’t appear in Jane Austen). The rest, as they say, is history.
These base texts will be augmented with Davies’ own hand-written annotations, notes
and correspondence, and a range of additional assets the project is gathering from interviews with Davies himself and members of the cast and crew, educational materials, production ephemera and clips. The resulting ‘genetic edition’ will be a new digital scholarly edition not of Middlemarch the novel, but of Middlemarch the Andrew Davies adaptation of Eliot’s novel, tracing the cross-media transformation. It promises to reveal much about what goes into (and comes out of) the process of literary adaptation.
The design of the genetic edition is being developed in consultation with Dr. Beverley Rilett, digital humanities specialist at the University of Auburn, Alabama and director of the George Eliot online archive. John Burton, chairman of the George Eliot Fellowship, is also part of an expert panel informing the project’s progress. The impact potential of the project’s methodology will be explored in a study day to be held at the British Library in December 2022, which will invite archivists, educational publishers and visitors’ centre curators to consider further genetic modifications to the digital adaptation of literary adaptations for a range of audiences .
The Cinema and Television History Institute (CATHI) is a centre of excellence in archival screen heritage. It specialises in evidence-based methods and oral history approaches to inform ground-breaking interdisciplinary research and RCUK-funded international collaborations.
The Institute boasts not only world-leading researchers, but a host of unique and valuable film and media-related archives that provide a veritable treasure trove of fascinating research materials to support innovative undergraduate teaching, engaging and educational public outreach events, and distinctive interdisciplinary postgraduate training.
Working alongside DMU’s Special Collections and the Centre for Adaptations, CATHI is home to unique collections overseen by Director of Archives Steve Chibnall, including the Hammer Script Archive, the Cinema Museum’s Indian Cinemas Archive, the Sir Norman Wisdom Collection, the Andrew Davies Archive, the Anita Anand Archive, the Palace Pictures & Scala Productions Archive, the Leicester Film Society and Phoenix Arts Centre Archives, and the Peter Whitehead Archive.
CATHI’s aim has always been to bring its research to new audiences (within and beyond the academic community), and impactful public engagement remains high on our agenda. Pre-COVID-19, the last twelve months’ calendar has included: Laraine Porter’s BFI British Silent Film Festival (September 2019); Claire Monk’s post-show interview with Hanif Kureishi at the stage version of My Beautiful Laundrette, The Curve, Leicester (1st October): Kieran Foster’s Vampirella live script reading, at the Regent Street Cinema, London (17th October); Steve Chibnall and Alissa Clarke’s Peter Whitehead Network film screenings at the ICA, London (7th and 9th November); Monia Acciari’s Kinaara Film Festival, Hyderabad, India (8th-10th November); Ulrike Kubatta’s DocHub@DMU screening and Q&A of The Hard Stop, Phoenix Cinema, Leicester (11th November); Claire Monk’s Introduction to a screening of Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, Phoenix Cinema (13th November); Laraine Porter at the Phoenix Cinema’s 10th anniversary (19th November) and chairing a panel discussion following a screening of Half the Picture, Phoenix Cinema (26th November); DMU’s Cultural Exchanges Festival (24th-28th February 2020) – Leicester Film Society (Sue Porter), Joseph Bennett (Ulrike Kubatta), Vampirella (Kieran Foster); Stuart Hanson, Silver Screens and the Town: Critical Exchanges, Phoenix Cinema (11th March).
Despite COVID-19, 2020 has seen some exciting new developments and further expansion of CATHI’s holdings this year. During lockdown, Matt Jones, Ulrike Kubatta and Ellen Wright ran COVIDEODROME – a weekly Zoom discussion group bringing together undergraduates, post-grads and academics to debate a key film. Meanwhile, Justin Smith and Deborah Cartmell (Director of the Centre for Adaptations) hosted an online ‘In Conversation’ with Honorary Professor and celebrated screenwriter Andrew Davies. As the new academic year approaches, our second Archives Open Day (a half-day MSTeams interactive forum) – in partnership with the University of Leicester and supported by Midlands 4 Cities as an AHRC Dialogue Day – takes place on 11th November, and is open to anyone with an interest in archive-based screen media research.
Participants will discover more about the new projects and additions to our collections in this CATHI’s 10th anniversary year. The custodian of the Cinema Museum’s Indian Cinemas Archive, Monia Acciari, will be discussing scrapbooking Seeing into the Near Future of Screen Pasts – The CATHI Archives Open Space as a research tool and revealing more about CATHI’s new ‘Voices of Indian Cinema’ project, based on a new collection of landmark interviews loaned to DMU by film producer Mahmood Jamal. Kieran Foster builds on his post- doc project on Hammer’s unmade Vampirella, with fresh plans for a study of Palace Pictures’ unmade films, drawing on their back catalogue. The Palace/Scala Archive will also provide a vital source for a new documentary about the company co-directed by Stephen Woolley and the late Nik Powell to be directed by Ben Wheatley. From DMU’s Centre for Adaptations, Anna Blackwell and Lucy Hobbs will be joining CATHI Director Justin Smith to explore the challenges of creating a digital genetic edition of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, using materials from screen adaptor Andrew Davies’ archive. And Smith will also be in conversation with former BBC Asian Network journalist and Assistant Head of Leicester Media School Gurvinder Aujla-Siddhu about an AHRC Midlands 4 Cities Collaborative Doctoral Award to revisit the role of factual and news programming made by Anita Anand (then Zee- TV, now at the BBC) in the run-up to the 1997 General Election with South Asian communities in Leicester and Birmingham, in partnership with Asian Arts and Heritage hub Sampad. Building on the considerable success of last year’s oversubscribed Open Day, this year’s online archival training event will also open up a space for postgraduates and Early Career Researchers to explore the challenges (heightened by COVID-19) of researching online collections in an age of digital plenitude, and will offer workshops on publication avenues and grant applications. CATHI’s track record of funded research offers specialist expertise and informed guidance in this area, as this list attests: Monia Acciari (Multilingual Euro-Bollywood: an ‘Imaginative language’ workshop); Vicky Ball (Women’s Work and Working Women: A Longitudinal Study of Women Working in the British Film and Television Industries (1933- 1989) and Play for Today at 50); Pier Ercole (European Cinema Audiences: Entangled Histories and Shared Memories and Mapping European Cinema: A comparative project on cinema going experiences in the 1950s); Stuart Hanson (The silver screen and the town: Memories of cinema-going, community and the revival of the local cinema); Matthew Jones (Cinema, memory and the community); Laraine Porter (British Silent Cinema and the Transition to Sound); and James Russell (Hollywood and the baby boom: a social history). It’s not hard to see why CATHI is the go-to place for supporting the next generation of screen history researchers.
Our approach focused upon ensuring Film and Media Studies learners are equipped with a workable, transferable skillset, ready for the job market, is embedded throughout our undergraduate provision, facilitating clear pathways via MA and MRes to our world-leading postgraduate archival research, through distinctive and innovative undergraduate modules on topics such as Global Film History, Film and Material Culture and the new undergraduate module currently under development, Film in the Archives, all of which build on CATHI’s unique experience and expertise.
CATHI’s research facilities and training enable hands-on access to our rich array of archival treasures, aided by state-of-the-art scanning and tape digitisation technologies. And progress on our large-scale cataloguing system, powered by sector experts Metadatis, promises open-access search-and-find in our future vision of the screen past.