In recent years, adaptation studies has emerged as a field of urgent scholarly importance and, having moved past outdated presuppositions and prejudices, has revealed adaptation as a crucial form of dialogue between and among different media, texts and social–historical contexts. The proliferation of new technologies and new media, theorized as the digital post-cinematic era, but encompassing more than what Costas Constandinides calls the ‘post-celluloid’ (2010: 3), has arguably deepened this importance, implicating adaptation in previously unconsidered cultural arenas. In their common emphasis upon post-millennial cinema, all four articles in this dossier are based in the recognition that it is no longer possible to conceive of filmic adaptation as a straightforward movement from page to screen; that therefore we must turn our attention to the role new media technologies play in processes of dialogic mediation and identity formation, in the production (and elision) of inter-subjective and cultural difference, in the shaping of cultural memory, and in the very question of defining cinema in the early twenty-first century.
This article explores the phenomenon of metareference within two recent adaptations, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) and The Adventures of Tintin (2011), each of which adapts a body of work already adapted across a wide range of media. This article argues that by employing metareference, a self-reflexive strategy that seeks to engender an awareness of media properties among audiences, these films self-reflexively address cinema’s potential as a medium for adaptation. However, rather than marshalling these films in an assertion of cinema’s superiority, this article suggests that they explore anxieties over cinema’s changing position in the media landscape, ultimately reflecting broad shifts in our perception of film adaptation.
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