When/where adaptations

I've never given a lot of thought about adaptations of films and operas through different cultures and time periods but Hutcheon definitely brings that into perspective. She talks about "readiness to reception and production" saying that the time and culture that an adaptation is being created for can greatly affect the sort of change it goes through. I'm going to use the same example of Carmen that she uses, because I read all of what she wrote and I thought it was really interesting. There is a version of it that was made in the mid 1900s called Carmen Jones and in the film version all the characters are black, whereas originally Carmen was supposed to be a Spanish gypsy. "As James Baldwin pointed out in his attack on the film version of Carmen Jones, making everyone black removed Carmen's otherness" (161) writes Hutcheon and I think Baldwin made a good point, but like Hutcheon says during that time in the United States there was still a lot of racial turmoil, the civil rights movement hadn't even happened yet, so to people viewing the film there was still a lot of otherness about the story and the actors. She says this version of Carmen "likely would not have spoken to a European audience... at least not in the same way as it did to Americans". She gives a lot of other examples of this in the beginning of this chapter, how different adapters take into consideration their audience and the beliefs of the times when they remake something. I like the example she gives of the 1819 The Vampyre and how when it is redone by the French playwrights they make the vampire into less of a demonic killer and instead a womanizer. And then it is remade again for British audiences and they are made to feel more sympathetic towards the vampire because he has "appropriate moral qualms". I found that really interesting because it lends support to what Hutcheon says about adaptations being "repetition without replication". Adapters are always trying to rework the story to get approval from their audience and have their work be a success. It seems to me that they take the basic story of a play or opera (etc) and then put their own creative spin on things so that the story will speak to the viewers.