William S. Burroughs was a homosexual drug addict. A knot of contradictions, he was additionally deeply homophobic, sexist, racist and a gun-loving conservative, a ardour that will ultimately result in him to be convicted of manslaughter. For sure, his life was as wild as his fiction – simply watch Luca Guadagnino’s new movie Queer.
The movie is an adaptation of Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novella of the identical identify, which was written in Central America, to the place he had fled after drunkenly – and unsuccessfully – trying to shoot a whisky glass off his spouse’s head at a celebration. The story follows William Lee (an avatar for Burroughs, brilliantly performed by Daniel Craig) as he stalks via Nineteen Fifties Mexico Metropolis trying to take pleasure in attractive males and mind-altering substances.
For those who’ve delved into Guadagnino’s again catalogue you understand his filmic world is heady, steamy and deeply sensuous. Consider the bitten peach dripping with nectar in his queer coming-of-age movie Name Me By Your Title, the dizzying and harmful dances of Suspiria, and the new love triangle in his most up-to-date movie, Challengers. His world is one in every of feverish longing, and Queer continues this legacy.
Our reviewer, American literature knowledgeable James Miller, discovered it to be a reasonably trustworthy adaptation of Burroughs’ novel. The primary half follows Lee as he turns into obsessive about a tall handsome younger veteran referred to as Eugene Allerton. Within the second half, the pair embark on an journey to South America to seek out yagé (the hallucinogen ayahuasca).
It’s a fantastically shot movie that, as Miller writes, “explores the strain between private freedom, transgression and management – themes that endured all through Burroughs’ work”.
Queer is in cinemas now
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Queer: Daniel Craig is great on this brave William Burroughs adaptation
The duty of translation
Queer might have been a tough e-book to adapt – Burroughs’ writing is extremely experimental and laden with trippy photographs, which Guadagnino has someway managed to evoke. One other spectacular feat of translating a e-book to the display screen is Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, based mostly on the epic Colombian saga by Gabriel García Márquez.
The e-book is a sprawling work of genius, chargeable for popularising magical realism as a literary style and profitable García Márquez a Nobel prize. Surprisingly, regardless of its recognition, it has by no means been made into a movie – the creator himself thought-about it unfilmable.
I get the place he was coming from. Certainly no studio might have the assets to render its wild mixture of actuality and fantasy the best way our personal imaginations can. However Netflix has grasped the nettle and gone massive in what’s one in every of their most costly and lavish productions.
Cut up into two components, the primary of which is eight episodes, the studio’s adaptation “doesn’t disappoint in its scope or ambition,” in response to Liz Harvey-Kattou, an knowledgeable in Latin American research. A surprisingly trustworthy and detailed retelling, it would please those that adore the novel and convey new followers who love a stupendous interval drama – in addition to those that get pleasure from fantasy.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is on Netflix now
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One Hundred Years of Solitude: Netflix adaptation is trustworthy, bold and fantastically realised
Penguin
Protecting on the theme of translation, this time from one language to a different, Japanese author Haruki Murakami has simply printed his newest novel, The Metropolis and its Unsure Partitions. The e-book revolves round two parallel tales, one a few 17-year-old boy, and the opposite of a 45-year-old man. After studying it in Japanese and English, Japanese research scholar Gitte Marianne Hansen occurred upon an fascinating distinction between the best way these two tales are set aside in every model.
In English, the reader turns into conscious that the 2 narratives are distinct as they become familiar with the completely different worlds they inhabit. Nonetheless, in Japanese the distinction is quick as a result of the language has a number of methods to say “I”. This may not seem to be a giant deal however, as Hansen’s piece outlines, it modifications the story and the best way the reader interprets it in a number of attention-grabbing methods.
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Haruki Murakami and the problem of translating Japanese’s many phrases for “I”
New digital horizons
In As You Like It, Shakespeare famously wrote, “all of the world’s a stage” and throughout the pandemic, actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen took this to coronary heart and ran with it. With theatres closed, they took each a part of Grand Theft Auto’s on-line open-world sport and made it a stage for a novel manufacturing of Hamlet. For future media tutorial Andy Miah, Grand Theft Hamlet is the hilarious movie documenting the making of this ingenious, boundary-pushing manufacturing.
In addition to displaying the chances of theatre in digital areas, it’s only a very humorous and heartwarming movie that can entertain theatre and video games lovers in equal measure. I for one laughed out loud at frequent requires actors and viewers members to “please chorus from killing one another”.
Grand Theft Hamlet is in choose cinemas now
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Grand Theft Hamlet documentary shines a light-weight on reinventing Shakespeare in a digital world
Additionally pushing conventional artwork types to new locations is the Tate Fashionable’s new exhibition Electrical Desires: Artwork and Expertise Earlier than the Web. That includes 150 works, it’s one essentially the most bold exhibitions on the Tate thus far, bringing collectively groundbreaking works by artists who engaged with science, know-how and materials innovation as much as the early Nineteen Nineties.
It’s an enchanting take a look at our relationship with know-how earlier than the commercialisation of the web. As our reviewer Geoff Cox, an knowledgeable in artwork and computational tradition, notes, there’s a form of utopian hope, one thing harmless nearly and idealistic, which we’re lacking now.
Electrical Desires: Artwork and Expertise Earlier than the Web is at Tate Fashionable, London, till 1 June 2025
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Electrical Desires: Artwork and Expertise Earlier than the Web on the Tate affords a glimpse into the long run previous
