Araby | |
---|---|
Directed by | Dennis Courtney |
Screenplay by | Dennis Courtney Joseph Bierman |
Based on | Araby by James Joyce |
Starring | Van Hughes Joanna Canton |
Narrated by | James Turner |
Cinematography | Ron Baldwin |
Edited by | Dennis Courtney Joseph Bierman |
Music by | Seamaisin Kila |
Release date |
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Running time | 21 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Araby is an independent short film directed by Dennis Courtney, starring Van Hughes. It was adapted from the short story "Araby" by James Joyce, which was included in his short works collection Dubliners .
Based on the short story by Irish author James Joyce, Araby is the bittersweet tale of a young boy's confused affection for his friend's older sister. Taught by Jesuits in turn-of-the-century Dublin, and raised in a strict Catholic family, the boy worships her from afar. When she finally notices him, the girl expresses her sadness in not being able to attend the enchanting Araby bazaar. The boy nobly sets out to attain a gift for the girl, but instead meets with a harsh revelation. The boy's romantic quest through the streets of Dublin becomes a religious pilgrimage, merging the sensual and the sacred. [1]
The filmmakers makes several adroit additions to Joyce's text, including an episode in the schoolroom where a Christian Brother instructs the boys about the young martyr Tarsicius, whose exploit of carrying the Eucharist to Christian prisoners in Rome is only alluded to in Joyce's text. In fact, Tarsicius is not even named in the story when the narrator records: “I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes." A second emendation is the expansion of the role of Mrs. Mercer, whom Joyce only mentioned in the story. In the film she confers with the protagonist's aunt over the tea-table. For this dialogue, missing from the "Araby" text, the filmmakers went to ‘‘The Sisters,’’ the first story in Dubliners, as well as utilizing narration from "Araby" itself. Another significant change from the story in the handling of the Caroline Norton poem ‘‘The Arab's Farewell to His Steed.’’ Joyce merely alludes to the poem, but in the film, the uncle in voice-over recites lines from it, which indisputably link the verses with the young man as he races down Buckingham Street to the special train at Westland Row Station that will take him to Araby. [2]
The production was completed in 8 days with a cast and crew of 40 people and a budget of $30,000. [3] It was filmed in Richmond, Virginia, Portsmith, Virginia, New Hope, Pennsylvania and Asbury Park, New Jersey. [4] Seamaisin, a group of musicians from University of Notre Dame recorded traditional Irish music for the film and the Dublin-based traditional group Kila also provided two songs for the soundtrack. [5]
The Irish Edition wrote, "The film subtly reveals the deep feelings that weave their way through the boy's consciousness, from his romantic preoccupation with the girl, the initial hope and anticipation of receipt of the money from his uncle so he can buy a gift and on through to the ultimate failure of his efforts. Joyce would be absolutely delighted with the beauty and magical power of this 21-minute film. [6] “The filmmakers tell the story in a cinematic language that is brisk and impressionistic - like the experiences of a child - but pensive and mature at the same time.” [7] “The film ultimately helps us to get at what Joyce critic Donald Torchiana calls the "mythic, religious and legendary patterns that Joyce seems to place so frequently at the very center of each story".” [8]
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.
Leopold Bloom is the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. His peregrinations and encounters in Dublin on 16 June 1904 mirror, on a more mundane and intimate scale, those of Ulysses/Odysseus in Homer's epic poem: The Odyssey.
Roddy Doyle is an Irish novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. He is the author of eleven novels for adults, eight books for children, seven plays and screenplays, and dozens of short stories. Several of his books have been made into films, beginning with The Commitments in 1991. Doyle's work is set primarily in Ireland, especially working-class Dublin, and is notable for its heavy use of dialogue written in slang and Irish English dialect. Doyle was awarded the Booker Prize in 1993 for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. It presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.
Araby may refer to:
John Stanislaus Joyce was the father of writer James Joyce, and a well known Dublin man about town. The son of James and Ellen Joyce, John Joyce grew up in Cork, where his mother's family, which claimed kinship to "Liberator" Daniel O'Connell, was quite prominent.
Joseph Ronald Drew was an Irish singer, folk musician and actor who had a fifty-year career recording with The Dubliners.
Nora Barnacle was the muse and wife of Irish author James Joyce. Barnacle and Joyce had their first romantic outing in 1904 on a date celebrated worldwide as "Bloomsday" after his modernist novel Ulysses. Barnacle did not, however, enjoy the novel. Their sexually explicit letters have aroused much curiosity, especially as Joyce normally disapproved of coarse language, and they fetch high prices at auction. In 2004, an erotic letter from Joyce to Barnacle sold at Sotheby's for £240,800.
Thomas Patrick McKenna was an Irish actor, born in Mullagh, County Cavan. He had an extensive stage and screen career.
"The Dead" is the final short story in the 1914 collection Dubliners by James Joyce. It is by far the longest story in the collection and, at 15,952 words, is almost long enough to be described as a novella. The story deals with themes of love and loss, as well as raising questions about the nature of the Irish identity.
"Araby" is a short story by James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners. The story traces a young boy's infatuation with his friend's sister.
"The Sisters" is a short story by James Joyce, the first of a series of short stories called Dubliners. Originally published in the Irish Homestead on 13 August 1904, "The Sisters" was Joyce's first published work of fiction. Joyce later revised the story and had it, along with the rest of the series, published in book form in 1914. The story details a boy's connection with a local priest, in the context of the priest's death and reputation.
Kíla is an Irish folk music group formed in 1987 in Irish language secondary school Coláiste Eoin in County Dublin.
"An Encounter" is a short story by James Joyce. It is second in a collection of Joyce's short stories called Dubliners. In the story, two young boys experience an eerie encounter with a strange, old man. It deals with themes such as routine and wanderlust.
"Clay" is a short story by James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners. It deals with the reflections of a middle-aged, unmarried woman during the course of her day.
Austin Film Festival (AFF), founded in 1994, is an organization in Austin, Texas, that focuses on writers' creative contributions to film. Initially, AFF was called the Austin Heart of Film Screenwriters Conference and functioned to launch the careers of screenwriters, who historically have been underrepresented within the film industry.
The O’Connell School is a secondary and primary school for boys located on North Richmond Street in Dublin, Ireland. The school, named in honour of the leader of Catholic Emancipation, Daniel O’Connell, has the distinction of being the oldest surviving Christian Brothers school in Dublin, having been first established in 1829. It is now under the trusteeship of the Edmund Rice Schools Trust.
Chris Rael is an eclectic American musician, singer, composer, and songwriter.
Kennedy's Kitchen is an American band consisting of seven musicians who compose Traditional Irish music. Since forming in 1998, it has been based in South Bend, Indiana, United States. Led by joHn Kennedy, Kennedy's Kitchen has performed at various venues across the Midwest portion of the United States and beyond.
Epiphany in literature refers generally to a visionary moment when a character has a sudden insight or realization that changes their understanding of themselves or their comprehension of the world. The term has a more specialized sense as a literary device distinct to modernist fiction. Author James Joyce first borrowed the religious term "Epiphany" and adopted it into a profane literary context in Stephen Hero (1904–1906), an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In that manuscript, Stephen Daedalus defines epiphany as "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself." Stephen's epiphanies are moments of heightened poetic perception in the trivial aspects of everyday Dublin life, non-religious and non-mystical in nature. They become the basis of Stephen's theory of aesthetic perception as well as his writing. In similar terms, Joyce experimented with epiphany throughout his career, from the short stories he wrote between 1898 and 1904 which were central to his early work, to his late novel Finnegans Wake (1939). Scholars used Joyce's term to describe a common feature of the modernist novel, with authors as varied as Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, and Katherine Mansfield all featuring these sudden moments of vision as an aspect of the contemporary mind. Joycean or modernist epiphany has its roots in nineteenth-century lyric poetry, especially the Wordsworthian "spots of time," as well as the sudden spiritual insights that formed the basis of traditional spiritual autobiography. Philosopher Charles Taylor explains the rise of epiphany in modernist art as a reaction against the rise of a “commercial-industrial-capitalist society” during the early twentieth century.