earticle

영어

This paper aims to reinterpret Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 play, through the lens of the railroad-cinema association. While Williams alludes to the railroad mainly through sound effects, Kazan not only concentrates on the visual images of trains and a railroad station in the opening scene but also keeps focalizing the railroad implications throughout the film. Kazan presents his film as a dynamic intertextual site in which Blanche’s material and psychic conditions as well as her conflicts with other characters are intersected with the physical images, light, steams and noises of the railroad and allusive implications of journey and junction. Using Robert Stam’s theory of film adaptation as a theoretical framework, I explore how these intersections in Kazan’s film serve not only to transfer the inner spirit of Williams’s play to the screen but also to allow the film to have an intertextual dialogue with cultural contexts behind the railroad-cinema association.