From Page to Screen / Vom Buch zum Film. Группа авторов
that is, true attempts at feminist reimaginings of secondary female characters in book-based family films, are rare. In these, women are given, in spite of not being completely rid of patriarchal constraints, more active and independent roles as they transfer from book to film.
In spite of the recent upsurge of films with strong leading female characters and all-women casts, the use of purging and downgrading strategies is still common when it comes to secondary characters: many new adaptations and sequels such as the whole Jurassic Park franchise (1997, 2001, 2015 and 2018) and the very recent live-action adaptations of Beauty and the Beast (2017) and Mary Poppins Returns (2018) fall back again on the old tropes of femininity in spite of the feminist push behind them (Koushik, Reed, 2019: 132).
This is the backdrop of the informal gender education of whole generations of viewers over the decades to which young audiences under lockdown are now being exposed at home. Some of the solutions to the problems raised in this chapter include situating critical “pedagogy far beyond the boundaries of schools” (Bell, Haas, Sells, 1995: 9), offering “representations that work with a degree of fluidity and contradiction” (Gledhill, 2006: 118), abandoning a capitalist logic when accessing media texts (Koushik, Reed, 2019: 125), and more women directors and screenwriters (Lauzen, 2019: 6). It is still difficult to find film adaptations where secondary female characters fare better than (or at least as well as) their book counterparts. From a gender standpoint, reading the book is still a more liberating experience than watching the film.
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