What is it about?
Bierce’s Civil War story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” was adapted in 1959 as a television episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and in 1962 as Robert Enrico’s French film La rivière du hibou, which was presented as a Twilight Zone episode in turn. Although the canonical reading of this story aligns it with the author’s other “antiwar” narratives, black enslavement comes to the fore in both these short film adaptations, but with opposite connotations. Examining their digression in narrative and stylistic direction illustrates many dichotomies of cinema aesthetics: low vs. high art, mainstream vs. avant-garde, escapism vs. social critique—and demonstrates the cultural possibility for these opposite approaches to register concurrently as popular media products.
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Why is it important?
The Twilight Zone adaptation of Bierce's canonical short story has been discussed widely by scholars and critics over the years. However, the way in which Enrico's film moves beyond the story to emphasize enslavement has not been sufficiently addressed so far. Also, the Hitchcock adaptation makes an informative comparison to the TZ episode as such, since they are concurrent popular American television products. The Hitchcock episode, in any case, has been mostly overlooked in past media criticism.
Perspectives
This article went through a rather elaborate evolution to arrive at where it is. Originally, I wanted to use the comparison of these two Bierce adaptations as an example of "transnational" adaptation pedagogy and the potential to inform adaptation studies through the juxtaposition of multiple adaptations from different cultural contexts, as well as an emphasis on short stories over novels for practical teaching purposes. These considerations were eventually put aside, and the article ended up its paired-down state with its focus on contrasting depictions of enslavement in concurrent popular media.
David Melbye
University of Huddersfield
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Two divergent cinematic readings of enslavement in ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, Short Film Studies, March 2023, Intellect,
DOI: 10.1386/sfs_00090_1.
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