The Easy Route to Melancholy. 451 degrees Fahrenheit by Ray Bradbury and its Film Adaptations Cover Image

Prosta droga do melancholii. O antyutopii 451 stopni Fahrenheita Raya Bradbury’ego i jej filmowych adaptacjach
The Easy Route to Melancholy. 451 degrees Fahrenheit by Ray Bradbury and its Film Adaptations

Author(s): Arkadiusz Lewicki
Subject(s): Post-War period (1950 - 1989), Transformation Period (1990 - 2010), Present Times (2010 - today), Film / Cinema / Cinematography
Published by: Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza
Keywords: Ray Bradbury; book; “audio world”; “pictorial world”; anti-utopia;

Summary/Abstract: The article is an attempt to interpret Ray Bradbury’s anti-utopian novel 451 degrees Fahrenheit, published in 1953, and two film adaptations of this book: the film directed in 1966 by François Truffaut and Ramin Bahran television adaptation from 2018. All versions have a similar story structure and tell about the near future, in which the main task of the fire department is burning books. The differences consist in shifts of emphasis within the world presented. The author proves that the 1966 version shows a possible world, which is “an audio world”, while in Ramin Bahrani’s work we are dealing with the “pictorial world”; in the 1966 film the written word is replaced by sounds and the spoken word, and in the version from 2018 by paintings. These differences indicate not only different possibilities for interpreting Ray Bradbury’s novel, but also transformations that took place at different levels of the reality surrounding us.

  • Issue Year: 2019
  • Issue No: 32
  • Page Range: 257-272
  • Page Count: 16
  • Language: Polish