This chapter focuses on Europe’s response to the ongoing wartime crisis by exploring media driven humanitarian campaigns. New media fundraising utilized documentary film, memoir, print media and celebrity endorsements to represent this aid as transformative and successfully bolstered interest in the plight of refugees. As a consequence, refugees became a new kind of moral weapon used to bolster support for continued Allied presence in the Ottoman Empire.

Tolstoy’s works have been adapted into film more often than any other Russian writer except for Dostoevsky. This chapter covers Russian and world cinematic adaptations of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection, and various shorter works of Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s novels, with their vast length, broad canvas, and complex plots, create unique challenges for prospective filmmakers. While some directors attempt to film his texts as closely as possible, others choose to single out particular aspects of his novels as their foci. Adapters of Anna Karenina, for instance, often focus almost exclusively on Anna and Vronsky’s love affair, while minimizing the plotline involving Levin. Cultural factors often come into play, for instance in Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, which adapts Tolstoy’s text in light of the Brezhnev-era demand for monumentalism, and for conveying the patriotic aspects of the novel. Shorter works such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kreutzer Sonata have inspired particularly creative approaches, as directors often freely combine Tolstoy’s short narratives with other texts and set them in remarkably different social, historical, and cultural contexts.

While the stereotype of the oriental villain and the practice of yellowface have been discussed by scholars, less has been said about how practices of cinematography and editing more subtly controlled the representation of Asian immigrants in American film. This chapter examines how orientalism informed American feature-length silent films, including Chinatown Nights (1929) and A Tale of Two Worlds (1921), by visualizing the negative impact of Chinese immigration, depicting the investigation of Chinatown’s people and spaces by white American heroes, and concluding with the reassertion of occidental dominance over oriental people and spaces. In contrast, films such as The Tong-Man (1919) presented resistance to cinematic regulatory gazes by casting Asian American actors in key roles, including silent film’s only Asian American star, Sessue Hayakawa, to challenge those orientalist constructions of subjectivity and objectivity. This chapter demonstrates that, while many silent films depicted Chinatown as a space for white American adventure and Chinese immorality, some demonstrated an appreciation for Chinese immigrants who desired the American dream and assimilation in America’s melting pot.

Approximately 300 Shakespeare films were made in the film industry’s silent era. They range from the filmed record of a theatre production to the film conceived as an autonomous work of cinema; the brief allusion to the full-blown drama; the narratively precise retelling of a play to a skittish borrowing from it; the historically placed production to the radical update. They emerged from production companies in Britain, the US, Italy, France, Germany and Denmark. Collectively, they are revealing both about the changing priorities of the film industry and of the broader history of Shakespeare on screen. This chapter considers the impulses that inspired them, what they achieved, how they were exhibited and received and the nature of their legacy. Moments selected for illustrative focus include the Herbert Beerbohm Tree King John (1899), The Tempest (1908), films of the Shakespeare Tercentenary (1916), Asta Nielsen’s Hamlet (1920), Emil Jannings’ Othello (1922), John Gielgud in the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene (1924) and the use of live lecturers. The chapter ends with the creative engagements silent Shakespeare films have recently prompted, including in the Kit Monkman Macbeth (2018).

The chapter considers tropes of violence in Coriolanus and The Taming of the Shrew. It examines some of the ways these have been shaped by cross-pollination among stage, cinema, and television. For Coriolanus this includes cinema’s increase in realistic cinematic violence and the profitable rise of action hero films. The screen makes highly visible the play’s physical violence marked by signifiers of masculinity: bleeding wounds (received or given in battle) and the scars they leave.Screen versions discussed include: televised Coriolanus broadcasts, one in Italy on RAI television (1965) and the other seen internationally through the BBC Shakespeare Series (1984); stage productions by France’sNational Populaire Villeurbanne (2006), and England’s Royal Shakespeare Company (2018); and Ralph Fiennes’s film (2011). The major films of The Taming of the Shrew include two mass-market movies starring celebrity couples, Mary Pickford/Douglas Fairbanks, directed by Sam Taylor (1927) and Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton directed by Franco Zeffirelli (1966), the BBC Shakespeare Series’ Shrew directed by Jonathan Miller (1980) and the Shakespeare Globe’s stage production (2012).

Mark Twain’s works have received many adaptions in film, television, and theatre, almost always with disappointing results. Translating Twain’s humor, satire, and message have proven difficult. A case in point is the 1938 film version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, probably the best film adaptation of a Twain novel, which was followed the next year by a flawed version of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, starring Andy Rooney as Huck Finn. Filmmakers have tried in vain to portray the serious themes Twain imbedded in even his most comic works. The history of Twain in film and television is pretty much a history of good intentions and flawed results. One notable exception is the Broadway musical Big River, in which country songwriter manages ot capture Twain’s humor, spirit, and message.