Critical material relating to Emma’s being a difficult read due to its hermeneutic versatility and ambiguity has been insisted upon, as opposed to criticism with political and other than aesthetic agendas.

Two centuries of interpretive history necessarily come to bear on any reading, be it critical or filmic, of Austen’s novel Emma. Building on the work of theorists such as André Bazin, Jean Mitry, and Dudley Andrew, the essay concludes that A Tree Grow in Brooklyn not only targets the relational chasms to be crossed by its main characters but also builds a bridge between the producers of the past (including director Kazan) and viewers of the present, contemporary audiences who are asked to peer through a cinematic ‘window’ and partake in a view of the warmth and intimacy to be found in an immigrant family’s life.ĪBSTRACT Given the fact that more than twenty Austen-related cinematic adaptations have been released over the past fifteen years alone, the analysis of this cultural phenomenon emerges as a necessity for gaining a complex understanding of Austen’s work and the way we perceive it today. Transitions from dreamy contentment to harsh realization or an awareness of the hard truth of a situation occur rapidly in these liminal spaces.

The alternating pattern of harmony, contrasted with interpersonal conﬂict, constitutes what the authors call the ‘emotional dialectics’ of the ﬁlm. Signiﬁcantly, the ﬁlm’s most intense moments of emotional harmony and discord occur in front of (or through) these in-between thresholds, where softness gives way to hardness (and vice versa). These are sites of indeterminacy, where personal transitions and economic transactions take place. The central visual elements in this ﬁlm are thresholds or openings, such as windows, doorways, and stairways, which together comprise a liminal space whose crossings serve as the literal inscriptions of Kazan’s dialectical project.

This essay analyzes Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), an adaptation of Betty Smith’s bestselling novel of the same title (published two years earlier).

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