Maxwell Landon: Grafting the Gaze: Masculinity and Queer Desire in Beau Travail’s Free Adaptation

This paper examines the formal and thematic connections between Herman Melville’s novella, Billy Budd, Sailor, and Claire Denis’s “loosely adapted” film, Beau Travail. Using Denis’s filmmaking process of “grafting” as a case study, this article argues the potential of the camera as a primary adaptive tool in literature-to-film adaptations—as opposed to the traditional method of the adapted screenplay.