Slide 1 – Title Slide
Slide 2 – Lecture by Ashley D. Polasek, PhD student at the Centre of Adaptation at the DeMontfort
University, Leicester, UK. Can be found on <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAAEGWu-6pc>
Slide 3 – Quote from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin Remediation: Understanding New Media
Remediation is the process by which ‘new media refashion prior media’, p. 273
Paraphrased from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin Remediation: Understanding New Media
Immediacy: Media that have the goal of immersion, making the user forget the medium is there.
Hypermediacy: Media that aim to make the reader aware of the medium, and making it part of the art
itself, p. 272.
•
Top Quote ‘I hear of Sherlock everywhere…’ from ‘The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter’
Slide 4 – Holmes smoked long-stemmed pipes (The Adventure of the Copper Beeches). The cap similar
to a deerstalker is used once; ‘his ear-flapped travelling cap’ (The Adventure of Silver Blaze)
Sydney Paget was the original artist on The Strand Magazine. He was commissioned by mistake; the
original commission was for his brother Walter Paget.
Frederic Dorr Steele was the illustrator for Collier’s Magazine, USA, and his illustrations of Holmes were
based on William Gillette.
•
Top Quote ‘…neatest and most methodical…’ from ‘The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual’
Slide 5 – Guinness Book of Records 2012 lists Holmes as the most filmed human character in cinema and
TV. He stands at 254 appearances, runner up to Count Dracula who stands at 272 appearances.
<http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2012/5/sherlock-holmes-awarded-title-for-mostportrayed-literary-human-character-in-film-tv-41743/>
Quote from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin Remediation: Understanding New Media ‘[a]lthough no
viewer could believe that the photograph is the same thing as the world it depicts, he can be
encouraged to look through the medium, on the grounds that the medium holds a record of the light
rays that would have reached his eye had he been placed where the camera was’. p. 121
Images: Top – Left to right: William Gillette, Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing, Geremy Brett
Images: Bottom – Right to left: Robert Downey Jr, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jonny Lee Miller
•
Top Quote ‘…put himself in a false position…’ from ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’
Slide 6 – All quote from Bolter and Grusin taken from pages:
Quote 1 – ‘In the case of [Ralph] Goings and other photorealists, to make paintings of photographs is a
process of self-remediation, because the painters themselves take the photographs that they then
remediate on canvas or on paper’, p. 120
Quote 2 – “…the desire to bypass [choices that traditional realists made in translating 3D objects] was
tied up with the desire to present the image as factually and objectively as possible…” Linda Chase,
1988, p. 121
Quote 3 – Stanley Cavell (1979) is quoted to note that ‘both romanticism and modernism, the artist’s
goal was to achieve presentness or immediacy by insisting on the presence of his own self in his art’ p.
121
Quote 4 – Ralph Goings rejects this notion, saying that “…if everything is self expression, then selfexpression is no big deal.” Bolter and Grusin p. 121 from Chase, 1988
Quote 5 – Bolter and Grusin go on to say that a distance still separates a viewer from art, and that there
are ‘… two ways to reduce the distance and heighten the sense of immediacy: Either the viewer can pass
through the window into the represented world, or the objects of representation can come up to or
even through the window and surround the viewer.” p. 235
Quote from Manovich: Language of New Media, p. 41
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Top Quote – ‘Insensibly one begins to twist facts to sooth theories, instead of theories to sooth
facts’ from ‘Scandal in Bohemia’
Slide 7 – Name of the artist for Fanart of Gregory Lestrade, James Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes and Irene
Adler as portrayed in BBC Sherlock; Alice X. Zhang, source <http://society6.com/artist/alicexz> for all the
fanart of BBC Sherlock. Fanart of Sherlock Holmes as portrayed in the Granada Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes is by an unknown artist.
•
Top Quote: ‘When we first met, you told me a disguise is a self-portrait’ Scandal in Belgravia,
BBC Sherlock S2E1
Slide 8 – Top Quote: ‘…let us try to forget for half an hour…’ from ‘The Adventure of the Five Orange
Pips’
Slide 9 – Mutoscope recording is stored at the Library of Congress, and was shot by Arthur Marvin for
Mutoscope and Biography Company. Source < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmffCrlgY-c>
•
Top Quote: ‘I am baffled until you explain your process’ from ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’
Slide 10 – Original Quote remediated by Paget consists of one line:
‘[Holmes] took off his coat and waistcoat, put on a large blue dressing-gown, and then wandered about
the room…’ Annotated Version p. 381.
•
Top Quote: ‘There is a strong family resemblance …’ from ‘A Study in Scarlet’
Slide 11 – ‘Generally … one thinks the life of the detective went on around the fireplace’ taken from The
Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, quote of Vincent Starrett.
•
Top Quote: ‘…preserved my rooms and my papers exactly as they had been’ from ‘The
Adventure of the Empty House’
Slide 12 – Three pictures of reconstruction of the Sitting Room:
1) The first reconstruction of the famous 221B sitting room that was not a film set was recreated
for 1951 Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Marylbone street. This exhibition is still available to the
public on the second floor of the Sherlock Holmes pub, in London
2) The second is the SH Museum in Lucens, Switzerland, created in the 60s by Adrian Conan Doyle
and reopened to the public recently in 2011
3) The Third is the sitting room from the London SH Museum, opened in the 1990 and still open to
the public
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Top Quote: ‘It’s not an imitation, it’s authentic’ from Sherlock Holmes in Washington (Roy
William Niell, dir., Universal Studios)
Slide 13 – The Sitting Room
1. One of the features of the sitting room is the famous wicker chair. The illustration *click*
appeared on The Strand in Sept 1893 with the story ‘The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter’.
2. There was no mention of a wicker (cane) chair in the stories until ‘The Disappearance of Lady
Frances Carfax’ in December 1911 (which is that quote above).
• Top Quote: ‘The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax’
Slide 14 – Illustration by Sydney Paget to the story ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’
1. The first known remediation of the image is this (click) in the Rathbone-Bruce adaptation of The
Hound of the Baskervilles (dir., Sidney Lanfield, 20th Century Fox, 1939).
2. The remediation is more obvious in this (click) third image, taken from the Granada Series’
version of the Silver Blaze adaptation (1988), the same story the illustration was drawn for so
that the image was directly referenced for the use of this shot.
3. (click) This same image was then remediated into Sherlock, a modern retelling of the Holmes
stories in 21st Century London. While not in a train, the position of his hands obviously links back
to the Paget image, bringing it directly into the immediacy of being shot by a coloured, state-ofthe-art camera.
4. (click) And this image was then remediated into the hypermediate realm of the video game in
‘The Testament of Sherlock Holmes’, which came out in 2012 (dev., by Frogware, published by
Focus Home Interactive, 20th September 2012)
• Top Quote: ‘…just in time to catch our train to Paddington…’ from ‘The Adventure of Silver
Blaze’
Slide 15
1. Picture 1 – the actors Cumberbatch and Freeman in their sitting room set at 221B. Note the
wallpaper.
2. Picture 2 – the wallpaper (and sprayed smiley) has become part of the Sherlock Holmes brand
among fans, and has been integrated into the symbol of Holmes like the calabash pipe and the
deerstalker.
3. Picture 3 – The clothing worn by the cast for Sherlock has been stylised to fit into every day life.
4. Picture 4 – The ‘I Believe in Sherlock Holmes’ movement was started by fans as a response to
the end of Sherlock Season 2, which (ending) mirrors the end of Sherlock Holmes at the
Reichenbach and (reaction) the reaction of people back in Doyle’s time. The premise of the
movement is to pretend that the events in Sherlock happened in real London, rather than in
Sherlock’s fictional one, and to react as though this were a true life event.
5. Picture 5 and 6 – These are picture of extreme immediacy reached by this remediation of
Holmes, one taken at Odessa in Ukraine on 16/9/12, and one taken at the university of Malta, by
me, last October.
6. Picture 7 – The new symbols are then being remediated and integrated into the Holmes brand –
to the left, Cumberbatch in his role as Sherlock, to the right, Miller, reprising the role of Sherlock
Holmes for CBS’s Elementary, which is on its first run since last September.
• Top Quote: ‘A Case of Identity’
Slide 16 – ‘pass through the window into the represented world, or [bring] the objects of
representation … through the window and [be] surround[ed by them]’ Bolter and Grusin, Remediation;
Understanding New Media p. 235
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Top Quote: ‘…art In the blood…’ from ‘The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter’
Slide 17
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Top Quote: ‘…I had a last impression…’ ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’