Celluloid Esther: The Literary Carnivalesque as Transformed through the Lens of the Cinematic Epic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The reception ofEstherhas often been fraught with attempts to make the book more palatable to the audience receiving it and to interpret the book in a manner more consistent with the values of that community. This is evidence in cinematic adaptations of the book, where the story is transformed to better suit the genre expectations of the Biblical epic and the perspectives of the intended viewers. By examining two films based onEsther – Esther and the King(1960) andOne Night with the King(2006) – some of the interpretive issues surrounding the tone and content of the Biblical source become apparent. IfEstheris best understood as a carnivalesque work, as many scholars have suggested, then the expectations of this kind of work have not been met in the cinematic adaptations. Given the importance of film in contemporary Biblical reception, these new readings ofEstherare perhaps particularly influential, at least within the restricted communities who view these movies. Likewise, analysis of these changes highlights the values of the makers of these films and the audiences who consume them.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".