Literature into film: Case studies in adaptation strategies (original) (raw)
Related papers
From book to film: The process of adaptation
Since its very beginning, cinema has always relied heavily on adaptations from literary works to provide films with stories. This paper discusses some major issues in the process of adaptation. First, the fact that literature and film are two different “sign systems”, each with its own ways and means to convey meanings and emotions. Second, the number of false assumptions about the alleged difficulty, if not impossibility, of cinema to tell stories as effectively as the written word. Third, the problem that for a long time, adaptations have been assessed on the basis of how “faithful” they were to the original text, thus preventing an evaluation of the adapted work in its own terms, as an original, creative, “new” product. Finally, the crucial role of audiences in perceiving adaptations “as adaptations”, i.e. as texts referring back to other texts, in a dynamic balance between repetition and variation, familiarity and novelty, ritual and surprise. N.B. A related paper, “Literature into film: Case studies in adaptation strategies”, is also available at Academia.edu
THE APPEAL OF LITERATURE-TO-FILM ADAPTATIONS Adaptation as interpretation
The debate on cinematic adaptations of literary works was for many years dominated by the questions of fidelity to the source and by the tendencies to prioritize the literary originals over their film versions. 1 Adaptations were seen by most critics as inferior to the adapted texts, as "minor", "subsidiary", "derivative" or "secondary" products, lacking the symbolic richness of the books and missing their "spirit". 2 Critics could not forgive what was seen as the major fault of adaptations: the impoverishment of the book's content due to necessary omissions in the plot and the inability of the filmmakers to read out and represent the deeper meanings of the text.
A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation
Poetics Today, 2014
This volume comprises twenty-three articles on the aesthetics and mechanics of movie adaptation, "from the very beginning of cinema to the current day, covering historical, ideological, economical, and different theoretical approaches, ranging from the canonical to popular literary and film texts within the ever-expanding mediasphere" (8). Deborah Cartmell's introduction surveys the history and the problems of "adaptation studies." Then, in part 1, "History and Contexts: From Image to Sound," the first four articles deal with adaptations in the silent film. Judith Buchanan examines a sample of early silent films (since 1907) based on novels or plays and adaptations made after the transition to feature film (1913). In major cinema theaters, between 1907 and 1912, "lecturers," or "narrators," supplied a commentary on the films, and then their aid gave way to numerous "self-explanatory" literary adaptations in the second half of the silent era (1913-27). Gregory Robinson tells the fascinating story of intertitles in silent films: their conventional uses (conveying expositional data and dialogues, providing continuity) and the experimentation with their features and functions, compared with both commercial and experimental films later on (for example, by Michael Snow or Quentin Tarantino). Robinson also discusses the different styles of notable "title writers," such as Anita Loos, H. M. "Beanie" Walker, and Ralph Spence. Richard J. Hand's article turns to various (proto)modernist artists of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century who experimented with intermedial adaptation, more or less successfully. These include Thomas Hardy's, Henry James's, and Joseph Conrad's adaptations of their novels into plays or films and
Turning Novel into Film: Criticism of Adaptation
Adapting a novel into a film is a humongous task than writing a book, yet the critics never favoured a film over the novel. There are limitations to it, and the transformation brings changes at every level of the film and a book is not the same after the film. It is hardly ever that a film has come out better than the book. Adding, subtraction, multiplication and division: it all applies to script while making a film out of a book. The present paper focusses on the disadvantages held by a film during the metamorphosis of the book.
Literature and film: a guide to the theory and practice of film adaptation
Choice Reviews Online
as enabling his own analysis of Jane Austen's novel. 7 Historians have approached abolition and emancipation as many-sided phenomena, so that it is hardly controversial nowadays to argue, for instance, that emerging humanitarian and liberal attitudes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries-the hallmark of the abolitionist movement in Britain-helped to pave the way for new forms of imperialism, and in particular the "civilizing mission," of the later nineteenth century. 8 Consequently, the liberal and humanitarian Jane Austen was an obvious candidate for inclusion in this new complex historiography, as an exemplary recorder of the multiple relationships between domestic and colonial in the interregnum between the first and the second British empires, and of some of the ways in which colonial questions were actually central to the elaboration of new English cultures in the nineteenth century. 9 The sophistication and irony of this historiographical approach-in which it is sometimes hard to tell the good guys from the bad-appeared to match the intricacies and ironies of Mansfield Park itself. And so Rozema's film picked up on and validated this academic approach. As John Wiltshire puts it in his recent book on Austen adaptations, "The film is the apotheosis of these variously political readings of Jane Austen: it certainly represents a meeting point or site of infiltration by academic commentary into the mass media." 10 However, while the film appears to validate academic hegemony over Mansfield Park, and over Jane Austen in general, against the middlebrow inhabitants of the Republic of Pemberley, in fact, if we read the Jane Austen criticism carefully, we can see a curious parallel between fan outrage at Rozema's film and academic disappointment with Austen's novel. Despite the undoubted importance of the revisionist histories of British slavery, and despite their formal analogy to the difficult structure of Austen's novel itself, it is nevertheless a common experience of modern readers of Mansfield Park that, for all its subtlety, what the novel lacks is precisely a simple, heroic narrative of abolition. Faced with the complexities of plot, character, and narrative point of view in the novel, readers often experience disappointment, loss, and even a sense of infidelity to an imaginary "original" story of slavery-just as viewers of film adaptations routinely complain of movies' unfaithfulness to "the book." One of Jane Austen's heroes, the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, provided one of the best-known versions of that simple historical narrative. In his History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, first published in 1808, the movement to outlaw the buying and selling of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade is famously likened to a river. A fold-out map of the history of abolition is included in Clarkson's book, with the names of famous abolitionists attached to streams or tributaries, linking up to form a large body of water: "The torrent which swept away the Slave-trade." 11
The Guide: Adaptation From Novel To Film
2016
Adaptation in the film industry is nothing new. Almost three-fourths of all films ever made have been adapted from novels, plays or short stories of the classic literature in every language. Our Indian film industry is of no exception. It is often said that the printed text is, in some way, superior to and more moral than the filmed version. The objective of this paper is to focus on such adaptation – the adaptation of R.K.Narayan's Sahitya Akademi Award winning novel The Guide to Vijay Anand's film Guide. After the release of the film Narayan was very unhappy because he felt that it could not capture the spirit of the story, and he did not like the unwarranted cuts and changes. This is true from the aesthetic view point, but it is equally true that a film director is not bound to the original and he or she has every right to eliminate or add some characters and incidents which are or are not there in the original text in order to cater the taste of all sorts of public. In t...
Literature and Film Adaptation Theories: Methodological Approaches
Research is a biannual , peerreviewed, full-text, and open-access Journal of the Universidad Complutense Madrid that publishes interdisciplinary research on literary studies, critical theory, applied linguistics and semiotics, and educational issues. The journal also publishes original contributions in artistic creation in order to promote these works.
Meta: Journal des traducteurs, 2017
Contemporary theoretical trends in Adaptation Studies and Translation Studies (Aragay 2005; Catrysse 2014; Milton 2009; Venuti 2007) envisage synergies between the two areas that can contribute to the sociocultural and artistic value of adaptations. This suggests the application of theoretical insights derived from Translation Studies to the adaptation of novels for the screen (i.e., film adaptations). It is argued that the process of transposing a novel into a filmic product entails an act of bidirectional communication between the book, the novel and the involved contexts of production and reception. Particular emphasis is placed on the role that context plays in this communication. Context here is taken to include paratextual material pertinent to the adapted text and to the film. Such paratext may lead to fruitful analyses of adaptations and, thus, surpass the myopic criterion of fidelity which has traditionally dominated Adaptation Studies. The analysis uses examples of adaptat...
Meta, 2017
Contemporary theoretical trends in Adaptation Studies and Translation Studies (Aragay 2005; Catrysse 2014; Milton 2009; Venuti 2007) envisage synergies between the two areas that can contribute to the sociocultural and artistic value of adaptations. This suggests the application of theoretical insights derived from Translation Studies to the adaptation of novels for the screen (i.e., film adaptations). It is argued that the process of transposing a novel into a filmic product entails an act of bidirectional communication between the book, the novel and the involved contexts of production and reception. Particular emphasis is placed on the role that context plays in this communication. Context here is taken to include paratextual material pertinent to the adapted text and to the film. Such paratext may lead to fruitful analyses of adaptations and, thus, surpass the myopic criterion of fidelity which has traditionally dominated Adaptation Studies. The analysis uses examples of adaptation shifts (i.e., changes between the source novel and the film adaptation) from the film P.S. I Love You (LaGravenese 2007), which are examined against interviews of the author, the director and the cast, the film trailer and one film review.