On the Appreciation of Cinematic Adaptations (original) (raw)
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Film Adaptation as Translation: On Fidelity
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As old as the machinery of film itself, literary texts have continually informed cinematic adaptations. The interaction of two discrete media evokes questions pertaining to the nature of adaptations. Are they a new text or is a text purely 'textual'? In light of adaptation theory and the history of cinema, this paper offers a brief assessment of this phenomenological inquiry. 'Fidelity' to the source literary text has conventionally been the primary criterion for assessing a film adaptation. This paper also explores this assumption and its transformation in the postmodern world.
An Introduction to the Tools of Cinematic Adaptation
International Journal of Trends in English Language and Literature, 2021
Our world is often referred to as the "world's imagination", its virtual world, and the illusion of the real world. Writers gave wings to their imagination and created a series of imaginations in the form of writing known as "literature". Literature, a written masterpiece does not reach a wider audience due to illiteracy, but Cinema has not left any corner of the world untouched with its magic. Though there are many forms of literature, which are divided into four main categoriesproses, drama, poetry, and fiction but the transmutation of literature is still a challenge. This research will present a compact understanding of Cinematic Adaptation and the Tools used in the process of transmutation of 'Script to Screen'.
How Film Adaptations Make the Original Poetic
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This essay argues that film adaptations make the original poetic because the mode of expression changes from "telling" to "immersion." The author refers to Walter Benjamin's translation theory to discuss the nature of adaptation and makes use of several widely celebrated novels and their film versions as examples.
Interpreting Cinema : Adaptations , Intertextualities , Art Movements
2020
Film studies now has become a full-fledged discipline with several theoretical approaches lined up behind it and has a strong foothold in serious academics. Films are now read from various perspectives as text, as a serious novel is read over and over again, since every successive reading/viewing yields additional insights into their meaning. Interpreting Cinema: Adaptations, Intertextualities, Art Movements by eminent academician and scholar Jasbir Jain is a collection of sixteen essays which explores the academic aspect of film studies and has a wide range of
Radical Reflexivity in Cinematic Adaptation: Second Thoughts on Reality, Originality, and Authority
Literature Film Quarterly, 2013
Though filmmakers and scholars have long celebrated meta-cinema, or reflexivity, as a radical and artistically sophisticated mode of cinema capable of rupturing the bourgeois "realism" of the mainstream or "Hollywood" film, a curious double standard often is applied to reflexive adaptations of literary texts.' In discussing the reflexivity of such non-adaptations as Godard's Weekend (1967) or Tarantino's Kill Bill (2003), commentators focus on the creators' edgy and knowing playfulness: "By seeing themselves not as nature's slaves but as fiction's masters, reflexive artists cast doubt on the central assumption of mimetic art-the notion of an antecedent reality on which the artistic text is supposedly modeled" (Stam 129). By casting doubt on the elemental assumptions upon which mimesis is based, in other words, these antifoundationalist films shed their secondariness-their derivativeness. Films such as Weekend, or novels such as Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote or Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, are praised for their ability to critique dominant ideological and signifying codes. In most studies of reflexive adaptations of literature, however, the films are said to be secondary to a different category of antecedent "reality," which is the source text and, often, its own superior reflexivity-whether we mean by this a play's metatheatricality, a novel's or poem's narrative reflexivity, or any source text's explicit recognition of its own constructedness. In a brief chapter on cinematic adaptations of reflexive literature, Robert Stam concludes rather simplistically that while the films often "incorporate certain reflexive devices, they do not metalinguistically dissect their own practice or include critical discourse within the text itself" (159). Moreover, reflexivity, when it occurs in cinematic adaptations of literature, is typically said to accommodate, or provide a visual parallel for, the reflexivity of the adapted text. For example, in one of the first and most influential essays on Shakesepearean metacinema, Kenneth Rothwell argues that "In making the means of representation a subject of representation, film-makers have only ~~m imicked their stage forebears" (211). Rothwell's claim reinforces several problematic ideas: first, that modes of reflexivity are identical across such different media as theater and film; second, that the Shakespeare play is always before the Shakespeare film in the sense that the so-called original text manages to anticipate all its potential metamorphoses in later readings, adaptations, and appropriations. The "original" thereby remains always superior. The 1916 Thanhouscr film of King Lear, directed by Ernest C. Warde and starring his father Frederick as the king, demonstrates well why what we might call the "accommodation argument" has proven so persuasive. The original opening of the film features the scholarly Warde in a Victorian library-like parlor. Cigar smoke clouding the air around him, he is
Adaptation, 2008
Instead of considering fi lm and television adaptations in the context of the source texts they are adapting, this essay proposes another context for their reception and analysis: the genre of adaptation itself. Focusing on the Hollywood traditions of masculine adventure and feminine romance associated respectively with adaptations of Alexandre Dumas père and fi ls, it identifi es four genre markers common to both traditions that make it more likely a given adaptation will be perceived as an adaptation even by an audience that does not know its source, and one antimarker associated with adaptations in the tradition of the younger Dumas but not the elder. The essay concludes by proposing adaptation as a model for all Hollywood genres.
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...
Practicing adaptation : one screenplay, five films
2016
In this thesis I examine the relationship between a screenplay and the films made from it. I test the hypothesis that a film based on an original (not adapted from an existing text) screenplay is an adaptation of this screenplay. In order to investigate the potential range of adaptations that occur during the process of film production, I commissioned a short screenplay which was made into a film five times, by five different production teams, each entirely independent of one another. Utilising these films as my primary set of data, I engage in comparative analysis of the screenplay to the five films and of each of the five films to one another. My framework for analysis is grounded in adaptation studies, which has engaged in close comparative analysis of novel to film, but has not made significant inquiry into the discrete phase of adaptation between screenplay and film. Additionally, I argue that an investigation into the relationship between written and filmed creative work is id...