Cinema and Its Representations (original) (raw)

Film Adaptation as Translation: On Fidelity

2015

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.

How Film Adaptations Make the Original Poetic

Culture as Text, 2024

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.

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.

On the Appreciation of Cinematic Adaptations

This article explores basic constraints on the nature and appreciation of cinematic adaptations. An adaptation, it is argued, is a work that has been intentionally based on a source work and that faithfully and overtly imitates many of this source's characteristic features, while diverging from it in other respects. Comparisons between an adaptation and its source(s) are essential to the appreciation of adaptations as such. In spite of many adaptation theorists' claims to the contrary, some of the comparisons essential to the appreciation of adaptations as such pertain to various kinds of fidelity and to the ways in which similar types of artistic goals and problems are taken up in an adaptation and its source(s).

The Great Gatsby meets Alain Badiou: Rethinking Fidelity in Film Adaptation

The Great Gatsby meets Alain Badiou: Rethinking Fidelity in Film Adaptation, 2023

The subject of this book is a consideration of the usefulness of the concept of fidelity put forward by the philosopher Alain Badiou in the discussion of film adaptation. Fidelity or faithfulness is primarily a consideration that emerges in relation to so-called canonical texts in adaptation: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby occupies a position of global recognisability and, within the United States, cultural mythology that has triggered strong reactions to the four Hollywood adaptations. The various adaptations allow for the differing approaches to the adaptation of this novel to be meaningfully explored. The film adaptations’ paratextual elements are discussed in order to show how these acted as limiting lenses. The strategies of the films for handling elements of Fitzgerald’s prose and themes are compared across the adaptations. The book concludes by asserting the worth of a larger application of a Badiouian fidelity within the field.

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

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.

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