Turning Novel into Film: Criticism of Adaptation (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.
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...
Theoretical Aspects of the Literary Text Adaptation Into Film Script
Scientific Journal of Polonia University
The article offers a comparative analysis of both texts – the literary text of the novel “Everything Is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer an American novelist, and the film adaptation of the literary text. The article issues the question of the theoretical fundamentals of the literary text adaptation into film script. The problems that arise in the process of literary text transformation into the language of the film text are highlighted. Differential peculiarities of the literary text and its film version are determined. The research proves that the text of the novel “Everything Is Illuminated” has undergone particular semantic changes and the emphasis shifted from verbal to verbal-visual in the film text, nevertheless its communicative function has been preserved.
Adaptation in Visual Culture, edited by Julie Grossman and R. Barton Palmer, 2017
Hutcheon writes that the most commonly discussed instances of film adaptation continue to be those that move from the modes of "telling" to "showing"-usually, from print to performance-but goes on to add that the reverse movement, namely: that of the "the flourishing 'novelization' industry … cannot be ignored" (38). Despite this claim, and in face of the fact that film audiences have been reading novelizations-that is, novels developed from films, or more typically, from screenplays-since (at least) the earliest days of talking pictures, relatively little research has been conducted in this field (for a notable exception, see Baetens). This is no doubt due to the fact that novelizations have typically been characterized as hybrid forms of literature-"the misshapen offspring of the cinema and the written word" (Allison)-but the ongoing volume and popularity of such novelizations-commercially successful titles, such as The Omen (1976/2006), and serial novels which expand franchise properties, like Star Wars and The X-Files-suggests a body of work that deserves a more detailed critical appreciation. This essay describes novelization as a mode of adaptation and serialization, attending to questions of intermediality, authorship and cultural value to open up some key issues in this widespread area of literary production. More particularly
Narrative enunciation in film is a signifying practice by means of which the subjectivity of a narrative discourse is constructed. The narrative art is closely linked with different modes of narrative enunciation or story telling techniques, it can be first/third person narrative, author surrogate, audience surrogate, magic realism, stream of consciousness technique etc. All these means of narrative techniques are used to establish certain perspective of the author, the way author wants to present facts and events that surrounds the story line or plot structure. Standing at the crux of a time when the very concept of cinema as a photographic transcription of reality or some pre-existing reality as it happened with the invention of 'cinematographe' by Edwin S Porter, has been taken to task, cinema has truly emerged as a vital instrument for uncovering silences within different social systems. Cinema when considered as the most powerful weapon to mobilize viewers, narrative or story line has been proved to be the most essential component for creating a unique bond between the spectator and the director or author of the film. Narrative or story-line when adapted from popular literature, especially novel, the point of divergences ie, differences in perspectives or representation of reality, both by the writer and the director is quite rampant. And those differences are considered as director's signature, certain marked quality that will distinguish the director from the author. Also, the manner in which the preconceived notion of audience as a passive recipient is subverted will be discussed which helped create a new meaning not only for the film makers or for the audience rather for the film industry or market as well. A series of classical movies which are adaptations either from popular pieces of literature, be it novel, drama or short story, will be discussed to identify the areas of divergences or deviations and thus to establish a different point of perspective altogether. The research methodology would be content analysis.
Literature into film: Case studies in adaptation strategies
This paper discusses the process involved in adapting literary works for the big screen. A number of case studies explores the strategies that are involved in carrying out this complex task, among which condensing and expanding descriptions, dialogues and events, adding dramatic action and using mise-en-scène to highlight character description, managing points of view, shifting time sequences, changing narrative structure and reader/viewer expectations. Some external factors impacting on adaptations, like different cultural contexts of reception and the influence of censorship, are also discussed. A companion paper, “From book to screen: The process of adaptation”, is also available at Academia.edu