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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Adaptation

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Adaptation by Thomas Leitch , Kyle Meikle LAST REVIEWED: 29 September 2014 LAST MODIFIED: 29 September 2014 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0116

Studies of cinematic adaptations—films based, as the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences puts it, on material originally presented in another medium—are scarcely a century old. Even so, particular studies of adaptation, the process by which texts in a wide range of media are transformed into films (and more recently into other texts that are not necessarily films), cannot be properly understood without reference to the specific period they were produced in. Each generation of adaptation studies has produced its own principles and orthodoxies, typically by attacking the orthodoxies and principles of the preceding generation. Adaptation studies have regularly alternated between polemics that attacked earlier assumptions in the field and readings of individual adaptations that have explored the implications of these attacks and so implicitly established new orthodoxies. The earliest work on adaptation, from Vachel Lindsay’s The Art of the Moving Picture , first published in 1915, to André Bazin’s “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,” first published in 1948, grapples with the general relationship between literature and cinema as presentational modes. The second phase, focusing mostly on adaptations of individual novels to films, follows George Bluestone’s highly influential 2003 study Novels into Film , originally published in 1957, in assuming a series of categorical distinctions between verbal and visual representational modes. Most studies of individual adaptations and their sources, and most textbooks on adaptation, have been produced under the influence of these assumptions. In this third phase, Robert Stam’s 2000 article “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation” rejects the binary distinctions between source texts and adaptations; Kamilla Elliott’s 2003 book Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate deconstructs the binary distinctions between verbal and visual texts; and Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn’s 2012 book A Theory of Adaptation emphasizes the continuities between texts that have been explicitly identified as adaptations and all other texts as intertextual palimpsests marked by traces of innumerable earlier texts. This third phase has generated most of the leading work on adaptation theory. An emerging fourth phase is heralded by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s 1999 study Remediation: Understanding New Media and Lev Manovich’s 2001 book The Language of New Media . Both are inspired by the rise of the digital media that establishes every reader as a potential writer. These analysts use a Wiki-based model of writing as community participation rather than individual creation to break down the distinction between reading and writing and recast adaptation as a quintessential instance of the incessant process of textual production. A leading tendency of this fourth phase has been to use methodologies developed for literature-to-film adaptation to analyze adaptations that range far outside literature and cinema.

General Resources

Earlier than any other area of cinema studies, adaptation began to generate a substantial body of resources specifically designed for teachers, students, and academic researchers. The dominance of the case study in the second phase of adaptation studies produced an especially comprehensive and wide-ranging series of literature-to-cinema filmographies, some aiming for exhaustiveness, others for greater selectivity and more extended analysis of particular novel-to-film or theater-to-film pairs. The prominence of college courses in film adaptation generated a number of textbooks focusing on cinematic adaptation, and later a series of essays considering the larger theoretical and pedagogical issues that were raised, or that could be raised, by focusing on adaptations.

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Filming John Fowles : critical essays on motion picture and television adaptations

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In/Fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation

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This volume explores a timely and controversial theoretical issue in cinematic adaptation studies: the necessity and value of fidelity as a yardstick by which to measure film adaptations of literary and dramatic works. Recent publications in the field have argued that adaptation criticism has been too focused on fidelity and unjustly privileges the literary source over the film adaptation. Film theorists who object to this perceived bias recommend that criticism of film adaptations develop a more intertextual paradigm, following the tenets of post-structuralist literary theory. Yet this approach risks throwing the field into chaotic relativism. The essays in this volume suggest, rather, that there is now a continuum of critical perspectives that use fidelity, or the comparative methodology which is its essence, both more and less as a benchmark for critiquing and evaluating film adaptations. Similarly, cinematic adaptations themselves have for some time operated on a spectrum of more or less fidelity to their primary literary or dramatic sources. A plurality (rather than an infinity) of critical approaches allows the field of adaptation studies to express a breadth of perspectives and interests while still maintaining the relational heart of the enterprise.

All the chapters in this book were initially plenary lectures, individual papers, or panel presentations (with discussion) heard at the Literature/Film Assoiation annual conference held at Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 2005. The in/fidelity continuum is organized as follows. Early essays express the desire for fidelity in film adaptation and/or demonstrate the ways in which several films, despite some textual and contextual interference, manage to remain relatively faithful to literary sources in one way or another. The next essays show how textual and contextual influences draw film adaptations into infidelities of various kinds. Later chapters offer examples of cinematic adaptations which have tenuous connections to their alleged sources or critique central elements of those sources. After a post-structuralist analysis of adaptation theory, the panel and following discussion provide some arguments both for and against fidelity criticism, including reasons for its persistence and ways to break its continuing, though changing, spell.

David L. Kranz teaches Shakespeare, Early Modern English literature, and film at Dickinson College. A contributing editor to Literature/Film Quarterly, he is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on Shakespeare and on film adaptation.

Nancy C. Mellerski teaches French and film studies at Dickinson College, She is the co-author of The Public Eye: Ideology and the Police Procedural (with Robert P. Winston) and of Issues in the French-Speaking World (with Michael B. Kline). She has also published articles on French cinema.

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Film and Media Studies Program

André bazin on adaptation: cinema’s literary imagination.

By Andre Bazin , Dudley Andrew (Editor) , Deborah Glassman (Translator) , Natasa Durovicova (Translator)

Adaptation was central to André Bazin’s lifelong query: What is cinema? Placing films alongside literature allowed him to identify the aesthetic and sociological distinctiveness of each medium. More importantly, it helped him wage his campaign for a modern conception of cinema, one that owed a great deal to developments in the novel. The critical genius of one of the greatest film and cultural critics of the twentieth century is on full display in this collection, in which readers are introduced to Bazin’s foundational concepts of the relationship between film and literary adaptation. Expertly curated and with an introduction by celebrated film scholar Dudley Andrew, the book begins with a selection of essays that show Bazin’s film theory in action, followed by reviews of films adapted from renowned novels of the day (Conrad, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Colette, Sagan, Duras, and others) as well as classic novels of the nineteenth century (Bronte, Melville, Tolstoy, Balzac, Hugo, Zola, Stendhal, and more). As a bonus, two hundred and fifty years of French fiction are put into play as Bazin assesses adaptation after adaptation to determine what is at stake for culture, for literature, and especially for cinema. This volume will be an indispensable resource for anyone interested in literary adaptation, authorship, classical film theory, French film history, and André Bazin’s criticism.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › The Sociology and Aesthetics of Film Adaptation

The Sociology and Aesthetics of Film Adaptation

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 27, 2017 • ( 0 )

THE SOURCES OF FILMS Frequently the most narrow and provincial area of film theory, discourse about adaptation is potentially as far-reaching as you like. Its distinctive feature, the matching of the cinematic sign system to prior achievement in some other system, can be shown to be distinctive of all representational cinema.

Let us begin with an example, A Day in the Country . Jean Renoir set himself the task of putting his knowledge, his troupe, and his artistry at the service of a tale by Guy de Maupassant . No matter how we judge the process or success of the film, its “being” owes something to the tale that was its inspiration and potentially its measure. That tale, “A Country Excursion,” bears a transcendent relation to any and all films that adapt it, for it is itself an artistic sign with a given shape and value, if not a finished meaning. A new artistic sign will then feature this original sign as either its signified or its referent. Adaptations claiming fidelity bear the original as a signified, whereas those inspired by or derived from an earlier text stand in a relation of referring to the original.

The notion of a transcendent order to which the system of the cinema is beholden in its practice goes well beyond this limited case of adaptation. What is a city symphony, for example, if not an adaptation of a concept by the cinema? A definite notion of Berlin pre-existed Walter Ruttman’s 1927 treatment of that city . What is any documentary for that matter except the signification by the cinema of some prior whole, some concept of person, place, event, or situation. If we take seriously the arguments of Marxist and other social theorists that our consciousness is not open to the world but filters the world according to the shape of its ideology, then every cinematic rendering will exist in relation to some prior whole lodged unquestioned in the personal or public system of experience. In other words, no filmmaker and no film (at least in the representational mode) responds immediately to reality itself, or to its own inner vision. Every representational film adapts a prior conception. Indeed the very term “representation” suggests the existence of a model. Adaptation delimits representation by insisting on the cultural status of the model, on its existence in the mode of the text or the already textualized. In the case of those texts explicitly termed “adaptations,” the cultural model which the cinema represents is already treasured as a representation in another sign system.

The broader notion of the process of adaptation has much in common with interpretation theory, for in a strong sense adaptation is the appropriation of a meaning from a prior text. The hermeneutic circle, central to interpretation theory, preaches that an explication of a text occurs only after a prior understanding of it, yet that prior understanding is justified by the careful explication it allows. In other words, before we can go about discussing and analyzing a text we must have a global conception of its meaning. Adaptation is similarly both a leap and a process. It can put into play the intricate mechanism of its signifiers only in response to a general understanding of the signified it aspires to have constructed at the end of its process. While all representational films function this way (as interpretations of a person, place, situation, event, and so forth), we reserve a special place for those films which foreground this relation by announcing themselves as versions of some standard whole. A standard whole can only be a text. A version of it is an adaptation in the narrow sense.

Although these speculations may encourage a hopelessly broad view of adaptation, there is no question that the restricted view of adaptation from known texts in other art forms offers a privileged locus for analysis. I do not say that such texts are themselves privileged. Indeed, the thrust of my earlier remarks suggests quite the opposite.Nevertheless, the explicit, foregrounded relation of a cinematic text to a well-constructed original text from which it derives and in some sense strives to reconstruct provides the analyst with a clear and useful “laboratory” condition which should not be neglected.

The making of film out of an earlier text is virtually as old as the machinery of cinema itself. Well over half of all commercial films have come from literary originals—though by no means all of these originals are revered or respected. If we confine ourselves to those cases where the adaptation process is foregrounded, that is, where the original is held up as a worthy source or goal, there are still several possible modes of relation between the film and the text. These modes can, for convenience, be reduced to three: borrowing, intersection, and fidelity of transformation.

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BORROWING, INTERSECTING, AND TRANSFORMING SOURCES In the history of the arts, surely “borrowing” is the most frequent mode of adaptation. Here the artist employs, more or less extensively, the material, idea, or form of an earlier, generally successful text. Medieval paintings featuring biblical iconography and miracle plays based on Bible stories drew on an exceptional text whose power they borrowed. In a later, secular age the artworks of an earlier generation might be used as sacred in their own right. The many types of adaptations from Shakespeare come readily to mind. Doubtless in these cases, the adaptation hopes to win an audience by the prestige of its borrowed title or subject. But at the same time it seeks to gain a certain respectibility, if not aesthetic value, as a dividend in the transaction. Adaptations from literature to music, opera, or paintings are of this nature. There is no question of the replication of the original in Strauss’s Don Quixote. Instead the audience is expected to enjoy basking in a certain pre-established presence and to call up new or especially powerful aspects of a cherished work.

To study this mode of adaptation, the analyst needs to probe the source of power in the original by examining the use made of it in adaptation. Here the main concern is the generality of the original, its potential for wide and varied appeal; in short, its existence as a continuing form or archetype in culture. This is especially true of that adapted material which, because of its frequent reappearance, claims the status of myth: Tristan and Isolde for certain, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream possibly. The success of adaptations of this sort rests on the issue of their fertility not their fidelity. Frank McConnell ‘s ingenious Storytelling and Mythmaking catalogues the garden of culture by examing borrowing as the history of grafting and transplantation in the fashion of Northrop Frye or even Carl Jung . This direction of study will always elevate film by demonstrating its participation in a cultural enterprise whose value is outside film and, for Jung and others, outside texts altogether. Adaptation is the name of this cultural venture at its most explicit, though McConnell, Frye, and Jung would all immediately want to extend their theories of artistic fertility to “original” texts which upon inspection show their dependence on the great fructifying symbols and mythic patterns of civilization.

This vast and airy mode of borrowing finds its opposite in that attitude toward adaptation can be called “intersecting.” Here the uniqueness of the original text is preserved to such an extent that it is intentionally left unassimilated in adaptation. The cinema, as a separate mechanism, records its confrontation with an ultimately intransigent text. Undoubtedly the key film exhibiting this relation is Robert Bresson’ s Diary of a Country Priest . Andre Bazin , championing this film and this mode, claimed that in this instance we are presented not with an adaptation so much as a refraction of the original. Because Bresson featured the writing of the diary and because he went out of his way to avoid “opening up” or in any other way cinematizing the original, Bazin claims that the film is the novel as seen by cinema. To extend one of his most elaborate metaphors, the original artwork can be likened to a crystal chandelier whose formal beauty is a product of its intricate but fully artificial arrangement of parts while the cinema would be a crude flashlight interesting not for its own shape or the quality of its light but for what it makes appear in this or that dark corner. The intersection of Bresson’s flashlight and the chandelier of Bernanos ‘s novel produces an experience of the original modulated by the peculiar beam of the cinema. Naturally a great deal of Bernanos fails to be lit up, but what is lit up is only Bernanos , Bernanos however as seen by the cinema.

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The modern cinema is increasingly interested in just this sort of intersecting. Bresson , naturally, has given us his Joan of Arc from court records and his Mouchette once again from Bernanos. Jean-Marie Straub has filmed Corneille’s Othon and The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach . Pier Paolo Pasolini audaciously confronted Matthew’s gospel with many later texts (musical, pictorial, and cinematic) which it inspired. His later Medea , Canterbury Tales , and Decameron are also adaptational events in the intersecting mode. All such works fear or refuse to adapt. Instead they present the otherness and distinctiveness of the original text, initiating a dialectical interplay between the aesthetic forms of one period with the cinematic forms of our own period. In direct contrast to the manner scholars have treated the mode of “borrowing,” such intersecting insists that the analyst attend to the specificity of the original within the specificity of the cinema. An original is allowed its life, its own life, in the cinema. The consequences of this method, despite its apparent forthrightness, are neither innocent nor simple. The disjunct experience such intersecting promotes is consonant with the aesthetics of modernism in all the arts. This mode refutes the commonplace that adaptations support only a conservative film aesthetics.

Unquestionably the most frequent and most tiresome discussion of adaptation (and of film and literature relations as well) concerns fidelity and transformation. Here it is assumed that the task of adaptation is the reproduction in cinema of something essential about an original text. Here we have a clear-cut case of film trying to measure up to a literary work, or of an audience expecting to make such a comparison. Fidelity of adaptation is conventionally treated in relation to the “letter” and to the “spirit” of the text, as though adaptation were the rendering of an interpretation of a legal precedent. The letter would appear to be within the reach of cinema for it can be emulated in mechanical fashion. It includes aspects of fiction generally elaborated in any film script: the characters and their inter-relation, the geographical, sociological, and cultural information providing the fiction’s context, and the basic narrational aspects that determine the point of view of the narrator (tense, degree of participation and knowledge of the storyteller, and so on). Ultimately, and this was Bazin ‘s complaint about faithful transformations, the literary work can readily become a scenario written in typical scenario form. The skeleton of the original can, more or less thoroughly, become the skeleton of a film.

More difficult is fidelity to the spirit, to the original’s tone, values, imagery, and rhythm, since finding stylistic equivalents in film for these intangible aspects is the opposite of a mechanical process. The cineaste presumably must intuit and reproduce the feeling of the original. It has been argued variously that this is frankly impossible, or that it involves the systematic replacement of verbal signifiers by cinematic signiflers, or that it is the product of artistic intuition, as when Bazin found the pervasive snowy decor in Symphonie Pastorale (1946) to reproduce adequately the simple past tense which Andre Gide ‘s verbs all bear in that tale.

It is at this point that the specificity of these two signifying systems is at stake. Generally film is found to work from perception toward signification, from external facts to interior motivations and consequences, from the givenness of a world to the meaning of a story cut out of that world. Literary fiction works oppositely. It begins with signs (graphemes and words) building to propositions which attempt to develop perception. As a product of human language it naturally treats human motivation and values, seeking to throw them out onto the external world, elaborating a world out of a story.

George Bluestone , Jean Mitry , and a host of others find this opposition to be most graphic in adaptations. Therefore they take pleasure in scrutinizing this practice even while ultimately condemning it to the realm of the impossible. Since signs name the inviolate relation of signifier to signified, how is translation of poetic texts conceivable from one language to another (where signifiers belong to different systems); much less how is it possible to transform the signifiers of one material (verbal) to signifiers of another material (images and sounds)? It would appear that one must presume the global signified of the original to be separable from its text if one believes it can be approximated by other sign clusters. Can we attempt to reproduce the meaning of the Mona Lisa in a poem, or of a poem in a musical phrase, or even of a musical phrase in an aroma? If one accepts this possibility, at the very least one is forced to discount the primary articulations of the relevant language systems. One would have to hold that while the material of literature (graphemes, words, and sentences) may be of a different nature from the materials of cinema (projected light and shadows, identifiable sounds and forms, and represented actions), both systems may construct in their own way, and at higher levels, scenes and narratives that are indeed commensurable.

The strident and often futile arguments over these issues can be made sharper and more consequential in the language of E. H. Gombrich or the even more systematic language of semiotics. Gombrich finds that all discussion of adaptation introduces the category of “matching.” First of all, like Bazin he feels one cannot dismiss adaptation since it is a fact of human practice. We can and do correctly match items from different systems all the time: a tuba sound is more like a rock than like a piece of string; it is more like a bear than like a bird; more like a romanesque church than a baroque one. We are able to make these distinctions and insist on their public character because we are matching equivalents. In the system of musical instruments the tuba occupies an equivalent position to that enjoyed by the romanesque in its system of architectural styles. Nelson Goodman has treated this issue at length in The Languages of Art pointing to the equivalence not of elements but of the position elements occupy vis-a-vis their different domains. Names of properties of colors may thus metaphorically, but correctly, describe aspects of the world of sound (a blue note, a somber or bright tone). Adaptation would then become a matter of searching two systems of communication for elements of equivalent position in the systems capable of eliciting a signified at a given level of pertinence, for example, the description of a narrative action. For Gombrich adaptation is possible, though never perfect, because every artwork is a construct of elements built out of a traditional use of a system. Since humans have the general capacity to adapt to new systems with different traditions in achieving a like goal or construct, artistic adaptation poses no insurmountable obstacles. Nevertheless attention to such “proportional consistencies” demands that the study of adaptation include the study of both art forms in their proper historic context.

Gombrich and Goodman anticipated the more fashionable vocabulary of semiotics in their clarification of these issues. In Film and Fiction, The Dynamics of Exchange , Keith Cohen tries to justify this new, nearly scientific approach to questions of relations between these arts; he writes, citing Metz:

A basic assumption that both words and images are sets of signs that belong to systems and that, at a certain level of abstraction, these systems bear resemblances to one another. More specifically, within each such system there are many different codes (perceptual, referential, symbolic). What makes possible, then, a study of the relation between two separate sign systems, like novel and film, is the fact that the same codes may reappear in more than one system. . . . The very mechanisms of language systems can thus be seen to carry on diverse and complex interrelations: “one function, among others, of language is to name the units segmented by vision (but also to help segment them), and . . . one function, among others, of vision is to inspire semantic configurations (but also to be inspired by them).” Noel Carrol, “ Film Theory and Film History: An Outline for an Institutional Theory of Film ,” Film Reader, no. 4 (1979): 81-98.

Cohen, like Metz before him, suggests that despite their very different material character, despite even the different ways we process them at the primary level, verbal and cinematic signs share a common fate: that of being condemned to connotation. This is especially true in their fictional use where every signifier identifies a signified but also elicits a chain reaction of other relations which permits the elaboration of the fictional world. Thus, for example, imagery functions equivalently in films and novels. This mechanism of implication among signs leads Cohen to conclude that “narrativity is the most solid median link between novel and cinema, the most pervasive tendency of both verbal and visual languages. In both novel and cinema, groups of signs, be they literary or visual signs, are apprehended consecutively through time; and this consecutiveness gives rise to an unfolding structure, the diegetic whole that is never fully present in any one group yet always implied in each such group.

Narrative codes, then, always function at the level of implication or connotation. Hence they are potentially comparable in a novel and a film. The story can be the same if the narrative units (characters, events, motivations, consequences, context, viewpoint, imagery, and so on) are produced equally in two works. Now this production is, by definition, a process of connotation and implication. The analysis of adaptation then must point to the achievement of equivalent narrative units in the absolutely different semiotic systems of film and language. Narrative itself is a semiotic system available to both and derivable from both. If a novel’s story is judged in some way comparable to its filmic adaptation, then the strictly separate but equivalent processes of implication which produced the narrative units of that story through words and audio-visual signs, respectively, must be studied. Here semiotics coincides with Gombrich’s intuition: such a study is not comparative between the arts but is instead intensive within each art. And since the implicative power of literary language and of cinematic signs is a function of its use as well as of its system, adaptation analysis ultimately leads to an investigation of film styles and periods in relation to literary styles of different periods.

We have come round the other side of the argument now to find once more that the study of adaptation is logically tantamount to the study of the cinema as a whole. The system by which film involves us in fictions and the history of that system are ultimately the questions we face even when starting with the simple observation of an equivalent tale told by novel and film. This is not to my mind a discouraging arrival for it drops adaptation and all studies of film and literation out of the realm of eternal principle and airy generalization, and onto the uneven but solid ground of artistic history, practice, and discourse.

THE SOCIOLOGY AND AESTHETICS OF ADAPTATION It is time for adaptation studies to take a sociological turn. How does adaptation serve the cinema? What conditions exist in film style and film culture to warrant or demand the use of literary prototypes? Although adaptation may be calculated as a relatively constant volume in the history of cinema, its particular function in any moment is far from constant. The choices of the mode of adaptation and of prototypes suggest a great deal about the cinema’s sense of its role and aspirations from decade to decade. Moreover, the stylistic strategies developed to achieve the proportional equivalences necessary to construct matching stories not only are symptomatic of a period’s style but may crucially alter that style.

Bazin pointed to an important instance of this in the immediate postwar era when adaptations from the stage by Jean Cocteau , Orson Welles , Laurence Olivier , William Wyler , and others not only developed new ways for the cinema to be adequate to serious theater, but also developed a kind of discipline in mise-en-scene whose consequences go far beyond the production of Macbeth , Les Parents Terribles , The Little Foxes , and Henry V . Cocteau ‘s film, to take one example, derives its style from Welles’s use of interior shooting in Citizen Kane and Ambersons , thus responding to a new conception of dramatic space; but at the same time his film helped solidify a shooting style that would leave its mark on Alexandre Astruc and Andre Michel among others. Furthermore his particular cinematic ecriture would allow Truffaut to set him against the cinema of quality in the famous 1954 diatribe. It is instructive to note that while Truffaut railed against the status quo for its literariness and especially for its method of adaptation, the directors he praised were also working with literary originals: Bresson adapting Bernanos, Ophuls adapting Maupassant and Schnitzler, and Cocteau adapting his own theater pieces. Like Bazin , Truffaut looked upon adaptation not as a monolithic practice to be avoided but as an instructive barometer for the age. The cinema d’auteur which he advocated was not to be pitted against a cinema of adaptation; rather one method of adaptation would be pitted against another. In this instance adaptation was the battleground even while it prepared the way for a stylistic revolution, the New Wave, which would for the most part avoid famous literary sources.

To take another sort of example, particular literary fashions have at times exercised enormous power over the cinema and, consequently, over the general direction of its stylistic evolution. The Romantic fiction of Hugo, Dickens, Dumas, and countless lesser figures originally set the stylistic requirements of American and mainstream French cinema at the end of the silent era. Similarly Zola and Maupassant, always of interest to French cineastes, helped Jean Renoir muscularly reorient the style of world cinema in the 1930’s. Not only that, through Luchino Visconti this naturalist impulse directly developed one strain of neorealism in his adaptations of Giovanni Verga (La Terra Tremd) and James M. Cain (Ossessione).

In another era and in response to a different political need, Renoir leapt at the chance to adapt the Gorki work. This was 1935, the year of the ascendancy of the Popular Front, and Renoir’s treatment of the original is clearly marked by the pressures and aspirations of that moment. The film negotiates the mixture of classes which the play only hints at. Louis Jouvet as the Baron dominates the film, descending into the social depths and helping organize a collective undoing of Kastylylov, the capitalist landlord. Despite the gloomy theme, the murder, jailing, deaths by sickness and suicide, Renoir’s version overflows with a general warmth evident in the airy setting by the Marne and the relaxed direction of actors who breathe languidly between their lines.

Did Gorki mind such an interpretation? We can never know, since he died a few months before its premier. But he did give Renoir his imprimatur and looked forward to seeing the completed version, this despite the fact that in 1932 he declared that the play was useless, out of date, and unperformable in socialist Russia. Perhaps these statements were the insincere self-criticism which that important year elicited from many Russian artists. I prefer, however, to take Gorki at his word. More far-sighted than most theorists, let alone most authors, he realized that The Lower Depths in 1932 Russia was by no means the same artwork as The Lower Depths in the France of the Popular Front. This is why he put no strictures on Renoir assuming that the cineaste would deal with his play as he felt necessary. Necessity is, among other things, a product of the specific place and epoch of the adaptation, both historically and stylistically. The naturalist attitude of 1902, fleshing out the original plans of Zola, gave way to a new historic and stylistic moment, and fed that style that Renoir had begun elaborating ever since La Chienne in 1931, and that despite its alleged looseness and airiness in comparison to the Gorki, would help lead European cinema onto the naturalist path.

This sketch of a few examples from the sociology of adaptation has rapidly taken us into the complex interchange between eras, styles, nations, and subjects. This is as it should be, for adaptation, while a tantalizing keyhole for theorists, nevertheless partakes of the universal situation of film practice, dependent as it is on the aesthetic system of the cinema in a particular era and on that era’s cultural needs and pressures. Filmmaking, in other words, is always an event in which a system is used and altered in discourse. Adaptation is a peculiar form of discourse but not an unthinkable one. Let us use it not to fight battles over the essence of the media or the inviolability of individual art works. Let us use it as we use all cultural practices, to understand the world from which it comes and the one toward which it points. The elaboration of these worlds will demand, therefore, historical labor and critical acumen. The job of theory in all this is to keep the questions clear and in order. It will no longer do to let theorists settle things with a priori arguments. We need to study the films themselves as acts of discourse. We need to be sensitive to that discourse and to the forces that motivate it.

Source: Concepts in Film Theory by Dudley Andrew, Oxford University Press 1984.

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Subject Librarian

Finding scholarly articles and journal title(s)

Articles and other writings about movies can be found in many publications. Our collection has one journal that looks exclusively at film adaptations, Adaptation . You can use Film & Television Literature Index or the Summon box below to find articles.

Citing and Tracking Your Bibliographic References

Use this guide to help you learn how to correctly cite and keep track of the references you find for your research.

Keeping up with the journal literature

You can get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Don't own or use a mobile device? You can still use BrowZine! It's now available in a web version. You can get to it here . The web version works the same way as the app version. Find the journals you like, create a custom Bookshelf, get ToCs and read the articles you want.

A definition for 'Adaptation'

A pre-existing work that has been made into a film. Adaptations are often of literary or theatrical works, but musical theatre, best-selling fiction and non-fiction, comic books, computer games , children’s toys, and so on have also been regularly adapted for the cinema. Adaptations of well-known literary and theatrical texts were common in the silent era ( see silent cinema ; costume drama ; epic film ; history film ) and have been a staple of virtually all national cinemas through the 20th and 21st centuries. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (1887–1927) have been adapted in a range of national contexts but probably the most adapted author is Shakespeare, whose plays have appeared in film form as a large-budget Hollywood musical ( West Side Story (Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, US, 1961)), a historical epic set in feudal Japan ( Kumonosu-jo / Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1957)), a Bollywood musical ( Angoor (Gulzar, India, 1982)), and a children’s animation ( The Lion King (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, US, 1994)), to name but a few. Adaptations often sit within cycles associated with a particular time and place, as with the British heritage film in the 1980s ( see cycle ). It is claimed that adaptations account for up to 50 per cent of all Hollywood films and are consistently rated amongst the highest grossing at the box office , as aptly demonstrated by the commercial success of recent adaptations of the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Other varied US adaptations include: computer games ( Resident Evil (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2002)), graphic novels ( Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)), comic books ( The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012)); see also cinematic universe ; superhero film ), and children’s toys ( Transformers: The Last Knight (Michael Bay, 2017)). A number of films also display a certain level of self-reflexivity regarding the process of adaptation, as can be seen in Adaptation (Spike Jonze, US, 2002) and The LEGO Movie (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, 2012). A property ripe for adaptation is referred to as pre-sold ; older works in particular are attractive to film producers because they are often out of copyright ( see deal, the ).

Kuhn, A., & Westwell, G. (2020). " Adaptation ." In A Dictionary of Film Studies . Oxford University Press. Retrieved 16 Feb. 2022

In the Library's collections

The following are useful subject headings for searching the online catalog. The books on adapting source materials for films are shelved in the call number range PN 1997.85 on Baker Level 4 .

film adaptations
fotonovelas
motion picture authorship This is the subject heading used instead of "screenwriting." The books on screenwriting and screenwriters are shelved in the PN 1996 through PN 1997.85 on Baker Level 4 .
motion picture plays technique
shakespeare william 1564 1616 film adaptations This is an example subject search for adaptations for a specific author.

Introductory reading(s)

Selected book title(s)

Other library resource(s)

Most of these are resources for actual scripts.

A short selection of adapted films

Here is a short list of adapted films located in the Jones Media Center or available through streaming. Find more film adaptations in the library's online catalog.

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THEORIES OF ADAPTATION: NOVEL TO FILM

Related Papers

International Journal of Innovative Knowledge Concepts- ISSN 2454-2415- Vol 1- 2017

Many film critics like have provided a base for the nature and method of the adaptation as an inter-relative idea between literature and film. The film script is not always an entirely new literary form. It simply translates. According to Balazs, the novel or drama should be regarded, as a potential raw material to be transformed at will by the writer of the screenplay. After that, the screenplay has an ability to approach reality, to approach the thematic and the formal design of the literary model and represent it with various viewpoints. The adaptation is also considered as an entirely new entity which provides several variations also. This paper attempts to explore the visual medium translation of the printed words by analyzing Shakespeare"s Macbeth in its various cinematic interpretations. Macbeth was adopted by many filmmakers across the world and this paper deliberates on three major adaptations: Indian version of Macbeth by Vishal Bhardwaj called Maqbool, Orson Welles"s version of Macbeth (1948) and Akira Kurosawa"s Japanese version of Macbeth called The Throne of Blood Introduction:

Azeez Jasim

To what extent our innermost feelings can be revealed through our works? The unbearable face of human being cannot be hidden and what a director shot in a film may reveal the real sense of what is hidden from our eyes. Thus directors sometimes try to hide their dark side behind such interesting movies after having modified the events of the original text to achieve their end. This paper, however, is an overview about the technique of adaptation which varies from one adaptationist to another depending on the historical background of the screenplay writer. Although the director succeeds to project what is on one side of his curtain, he fails to hide what is on the other side that discloses his innermost feelings.

Journal of Screenwriting

Shannon Wells-Lassagne

shyamali banerjee

John Mitras

The purpose of this paper is to show how recent research on the nature of dramatic language can further our understanding of the problematic nature of exporting Shakespearean texts on to the medium of film. This paper is written in three parts. The first part discusses the performance-orientation of dramatic language; the second part considers the possible choreography for spatial organization and kinesics suggested by dramatic language; the third part looks at some of the ways cinema neutralizes the performative potential of dramatic language. The central argument is that a successful modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare's plays will in some ways be hindered by the retention of the original script.

Studies in Literature and Language

aiman al-garrallah

Cătălin Constantinescu

This research is based on my multiple readings and re-readings of the novels of George Orwell for almost two decades. Orwell’s 1984, at least, is not just a very influent writing on our perceptions regarding surveillance: “Big Brother” is everywhere as discursive instance in our days; this may be a political and sociological starting point of discussion. Besides, it is a good example for discussing various aspects of how literature is used by readers – implying a whole debate upon the functions of literature. My reading of the filmic rewriting of Orwell’s 1984 (discussed in another study) revealed profound mutations in analysing the film as medium. It provided grounds for comparison, but not just for the sake of comparison (“comparaison n’est pas raison”, as Rene Etiemble emphasized in ‘60s). It is a fruitful starting point, as I try to focus on the relationships not only between film and literature, but also on dialectics of various approaches on the relationship between these media. The main goals are to observe and to evaluate what “degree of theoreticity” is admitted in our critical reading of adaptation. Comparatists should also investigate – as Claudio Guillén stated in Entre lo uno y lo diverso: introducción a la literatura comparada (1985) – how far can we go with categories or classes when they are subject of a comparative reading. In analysing the relationships between film and literature, one must not forget Susan Sontag’s claim in affirming that film, the narrative film namely (use of plot, characters, setting, dialogue, imagery, manipulating time and space) shares with literature the most.

Siddhant Kalra

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.

Literature Film Quarterly

greg semenza

Johannes von Moltke

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Writing about Film Adaptations:

An introduction.

Home | Critical History | Bibliography | Links | References

Lynda A. Hall Department of English and Comparative Literature Chapman University, Orange, CA [email protected]

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Film Writing: Sample Analysis

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Introductory Note

The analysis below discusses the opening moments of the science fiction movie Ex Machina in order to make an argument about the film's underlying purpose. The text of the analysis is formatted normally. Editor's commentary, which will occasionally interrupt the piece to discuss the author's rhetorical strategies, is written in brackets in an italic font with a bold "Ed.:" identifier. See the examples below:

The text of the analysis looks like this.

[ Ed.: The editor's commentary looks like this. ]

Frustrated Communication in Ex Machina ’s Opening Sequence

Alex Garland’s 2015 science fiction film Ex Machina follows a young programmer’s attempts to determine whether or not an android possesses a consciousness complicated enough to pass as human. The film is celebrated for its thought-provoking depiction of the anxiety over whether a nonhuman entity could mimic or exceed human abilities, but analyzing the early sections of the film, before artificial intelligence is even introduced, reveals a compelling examination of humans’ inability to articulate their thoughts and feelings. In its opening sequence, Ex Machina establishes that it’s not only about the difficulty of creating a machine that can effectively talk to humans, but about human beings who struggle to find ways to communicate with each other in an increasingly digital world.

[ Ed.: The piece's opening introduces the film with a plot summary that doesn't give away too much and a brief summary of the critical conversation that has centered around the film. Then, however, it deviates from this conversation by suggesting that Ex Machina has things to say about humanity before non-human characters even appear. Off to a great start. ]

The film’s first establishing shots set the action in a busy modern office. A woman sits at a computer, absorbed in her screen. The camera looks at her through a glass wall, one of many in the shot. The reflections of passersby reflected in the glass and the workspace’s dim blue light make it difficult to determine how many rooms are depicted. The camera cuts to a few different young men typing on their phones, their bodies partially concealed both by people walking between them and the camera and by the stylized modern furniture that surrounds them. The fourth shot peeks over a computer monitor at a blonde man working with headphones in. A slight zoom toward his face suggests that this is an important character, and the cut to a point-of-view shot looking at his computer screen confirms this. We later learn that this is Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), a young programmer whose perspective the film follows.

The rest of the sequence cuts between shots from Caleb’s P.O.V. and reaction shots of his face, as he receives and processes the news that he has won first prize in a staff competition. Shocked, Caleb dives for his cellphone and texts several people the news. Several people immediately respond with congratulatory messages, and after a moment the woman from the opening shot runs in to give him a hug. At this point, the other people in the room look up, smile, and start clapping, while Caleb smiles disbelievingly—perhaps even anxiously—and the camera subtly zooms in a bit closer. Throughout the entire sequence, there is no sound other than ambient electronic music that gets slightly louder and more textured as the sequence progresses. A jump cut to an aerial view of a glacial landscape ends the sequence and indicates that Caleb is very quickly transported into a very unfamiliar setting, implying that he will have difficulty adjusting to this sudden change in circumstances.

[ Ed.: These paragraphs are mostly descriptive. They give readers the information they will need to understand the argument the piece is about to offer. While passages like this can risk becoming boring if they dwell on unimportant details, the author wisely limits herself to two paragraphs and maintains a driving pace through her prose style choices (like an almost exclusive reliance on active verbs). ]

Without any audible dialogue or traditional expository setup of the main characters, this opening sequence sets viewers up to make sense of Ex Machina ’s visual style and its exploration of the ways that technology can both enhance and limit human communication. The choice to make the dialogue inaudible suggests that in-person conversations have no significance. Human-to-human conversations are most productive in this sequence when they are mediated by technology. Caleb’s first response when he hears his good news is to text his friends rather than tell the people sitting around him, and he makes no move to take his headphones out when the in-person celebration finally breaks out. Everyone in the building is on their phones, looking at screens, or has headphones in, and the camera is looking at screens through Caleb’s viewpoint for at least half of the sequence.

Rather than simply muting the specific conversations that Caleb has with his coworkers, the ambient soundtrack replaces all the noise that a crowded building in the middle of a workday would ordinarily have. This silence sets the uneasy tone that characterizes the rest of the film, which is as much a horror-thriller as a piece of science fiction. Viewers get the sense that all the sounds that humans make as they walk around and talk to each other are being intentionally filtered out by some presence, replaced with a quiet electronic beat that marks the pacing of the sequence, slowly building to a faster tempo. Perhaps the sound of people is irrelevant: only the visual data matters here. Silence is frequently used in the rest of the film as a source of tension, with viewers acutely aware that it could be broken at any moment. Part of the horror of the research bunker, which will soon become the film’s primary setting, is its silence, particularly during sequences of Caleb sneaking into restricted areas and being startled by a sudden noise.

The visual style of this opening sequence reinforces the eeriness of the muted humans and electronic soundtrack. Prominent use of shallow focus to depict a workspace that is constructed out of glass doors and walls makes it difficult to discern how large the space really is. The viewer is thus spatially disoriented in each new setting. This layering of glass and mirrors, doubling some images and obscuring others, is used later in the film when Caleb meets the artificial being Ava (Alicia Vikander), who is not allowed to leave her glass-walled living quarters in the research bunker. The similarity of these spaces visually reinforces the film’s late revelation that Caleb has been manipulated by Nathan Bates (Oscar Isaac), the troubled genius who creates Ava.

[ Ed.: In these paragraphs, the author cites the information about the scene she's provided to make her argument. Because she's already teased the argument in the introduction and provided an account of her evidence, it doesn't strike us as unreasonable or far-fetched here. Instead, it appears that we've naturally arrived at the same incisive, fascinating points that she has. ]

A few other shots in the opening sequence more explicitly hint that Caleb is already under Nathan’s control before he ever arrives at the bunker. Shortly after the P.O.V shot of Caleb reading the email notification that he won the prize, we cut to a few other P.O.V. shots, this time from the perspective of cameras in Caleb’s phone and desktop computer. These cameras are not just looking at Caleb, but appear to be scanning him, as the screen flashes in different color lenses and small points appear around Caleb’s mouth, eyes, and nostrils, tracking the smallest expressions that cross his face. These small details indicate that Caleb is more a part of this digital space than he realizes, and also foreshadow the later revelation that Nathan is actively using data collected by computers and webcams to manipulate Caleb and others. The shots from the cameras’ perspectives also make use of a subtle fisheye lens, suggesting both the wide scope of Nathan’s surveillance capacities and the slightly distorted worldview that motivates this unethical activity.

[ Ed.: This paragraph uses additional details to reinforce the piece's main argument. While this move may not be as essential as the one in the preceding paragraphs, it does help create the impression that the author is noticing deliberate patterns in the film's cinematography, rather than picking out isolated coincidences to make her points. ]

Taken together, the details of Ex Machina ’s stylized opening sequence lay the groundwork for the film’s long exploration of the relationship between human communication and technology. The sequence, and the film, ultimately suggests that we need to develop and use new technologies thoughtfully, or else the thing that makes us most human—our ability to connect through language—might be destroyed by our innovations. All of the aural and visual cues in the opening sequence establish a world in which humans are utterly reliant on technology and yet totally unaware of the nefarious uses to which a brilliant but unethical person could put it.

Author's Note: Thanks to my literature students whose in-class contributions sharpened my thinking on this scene .

[ Ed.: The piece concludes by tying the main themes of the opening sequence to those of the entire film. In doing this, the conclusion makes an argument for the essay's own relevance: we need to pay attention to the essay's points so that we can achieve a rich understanding of the movie. The piece's final sentence makes a chilling final impression by alluding to the danger that might loom if we do not understand the movie. This is the only the place in the piece where the author explicitly references how badly we might be hurt by ignorance, and it's all the more powerful for this solitary quality. A pithy, charming note follows, acknowledging that the author's work was informed by others' input (as most good writing is). Beautifully done. ]

The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Film Analysis

What this handout is about.

This handout introduces film analysis and and offers strategies and resources for approaching film analysis assignments.

Writing the film analysis essay

Writing a film analysis requires you to consider the composition of the film—the individual parts and choices made that come together to create the finished piece. Film analysis goes beyond the analysis of the film as literature to include camera angles, lighting, set design, sound elements, costume choices, editing, etc. in making an argument. The first step to analyzing the film is to watch it with a plan.

Watching the film

First it’s important to watch the film carefully with a critical eye. Consider why you’ve been assigned to watch a film and write an analysis. How does this activity fit into the course? Why have you been assigned this particular film? What are you looking for in connection to the course content? Let’s practice with this clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Here are some tips on how to watch the clip critically, just as you would an entire film:

Give the clip your undivided attention at least once. Pay close attention to details and make observations that might start leading to bigger questions.
Watch the clip a second time. For this viewing, you will want to focus specifically on those elements of film analysis that your class has focused on, so review your course notes. For example, from whose perspective is this clip shot? What choices help convey that perspective? What is the overall tone, theme, or effect of this clip?
Take notes while you watch for the second time. Notes will help you keep track of what you noticed and when, if you include timestamps in your notes. Timestamps are vital for citing scenes from a film!

For more information on watching a film, check out the Learning Center’s handout on watching film analytically . For more resources on researching film, including glossaries of film terms, see UNC Library’s research guide on film & cinema .

Brainstorming ideas

Once you’ve watched the film twice, it’s time to brainstorm some ideas based on your notes. Brainstorming is a major step that helps develop and explore ideas. As you brainstorm, you may want to cluster your ideas around central topics or themes that emerge as you review your notes. Did you ask several questions about color? Were you curious about repeated images? Perhaps these are directions you can pursue.

If you’re writing an argumentative essay, you can use the connections that you develop while brainstorming to draft a thesis statement . Consider the assignment and prompt when formulating a thesis, as well as what kind of evidence you will present to support your claims. Your evidence could be dialogue, sound edits, cinematography decisions, etc. Much of how you make these decisions will depend on the type of film analysis you are conducting, an important decision covered in the next section.

After brainstorming, you can draft an outline of your film analysis using the same strategies that you would for other writing assignments. Here are a few more tips to keep in mind as you prepare for this stage of the assignment:

Make sure you understand the prompt and what you are being asked to do. Remember that this is ultimately an assignment, so your thesis should answer what the prompt asks. Check with your professor if you are unsure.
In most cases, the director’s name is used to talk about the film as a whole, for instance, “Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo .” However, some writers may want to include the names of other persons who helped to create the film, including the actors, the cinematographer, and the sound editor, among others.
When describing a sequence in a film, use the literary present. An example could be, “In Vertigo , Hitchcock employs techniques of observation to dramatize the act of detection.”
Finding a screenplay/script of the movie may be helpful and save you time when compiling citations. But keep in mind that there may be differences between the screenplay and the actual product (and these differences might be a topic of discussion!).
Go beyond describing basic film elements by articulating the significance of these elements in support of your particular position. For example, you may have an interpretation of the striking color green in Vertigo , but you would only mention this if it was relevant to your argument. For more help on using evidence effectively, see the section on “using evidence” in our evidence handout .

Also be sure to avoid confusing the terms shot, scene, and sequence. Remember, a shot ends every time the camera cuts; a scene can be composed of several related shots; and a sequence is a set of related scenes.

Different types of film analysis

As you consider your notes, outline, and general thesis about a film, the majority of your assignment will depend on what type of film analysis you are conducting. This section explores some of the different types of film analyses you may have been assigned to write.

Semiotic analysis

Semiotic analysis is the interpretation of signs and symbols, typically involving metaphors and analogies to both inanimate objects and characters within a film. Because symbols have several meanings, writers often need to determine what a particular symbol means in the film and in a broader cultural or historical context.

For instance, a writer could explore the symbolism of the flowers in Vertigo by connecting the images of them falling apart to the vulnerability of the heroine.

Here are a few other questions to consider for this type of analysis:

What objects or images are repeated throughout the film?
How does the director associate a character with small signs, such as certain colors, clothing, food, or language use?
How does a symbol or object relate to other symbols and objects, that is, what is the relationship between the film’s signs?

Many films are rich with symbolism, and it can be easy to get lost in the details. Remember to bring a semiotic analysis back around to answering the question “So what?” in your thesis.

Narrative analysis

Narrative analysis is an examination of the story elements, including narrative structure, character, and plot. This type of analysis considers the entirety of the film and the story it seeks to tell.

For example, you could take the same object from the previous example—the flowers—which meant one thing in a semiotic analysis, and ask instead about their narrative role. That is, you might analyze how Hitchcock introduces the flowers at the beginning of the film in order to return to them later to draw out the completion of the heroine’s character arc.

To create this type of analysis, you could consider questions like:

How does the film correspond to the Three-Act Structure: Act One: Setup; Act Two: Confrontation; and Act Three: Resolution?
What is the plot of the film? How does this plot differ from the narrative, that is, how the story is told? For example, are events presented out of order and to what effect?
Does the plot revolve around one character? Does the plot revolve around multiple characters? How do these characters develop across the film?

When writing a narrative analysis, take care not to spend too time on summarizing at the expense of your argument. See our handout on summarizing for more tips on making summary serve analysis.

Cultural/historical analysis

One of the most common types of analysis is the examination of a film’s relationship to its broader cultural, historical, or theoretical contexts. Whether films intentionally comment on their context or not, they are always a product of the culture or period in which they were created. By placing the film in a particular context, this type of analysis asks how the film models, challenges, or subverts different types of relations, whether historical, social, or even theoretical.

For example, the clip from Vertigo depicts a man observing a woman without her knowing it. You could examine how this aspect of the film addresses a midcentury social concern about observation, such as the sexual policing of women, or a political one, such as Cold War-era McCarthyism.

A few of the many questions you could ask in this vein include:

How does the film comment on, reinforce, or even critique social and political issues at the time it was released, including questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality?
How might a biographical understanding of the film’s creators and their historical moment affect the way you view the film?
How might a specific film theory, such as Queer Theory, Structuralist Theory, or Marxist Film Theory, provide a language or set of terms for articulating the attributes of the film?

Take advantage of class resources to explore possible approaches to cultural/historical film analyses, and find out whether you will be expected to do additional research into the film’s context.

Mise-en-scène analysis

A mise-en-scène analysis attends to how the filmmakers have arranged compositional elements in a film and specifically within a scene or even a single shot. This type of analysis organizes the individual elements of a scene to explore how they come together to produce meaning. You may focus on anything that adds meaning to the formal effect produced by a given scene, including: blocking, lighting, design, color, costume, as well as how these attributes work in conjunction with decisions related to sound, cinematography, and editing. For example, in the clip from Vertigo , a mise-en-scène analysis might ask how numerous elements, from lighting to camera angles, work together to present the viewer with the perspective of Jimmy Stewart’s character.

To conduct this type of analysis, you could ask:

What effects are created in a scene, and what is their purpose?
How does this scene represent the theme of the movie?
How does a scene work to express a broader point to the film’s plot?

This detailed approach to analyzing the formal elements of film can help you come up with concrete evidence for more general film analysis assignments.

Reviewing your draft

Once you have a draft, it’s helpful to get feedback on what you’ve written to see if your analysis holds together and you’ve conveyed your point. You may not necessarily need to find someone who has seen the film! Ask a writing coach, roommate, or family member to read over your draft and share key takeaways from what you have written so far.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Aumont, Jacques, and Michel Marie. 1988. L’analyse Des Films . Paris: Nathan.

Media & Design Center. n.d. “Film and Cinema Research.” UNC University Libraries. Last updated February 10, 2021. https://guides.lib.unc.edu/filmresearch .

Oxford Royale Academy. n.d. “7 Ways to Watch Film.” Oxford Royale Academy. Accessed April 2021. https://www.oxford-royale.com/articles/7-ways-watch-films-critically/ .

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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The Definitives

Critical essays, histories, and appreciations of great films

Adaptation.

Essay by brian eggert may 21, 2012.

After selling his wildly original script for Being John Malkovich , screenwriter Charlie Kaufman lands a job to adapt Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief , an expansion of her article published in The New Yorker in 1995. Her best-seller could have made a great documentary about flowers; it charts the long history of orchid enthusiasts willing to risk their lives for rare specimens, and the latest of these men, John Laroche, is an eccentric Florida orchid farmer and con artist who employs Seminoles to poach rare orchids from protected lands. In the book, Orlean witnesses Laroche’s true passion for flowers and longs to feel something similar in her own life. When faced with translating Orlean’s meandering prose (“ New Yorker shit”) to film, Kaufman agonizes over how to penetrate his subject, even while he finds her book endlessly fascinating and identifies with her longing to feel passionate about something . The problem is, Orlean’s book “about flowers” has no plot. In a stroke of genius egomania, Kaufman resolves to incorporate himself into his script, making his screen story about the process of adaptation itself. By fulfilling his own needs as an artist, he captures the essence of Orlean’s novel.

The above paragraph is both a brief background and a plot description to director Spike Jonze’s 2002 film Adaptation. , the second collaboration between Jonze and Kaufman after 1999’s Being John Malkovich . This ceaselessly clever, brilliantly mind-bending film taps into the intangible spirit of Orlean’s book by involving the viewer in Kaufman’s painstaking translation to the screen. In the film, Kaufman’s story is told from the perspective of a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman, played by Nicolas Cage in a career-best, Oscar-nominated performance. Charlie suffers from writer’s block in his efforts to put something original, intelligent, and evocative to paper. At the same time, his uncomplicated, identical twin brother, the fictional Donald (also Cage), follows a banal Hollywood formula to the letter in his first script and achieves outrageous commercial success. By assigning a lead role for himself in his film, and another mirror-image role to signify his worst fears of selling out, Kaufman works through his flooding doubts and neuroses in his art by mutually embracing and transcending Orlean’s source material. More than any other screenwriter working today, Kaufman places himself into his work and becomes a rare example of a writer-auteur, a designation traditionally reserved for film directors.

Born in New York in 1958, Kaufman grew up an only child in Connecticut. His early life consisted of a normal suburban upbringing. He did not excel in school nor give his parents any cause to believe he would be extraordinary. He briefly attended Boston University and later studied cinema at NYU Film School, developing tastes for theater and intellectual reading. After graduating, he worked sporadically for National Lampoon magazine and Minneapolis’ Star Tribune newspaper. Then, in 1991, he moved to Hollywood, where he found work writing for television shows like Chris Elliot’s Get a Life! (1991-92) and Dana Carvey’s short-lived sketch comedy show, among others. In 1999, when Kaufman ventured into the mind of intense character actor John Malkovich, his original and comically surreal script made him an overnight star and one of the most talked-about writers in Hollywood. His subsequent scripts for Human Nature (2001) and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2003) were put to film by directors Michel Gondry and George Clooney, respectively, and were modest successes. In 2004, Kaufman received a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , a Philip K. Dick-infused romance also directed by Gondry. Finally, in 2010, Kaufman became a full-fledged auteur when he made his debut as writer-director of Synecdoche, New York , a film sharing in Adaptation. ’s self-reflectivity but perhaps not its joyous virtuosity.

Kaufman’s films are surrealistic in the traditional sense, reminiscent of Luis Buñuel in that everyone onscreen accepts their odd world no matter how strange. His characters may express their bemusement, but they embrace whatever Kaufman throws at them and even eventually seek to exploit it. In Being John Malkovich , when John Cusack’s puppeteer Craig Schwartz confesses to Catherine Keener his discovery of a portal into John Malkovich’s head, rather than fascination and study, they immediately abuse their finding by selling tickets. Human Nature finds Rhys Ifans’ raised-by-wolves protagonist using his status as a victim of modern science to convince Congress how corruptive of Nature humanity has become, even though he himself has become a willingly corrupted member of the human race. Each work is funny, philosophical, Kafkaesque, incredibly imaginative, and certainly post-modern. When you first see a Charlie Kaufman film, you’ve never seen anything else like it. He explores fantastical ideas and scenarios, yet he finds real characters harboring genuine emotions to populate them. Although, his characters will never find redemption through love or romance; more often, they find it through artistic self-understanding or their own acceptance that the universe is an unfair and cruel place. Despite Kaufman’s employment of fantasticality, his films contain a surprising amount of truth.

In Adaptation. ’s opening scenes, Charlie’s producer, Valerie (Tilda Swinton), commends him on his inventive Being John Malkovich script and wants to hear his thoughts on Orlean’s book. Sweaty and nervous in a casual business lunch with a woman to whom he’s attracted, Charlie mutters his way through a speech about keeping true to Orlean’s text when Valerie suggests he should write-in Orlean and Laroche falling in love. “I don’t want to cram in sex or guns or car chases, you know… Or characters, you know, learning profound life lessons, or growing, or coming to like each other, or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end … I feel very strongly about this.” She concedes to the writer’s confused vision, and Charlie returns home to sit in front of his typewriter. An inner dialogue takes over as Charlie debates with himself about how to start. Should he have a coffee first? He should write something first, then reward himself with coffee. He should eat a muffin. Perhaps he should start at the dawn of time, 4 billion and forty years ago. Banana nut is a good muffin. Inner deliberations such as this are familiar and painfully recognizable to any writer.

Overweight, balding, introverted, self-deprecating, and tremendously intelligent, Charlie recalls Woody Allen’s recurrent persona of a talented and lovable loser. The major difference between Allen’s persona and Kaufman’s is how low Kaufman is willing to take his protagonists, while Allen’s losers rarely have trouble finding lovers and often couple with beautiful actresses (Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, Dianne Wiest, etc.). If Charlie’s character represents an uncompromising artistic ideal, then his twin brother Donald represents Kaufman’s fear of “going Hollywood.” But ignorance is also bliss. Donald’s blindly positive attitude lands him a cute girlfriend (Maggie Gyllenhaal), favor among the cast of Being John Malkovich (many of whom appear in cameo), respect in the “industry,” and a huge payday for his cornball script. Meanwhile, Charlie does not have the confidence to pursue his interested would-be girlfriend Amelia (Cara Seymour). Cage delivers marvelous dual performances as the twins, defining each role with carefully nuanced body language and speech patterns so that even though his slouched stutterer Charlie and his always wide-eyed Donald look identical, the audience never has trouble telling them apart.

Before Charlie finds a way to start his script, Donald, who lives with Charlie, interrupts him. Donald announces plans to write his own script, a predictable psychological thriller called The 3 , about a serial killer with multiple personality disorder. Charlie declares the idea is a cliché wrapped in an overused plot device, but he does not have the energy to explain to Donald why. And so, Donald proceeds, relying heavily on advice given during a seminar by Robert McKee (Brian Cox) and McKee’s ever-present Screenwriting 101 book Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting— an actual book used by novice screenwriters. McKee’s conventional how-to guide deconstructs classics like Casablanca , and through them, elucidates a very broad cinematic technique to screen storytelling. McKee argues against voiceover, praises the use of a recurring song (think “As Time Goes By”), condemns deus ex machina , and lauds characters who learn profound life lessons—most being ideas to which Charlie is absolutely opposed. Following standardized formulas is not what Charlie does. Moreover, Orlean’s novel does not follow such set structural motifs either, so why should Charlie in his adaptation? As his deadline approaches and his writer’s block endures, however, Charlie finds himself tempted to employ McKee’s principles just to finish the script; he even takes McKee’s seminar and seeks out his counsel. McKee tells Charlie, “Wow them in the end, and you have a hit.”

In Adaptation. ’s third act “dénouement,” as Donald calls it, Kaufman’s script turns on itself and becomes, knowingly, a product of McKee-brand conventionalism, breaking not only Kaufman’s rules but devolving into a situation wherein his use of deus ex machina becomes a hilariously ironic choice. This is done in the most self-aware of ways—a series of artistic compromises that gradually reveal themselves in Kaufman’s story. Following McKee’s advice, Kaufman introduces a musical theme with The Turtles’ “So Happy Together” sung between Charlie and Donald, who soon discover Orlean and Laroche carrying on together. When Orlean realizes her affair has been revealed, she wants the brothers dead. Laroche hesitates but then goes along with her because his character must to keep the plot moving. There is a chase, a sudden car crash in which Donald dies, and a tender moment when Charlie sings “So Happy Together” to his fading brother. There’s even a deus ex machina in the form of an alligator that attacks Laroche. Of course, this is an intentionally obvious manipulation of the audience, and Kaufman’s tongue-in-cheek way of “wowing” us in the end. These final scenes commit all of those artistic crimes both Kaufman and Charlie were so determined to avoid, even if in this context they do not feel like conventions, but rather Kaufman illustrating how absurd such conventions are.

There is much to keep track of in Adaptation. : Charlie and the process of writing a screenplay, Charlie’s failing personal life and interactions with Donald, sections from The Orchid Thief as read by Charlie, and other passages read from Orlean’s perspective (as imagined and embellished by both Kaufman and Charlie), and visions of a potential film of The Orchid Thief conceived by Charlie. All the while, we must be aware of Kaufman’s voice as he alternates between characters and points of view. As he does with Charlie, Kaufman’s frequent artist characters see themselves clearly enough that, in their dissatisfaction, they create alternate and fantastic realities through their art: Kaufman created Charlie and Donald and their whimsical adventures in the third act; Charlie embraces those adventures in his own script after Donald’s death; in Being John Malkovich , Schwartz acts out his fantasies through his puppet theater and by living in Malkovich; Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Caden Cotard in Synecdoche, New York recreates his entire life on a vast soundstage, accepting life’s lack of meaning only after it becomes an artistic creation. Still, Kaufman’s ongoing series of confessionals about the artistic process—whether from the perspective of puppeteers or screenwriters or theater directors or Darwinians—includes a combination of fiction and real life.

Consider Kaufman’s creative license within his treatment of real people, like Susan Orlean and John Laroche. Both of them must have signed off on Kaufman’s complete creative freedom long before filming began. Any notion of Orlean’s affair with Laroche or their Ghost Orchid drug-running conspiracy is a complete fabrication on Kaufman’s part, explored only to acknowledge the absurdity of Valerie’s suggestion and our affection for Hollywoodized stories. Other characters appear as themselves, such as cameos by John Malkovich, John Cusack, and Catherine Keener, while others still are pure invention on Kaufman’s part—Donald, for instance. Kaufman embraces a practice where authors blend fiction and autobiography into whimsical, self-indulgent, head-spinning delight. Among other films about the writing process like Sunset Boulevard (1950), Barton Fink (1991), Naked Lunch (1991), and Deconstructing Harry (1997), only Adaptation. dwells so on the actual practice of writing, technique, and a severe preoccupation with what authorship means.

The title Adaptation. , then, becomes an exceptionally loaded pun, referring to a) Kaufman’s process of reworking Orlean’s book into script form, b) the Darwinian process of involuntary change to one’s surroundings that fascinates Orlean and Laroche, and c) a method through which Kaufman’s characters from Charlie to Orlean reshape their lives by putting themselves into something or someone else. What remains so engaging about Adaptation. is how Kaufman incorporates the artistic ideals of both personalities, Charlie and Donald, into the overall film. And though Kaufman uses Donald’s cherished Hollywood formula, they are used sardonically, if not facetiously. Never once does the film itself feel as though Kaufman has compromised his artistic integrity. As a result, Kaufman’s script comes from both identities, and so both Charlie Kaufman and his fictional brother Donald Kaufman received credit for the film’s screenplay. A product of fantasy, truth, reality, non-fiction, and sheer artistic bravado, this film is the resounding demonstration as to why Kaufman remains a singular auteur screenwriter whose inability to escape his own artistic influence compels his work.

Bibliography:

Hill, Derek. Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers . Kamera, 2008.

LaRocca, David. The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman . The University of Kentucky Press, 2011.

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Queer/Adaptation

A Collection of Critical Essays

© 2019
Pamela Demory 0

University of California, Davis, Davis, USA

You can also search for this editor in PubMed Google Scholar

Marks the first scholarly text to focus on the intersection of Queer theory and Adaptation theory
Theorises about the queerness of adaptation itself
Includes a variety of approaches such as textual analysis, authorship, reception, genre analysis, performance, history, nationality, and production

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture (PSADVC)

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About this book

Adaptation and Scandal in The Goldfinch

Chaste Thinking, Cultural Reiterations: Shakespeare’s Lucrece and The Letter

You Think You Know the Story: Novelty, Repetition, and Lovecraft in Whedon and Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods

Adaptation theory
textual analysis
transgressive

Table of contents (15 chapters)

Front matter, queer/adaptation: an introduction.

Pamela Demory

Adapting as Queering/Queering as Adapting

Emancipating madame butterfly.

Nick Bamford

Queering Dame Agatha Christie: Barry Sandler’s Camp Adaptation of The Mirror Crack’d (1980)

The queer aesthetics of tom ford’s film adaptations: a single man and nocturnal animals.

Scott F. Stoddart

Hannibal : Beginning to Bloom

Bodies, time, and space, moonlight , adaptation, and queer time, adaptation as queer touching in the safety of objects : transgressing the boundaries of bodies and texts.

Chiara Pellegrini

Fuck-Scripting: Becoming-Queer in Interior. Leather Bar

Queer J. Thomas

Adapting Queer Shorts to Feature Films: Does Size Really Matter?

Whitney Monaghan, Stuart Richards

Transnational Slash: Korean Drama Formats, Boys’ Love Fanfic, and the Place of Queerness in East Asian Media Flows

John Lessard

Queerer and Queerer: Promiscuity and Multiplicity

Queer many ways: ulrike ottinger’s dorian gray im spiegel der boulevardpresse (1984).

Shannon Brownlee

Blood Doubles: A Renegotiation of Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla on Film

Shelby Wilson

Hitchcock Goes to Italy and Spain: Euro Horror and Queer Adaptation

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns

Dazzle, Gradually: A “Tru” Account of Adapting Capote’s In Cold Blood

Michael V. Perez

Willful Infidelities: Camping Camille

Back matter.

“Eschewing moralistic connotations associated with LGBTQ lives, here, promiscuity unyokes binaries of sexuality and gender, while alluding to the intellectual pleasure and possible ‘erotic charge’ of intertextual engagement. By extension, queer/adaptation scholarship should stimulate similar responses; so, in an act of critical promiscuity I read, viewed, or re-experienced all of the material I could locate, seeking pleasure by matching my observations with those of the essayists.” (David Pellegrini, Adaptation, August 14, 2020)

Editors and Affiliations

About the editor, bibliographic information.

Book Title : Queer/Adaptation

Book Subtitle : A Collection of Critical Essays

Editors : Pamela Demory

Series Title : Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05306-2

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Literature, Cultural and Media Studies , Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-030-05305-5 Published: 06 March 2019

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-05306-2 Published: 15 February 2019

Series ISSN : 2634-629X

Series E-ISSN : 2634-6303

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XVII, 268

Number of Illustrations : 2 b/w illustrations, 28 illustrations in colour

Topics : Adaptation Studies , Queer Studies , Queer Theory

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Pride and Prejudice — Critical Analysis Of The Film Adaptation Of Pride And Prejudice

Critical Analysis of The Film Adaptation of Pride and Prejudice

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The 10 Best Literary Film Adaptations of the Decade

And then some..

As you may have noticed, over the past few weeks, we’re been looking back at the best books from the decade , from novels to poetry to nonfiction. As a sort of coda to that project, I’ve also polled the staff about their favorite literary adaptations of the decade, on both the big and small screens. Earlier this week, we published our list of the best television adaptations of the decade, and now, as promised, I present our list of the decade’s best films adapted from books.

Take note that we attempted to judge the films in question on their own independent merits; while many of us have read the books these shows are based on, we didn’t base our decisions on fidelity to, or creativity of departure from, the original text. We just wanted to pick the best movies.

As with the previous lists, the top ten big screen adaptations were chosen after a lengthy debate among the Literary Hub staff. It got testy, but in the end, we agreed—though many of us had to include our dissenting opinions at the end of the list. If we’ve missed your favorite, tell us why we’re wrong in the comments.

The Top Ten

Winter’s Bone (2010) Based on: Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell (2006)

Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (which she also co-wrote with producer Rosellini) is a beautiful, gritty, horrifying masterpiece. Based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell and released in 2010, it is the story of a teenage girl named Ree (Jennifer Lawrence, before her rise to fame and giving the best performance of her career) who lives in the Ozark Mountains with her mother and younger siblings. She serves as the primary caretaker for her whole family—her drug-dealing father has disappeared, and her mother suffers from mental illness. When her family is threatened with eviction, she decides to track down her father. But the neighbors are resistant to her attempts to pry into her father’s life—and she is emphatically discourages by her uncle, a conflicted meth addict named Teardrop (John Hawkes) from searching any further. It is a brutal, cutting film—its pacing is incredibly suspenseful and the acting (often stony), is pitch-perfect. It is a movie of silence, of snow—muted sounds and colors. Until it isn’t, and it transforms into a shocking, scarring, and vibrant spectacle of horror. Debra Granik should direct every movie.

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

The Social Network (2010) Based on: The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich (2009)

It’s not going to surprise anyone that David Fincher is has a prominent place on a list like this. His 2014 adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl claims one of the spots in the top 10. His 2011 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo very easily could have made it, too—it was arguably one of the most anticipated adaptations in several decades, and despite a lukewarm critical reception at the time has been aging pretty well into something closer to wide acclaim. Mindhunter gets a nod in the TV department. But the real crowning achievement of Fincher’s impressive decade is the one with no killers, no gore, and no brooding violence at all, really, except the violence done to the American social fabric thanks to the rise of a new class of reckless tech billionaires. Somehow, with its dark campus landscapes, Trent Reznor score, and unabashed displays of ambition, The Social Network turns out to be one of Fincher’s most insidious, disturbing works. The adaptation, from Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book, The Accidental Billionaires , was done by none other than Aaron Sorkin, and like Mezrich’s book, the screenplay zeroes in on the lawsuits filed by the various founders and early developers of Facebook. Depositions have never been captured so perfectly on film, with Jesse Eisenberg as the seething anti-hero, Zuckerberg, facing off against rivals, enemies, and himself. Looking back almost ten years later, it’s incredible just how prescient The Social Network was about the principles and players behind social media. Fincher and Sorkin seemed to see clearly the insecurities and threats behind this strange force.

–Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

True Grit (2010) Based on: True Grit by Charles Portis (1968)

True Grit , directed by Joel and Ethan Coen in 2010, is the second adaptation of Charles Portis’s 1968 novel of the same name. The first one, which was made in 1969 and starred John Wayne (in the November of his career), was a chipper, watered-down version of the original story, a vehicle for Wayne to pastiche his whole career as a crochety, no-nonsense cowboy. Wayne won an Oscar (kind of as a tribute) for his role as the crapulent, cantankerous, eye-patch-wearing U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn, forever associating himself and his legend with the film. The Coen Brothers’ retelling of the story fully (productively) ignores that the first True Grit even happened, drawing its script from Portis’s grim novel, to focus more on the protagonist that the first film dismissed: Mattie Ross, a formidable fourteen-year-old girl who arrives in a small town to retrieve the body of her murdered father. Played to poker-faced perfection by Hailee Steinfeld (and Elizabeth Marvel, later on), Mattie hires Rooster (Jeff Bridges, who has in the last two decades found his calling playing sloppy, insouciant older men) to hunt down and take into custody Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), her father’s murderer. Also along for the ride is a patronizing Texas Ranger named LeBoeuf (Matt Damon, who pronounces it “luh beef”). While the film is structured around the hunt for the killer, it is more about the relationships between the three characters on the journey—or, really, the lack of relationships between them. The film eschews the traditional “it’s the journey, not the destination” cliché of so many expedition-focused stories—the yearning for a connection between them is there, but they are not able to bring it to fruition.

But this is a Western, which means that the relationships that form are not limited to humans. Mattie’s most loving connection will be to Little Blackie, the shiny horse she picks out for herself to ride on the trip. He will (spoiler) ultimately give up his life to save hers, carrying her to medical care after an accident. Horses in True Grit , seem to play a particularly large role in the film’s construction of a moral hierarchy and are represented as providing integrity to an otherwise cold and chaotic world. As emblematized most obviously by the strutting, gauche Rooster, the wild west of True Grit turns everything and everyone into animals. As Mattie (her family’s breadwinner, now) tries to avenge her father, she is truly on the hunt for humanity and support—someone who can help her carry her family through this hard time. But humans, with their nominal superiority of morality and thought, will almost always fail her. And the film beautifully, sadly, darkly, watches humanity leave her with nothing—like the horses who love her back, she too must live as a beast of burden. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) Based on: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré (1974)

Swedish purveyor of moody, broody atmospherics Tomas Alfredson ( Let the Right One In ) conjures the beige-hued, ashen-faced world of jaded British spycraft so impeccably in his adaptation of John Le Carré’s seminal 1974 novel that you can almost smell the stale cigarette smoke and flop sweat, feel the scratchy suit fabric and stained shag carpeting. Gary Oldman plays the latest incarnation of Le Carré’s beleaguered-but-deceptively-cunning career intelligence officer George Smiley, here brought out of retirement and tasked with rooting out a Soviet mole in the upper echelons of the secret service. Alongside him is a rogue’s gallery of stony-faced British acting royalty: Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch, John Hurt, and Tom Hardy, to name but a few. These are men whose emotional lives have been slowly eroded by the grim rituals and moral compromises of service. The whole thing is just so damn bleak, but in a transfixing kind of way. I know that’s a strange argument to make for exalting a film to Best of the Decade status, but Alfredson’s remake is such a fully realized vision that every time I sit down to watch TTSS (usually in the dead of night) I am instantly transported, mesmerized. It’s paradoxical, but there’s something both deeply soothing and deeply unnerving about following Oldman’s stoic, melancholy Smiley through the ruins of this fallen kingdom—a post-Kim Philby landscape of stagnating enmities and vanished idealism.

–Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

The Hunger Games (2012) Based on: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008)

With all due respect to everyone who got really mad at Martin Scorcese for saying superhero movies weren’t art, I don’t think that The Hunger Games is great art—but I do think it’s a great adaptation. Not only does it capture the spirit of the book in all its distinctly YA-flavored but still genuinely frightening glory, but it’s also highly entertaining. This is the kind of movie that I’ll watch any time I see it on a screen—much like a character in The Hunger Games unable to look away from the Hunger Games. For one thing, the casting is impeccable: Stanley Tucci at his campy best as Caesar Flickerman! Woody Harrelson as loveable grump Haymitch Abernathy! Wes Bentley! Remember him from American Beauty ? He became a director after all! The director of the Hunger Games! This movie’s montage game is also really strong. I think probably what happened was that the directors gave one overarching note on the screenplay, and that note was “Can this be a montage?” And the answer was often yes! As is the answer to “Should I watch The Hunger Games ?” Jennifer Lawrence is also in it.

–Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Gone Girl (2014) Based on: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012)

Although Gone Girl needs no introduction, here I go anyway. Gone Girl , the movie, was adapted from Gone Girl, the book, first published in 2012 by Gillian Flynn to immediately become a bestseller. Flynn’s Gone Girl went on to sell two million copies in its first year. The psychological thriller, directed by David Fincher—director of every film you’ve heard of , including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo —starred Rosamund Pike, Ben Affleck, Neil Patrick Harris, and Tyler Perry (among the producers is also Reese Witherspoon) with Gillian Flynn at the helm, writing the screenplay, and was released to wide critical acclaim in 2014, grossing to $369 million. Meanwhile, Rosamund Pike’s performance as Amy Dunne earned her nominations for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. With all the official praise out of the way, now I get to lapse into the story that became a phenomenon.

Gone Girl opens on the day of Amy Dunne’s disappearance, the same day that marks the beginning of the unravelling of her husband Nick Dunne, who is being accused of her murder. In due course, the narrative pulls out from the investigation into Nick Dunne’s culpability and Amy Dunne’s found diary entries, to switch over to Amy, who really, is alive and framing her husband for her murder to punish him for being a bad husband. He is no longer the man she married. The film opens the same way that it closes, with an intimate close up of Amy who is lying down, and staring back at the camera, in a look that should seem affectionate and flirty but instead is unnerving in how ruthless it is. The line Nick speaks over this scene—held too long for comfort—is, “What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other?” These words reverberate throughout the movie only to toll again at the finale.

The film is full of chilling contrasts that augment its tension and reinforce its suspense. Notable is Fincher’s excellent depiction of Gone Girl ’s noir aesthetic: evident, for example, in the very dimly lit, empty (albeit in the morning) bar that Nick and Go own, where they play board games while drinking scotch and making light of crude jokes that make one squirm. They also complain about Amy. Excellent in the film is Detective Rhonda Boney: straight-faced, with a southern accent, and a wry humor that disarms New York-endorsed snob Nick just a few minutes into their meeting. A great scene: Nick has just called the police after seeing the living room furniture overturned and the front door ajar, and as procedure requires, Detective Boney evaluates the house; she steps into his bedroom and inquires, casually, about this profession. Nick says he’s a writer. He also owns a bar, named The Bar. “Oh, The Bar,” Boney says, “Love the name. Very meta.” Detective Boney is everything we’ve been taught the crime detective should be, only she is no fool, and she is not arrogant. That is more than we can say about her younger, male lieutenant who is blood-thirsty: he wants Dunne arrested, no matter the evidence. I could go on quite a while about the details of this movie, but the last and very important note I will end on is Amy’s chilling monologue that introduces her true persona to the audience.

Wearing sunglasses and driving with one arm out the window—the arm from which she drew blood to stage a convincing crime scene—Amy is cruising down a country road in the sunlight and we, at this point, know what she did. Here, she gives her iconic “cool girl speech,” the speech that makes a convincing case for the adage, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” The beauty of the speech is that it is dramatic, dripping with anger and, even though we know Amy is a psychopath, and we know we would never take things that far . . . . yet, there’s a flash of a second where we—the audience—nod along and say, yes. Yes. After praising it so highly, it would be cruel to leave you hanging, so here’s a piece of that monologue: “Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl . . . . Hot and understanding. Cool girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind. I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl.” It keeps going—the monologue, in the film, in the book, in your head. Thus is the effect, the phenomenon, of Gone Girl .

–Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Carol (2015) Based on: The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (1952)

In the dining room of a nondescript hotel by the side of the highway, Therese and Carol are sharing breakfast when a man can’t resist the chance to intrude. Sitting down at their table, he peppers them with questions, and they reply with brief, vague answers, as a parallel but much more interesting conversation plays out between their faces; the subtle raised eyebrow, the mocking nod, a world of communication in plain sight yet utterly hidden to the man in front of them. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt —a book that broke new ground when it was published in 1952 for portraying a lesbian relationship that does not end in despair or death— Carol communicates so much with this kind of unspoken connection and understanding, which made it possible for queer women to find and love each other in an era that would have preferred they remain invisible.

The love story between two women, which begins in the holiday season of 1952, is equally joyful and mindful of the many dangers posed by society’s resistance to queerness and queer sexuality. A.O. Scott wrote for The New York Times that viewers watch the two lovers “in public places, hidden in plain sight, cloaked in unspoken assumptions that are at once painful and protective.” Unlike so many other queer narratives, though, an awareness of that danger does not overshadow their intimacy; instead, it casts light on the tactics that queer women had to employ in order to survive, with incredible results.

–Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

The Handmaiden (2016) Based on: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (2002)

Park Chan-wook’s radical adaptation of Sarah Waters’s novel (by radical I mean he transmuted the action from Victorian-era Britain to 1930s colonial Korea, which was just as rigid and striated by class) was hands-down my favorite film of 2016, never mind my favorite adaptation of a novel. It starts slow, and quiet, which only makes what eventually unfurls—involving an elaborate, multi-faceted con, a torture chamber, a lesbian awakening, a library of porn, and an octopus—that much more striking. Every moment of this film, which is both a love story and a thriller, is gorgeous, and hypnotic, and sexy, and weird as hell. It is beyond good.

And though I know we’re not supposed to be considering the adaptation process, this one was remarkable: it improved upon a book that I already loved. As I wrote back in 2016 , the film “excised everything I didn’t like about the book (an over-complicated, fairly slow third act, for one thing) and replaced it with what I really wished for—the collaboration between these two strange, powerful women. The experience of watching the film reminded me of reading contemporary retellings of fairy tales—it’s a deeply satisfying wish-fulfillment that takes something already good and vital and twists it until it’s unbearably delicious, until it’s exactly what you want. This felt like a feminist reimagining of an already feminist novel.”

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Arrival (2016) Based on: “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang (1998)

What if language was the key to knowledge, not only about your neighbor, but about strangers and yourself as well? By the end of Arrival , the Denis Villeneuve film based on Ted Chiang’s 1998 short story, “Story of Your Life,” the viewer understands this as the movie’s central question. Linguist Louise Banks (played by the ever-reliable Amy Adams) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) are called by the US Army to help study one of twelve extraterrestrial spacecrafts that have positioned themselves in scattered locations around the world. What Banks and Donnelly discover aboard the craft are two amorphous alien specimens, which they call “heptapods,” that communicate using a complicated system of logograms, or written characters that represent a word or phrase. This straightforward set-up lays the groundwork for a moving, and often anxiety-inducing, investigation of language, empathy, and miscommunication. Arrival ’s surprising endgame cemented it as one of the most heartfelt movies of the last decade. The film’s meditative aesthetic is also boosted by a rather primal, ruminative score by the late, great Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Call Me By Your Name (2017) Based on: Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman (2007)

André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name , initially thought he would dislike director Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation; from the moment he arrived on a visit to the set, he wrote for Vanity Fai r , it was clear that Guadagnino’s vision for the film was significantly different from the one that had driven his own writing. But the final result, which he saw at the Berlin International Film Festival, and in particular the film’s infamous last shot, floored him. “The ending captured the very spirit of the novel I had written in ways that I could never have imagined or anticipated,” he wrote.

In Guadagnino’s hands, Aciman’s narration of the interior, obsessive Elio, a prodigious 17-year-old, becomes a series of languid Italian summer days over which a love story unfolds between him and Oliver, the older graduate student who comes to stay in their family’s house over the summer. Filmed in the Lombardy region of Italy, the film is so visually lush as to seem unreal, and the intensity of the connection it explores—and all the self-searching that follows it—is almost painful to watch, as Timothée Chalamet (Elio) and Armie Hammer (Oliver) bring a palpable chemistry and sense of constant, unresolved desire to their roles. Its setting, “Somewhere in Northern Italy,” is deliberately vague, Anthony Lane noted for The New Yorker —”the point of a paradise is that it could exist anywhere but that, once you reach the place, it brims with details so precise in their intensity that you never forget them,” he wrote. This film is a paradise worth your time and definitely one of the best adaptations of the last decade.

Dissenting Opinions

The following adaptations were just barely nudged out of the top twenty, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) Based on: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003)

What happens when someone you love turns out to be a monster? We Need to Talk About Kevin (WNTTAK) understands the complexities of love, grief, anger, and mourning intimately. Based on Lionel Shriver’s 2005 novel of the same name, the film has quickly surpassed its source material in both reach and reputation. Told from the perspective of Kevin’s mother, played to intense perfection by Tilda Swinton, WNTTAK begins with a lonesome Tilda, living in a rundown house and visiting her teenage son in prison. He’s done something terrible, something so terrible that Swinton’s neighbors no longer talk to her, but what? A gradual series of flashback sequences reveals Kevin’s difficult upbringing, his mother’s growing suspicion of his psychopathy, and finally, the explosive violence that lands him in prison in the first place.

If you prefer to end every film with the sensation that everything is pointless and we might just as well curl up in the fetal position and die (but also love exists and is very creepy), then this film is for you! It’s also part of a continuum of complex attitudes towards motherhood stretching back to Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child and beyond. Motherhood is ambiguous. So is love. And so is that ending. . .

–Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

The trailer for the film Cloud Atlas , directed by the Wachowski sisters, is the single most moving work of cinema ever made. It is basically as long as a real movie (a 5 minute and 42 second-long movie trailer!) and it is more enjoyable than watching the actual whole film of Cloud Atlas , an extremely ambitious and staggering epic that tells a giant six-generation, cross-continental, time-jumping narrative packed with very famous movie stars (though are they performing as people of other races, at times? Yes. Yes they are.) The novel on which the film is based, which was written by David Mitchell, is a beautiful, complicated tale of different individuals at different moments in time, from an 19th-century voyager in the Pacific, to an impoverished family in a futuristic primitive world. Mitchell’s book is subtle and the connections between the six different stories within are more like soft threads. The film on the whole transforms the book in a somewhat awkward literalization of many of its smaller details (the movie becomes all about reincarnation in a way the book only touches upon it)… but this movie trailer, which can’t tell the full story of the movie (though it kind of tries, with its expanse), is a collection of stunning notes, coming together much more smoothly and (helpfully) vaguely than in its full iteration. You go watch this trailer, with its perfect deployment of that one M83 song and snare drums and lonely piano themes and stunning colors and heartbeat-matching montage cut points and slow motion and Jim Broadbent and gravelly voiceovers like “I believe there is another world out there, a better world—and I’ll be waiting for you there” and you TELL me that it does not deserve to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. You look me eye and tell me.

The Great Gatsby (2013) Based on: The Great Gatsby , by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Here are just a few of the (myriad) reasons why Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 lush-as-fuck and much-maligned adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magnum opus is actually one of the great cinematic achievements of the 21st century: (i) The trailer. Remember how excited we all were when this dope trailer dropped? Remember how alive it made us feel? (ii) The soundtrack: Beyoncé and André 3000 covering Back to Black , Jack White covering Love is Blindness and, most especially, that young and beautiful Lana del Rey song (which I still listen to on the regular on my runs) Luhrmann pipes in over this glorious montage of Nick and Daisy hitting golf balls into the ocean and flinging beautiful silk shirts around the room. (iii) The party scenes . Just look at them all there, having a grand old time with their money and their sparkly clothes. (iv) The casting of Jason Clarke and Isla Fisher as George and Myrtle Wilson. Dead on. (v) The way DiCaprio’s Gatsby says the line “I’m certainly glad to see you, as well.” So intense. DiCaprio, the boyishly handsome rhino and Millennial/Gen Z model enthusiast who has spent a decade in roles that require him to look perennially on the brink of a complete mental breakdown, was born to play this role and I will brook no argument there (vi) Joel Edgerton absolutely going for it as Tom Buchanan. Not since Billy Zane’s Cal Hockley I enjoyed a wealthy shittheel villain so much. (vii) The way the movie wisely tones down the anti-Semitic Meyer Wolfsheim caricature. Good note, Baz. Good note. (viii) That Leo-raising-a-champagne-glass gif we all know and love. (ix) The way Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway adds that flourish to his sanatorium framing device novel at the movie’s close. All movie codas should be as bold in their purist-trolling as this .

Much Ado About Nothing (2013) Based on: Much Ado About Nothing , by William Shakespeare (1623)

Certain people in the office groaned when I announced that I wanted to write about this film, but those people are foolish. Look, no one would claim that this Much Ado About Nothing , directed by Joss Whedon and staged in his own house, is better than the official Much Ado About Nothing , directed by Kenneth Branagh in the ’90s (two more groan-worthy things), but it’s certainly more elegant, and hey, it’s the same play (my favorite). You can’t really mess up this play, which contains the best character in Shakespeare’s oeuvre—or maybe I’d give Beatrice and Puck a shared top billing, but the point stands. Perhaps most importantly, if you are a fan of other works created by Joss Whedon, ahem, this movie can be understood as an extended piece of fan fiction in which Wesley and Fred finally get together instead of the latter dying tragically in the former’s arms before they’ve even slept together. I mean, look at them, up there. Trust me when I say it’s very satisfying.

Snowpiercer (2013) Based on: Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette

Snowpiercer !!!!!! It’s so good, y’all.

Snowpiercer is a 2013 Korean-American production directed by indie darling Bong Joon-ho and based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob with a striking (get-it?) premise. In an apocalyptic scenario where the world has become too frozen to sustain human life, the only survivors are on board a train called Snowpiercer , barreling around the world just fast enough to preserve the lives of those onboard – but all survivors are not equal. We begin the narrative in the “third class” section of the apocalypse, as we learn about the train’s highly stratified class system, held in place by a rigidly applied system of barbaric punishment administered by a terrifying Tilda Swinton.

The oppressed masses soon begin a rebellion against their fur-clad overlords, and as they journey from the back of the train through gradually increasing opulence, fighting their way to the engine car, audiences are forced to question if this kind of survival is worth surviving at all. Snowpiercer also gets mad props most creative/prolific arm removal – like, five characters get their arms cut off this movie. Each in a different way. Something to know ahead of time, especially if you’re planning a drinking game around it.

A perfect action film with a solid Marxist message that draws strong visuals from its comic book origins and takes narrative inspiration from video games, Snowpiercer is one of the must-see films of the decade.

The Edge of Tomorrow (2014) Based on: Hiroshi Sakurazaka, All You Need Is Kill (2004)

The 2014 Tom Cruise sci-fi actioner The Edge of Tomorrow AKA Live Die Repeat is adapted from Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s light novel, All You Need Is Kill , but perhaps the true ur-text is the 1993 Harold Ramis/Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day . What’s it about? Well, the plot is almost beside the point; its the premise here that’s everything: it’s the near future, and aliens have invaded Europe, and Cruise—a combat-unready military PR sleazeball—is dragooned by Brendan Gleeson into active duty for a D-Day style invasion, where he is almost instantly killed only to awaken the day before with his memory intact and forced to live through the slaughter again and again and again. Until, that is, with the help of badass warrior Emily Blunt, he learns to become a mechanized-bodysuit-fighting master and to better understand his enemy and, maybe, himself ? I know, but it’s incredibly satisfying. There’s just so much glee to be had in the bonkersness and boldfaced derivativeness of the conceit, the video-game action sequences and the scenery-chewing supporting performances—and, of course, in watching Cruise (as the type of smarmy bastard that usually gets described as “playing against type” but always seems to suit him best) get 86-ed over and over. To watch this movie is to appreciate how little so many of its genre-mates are able to enjoy themselves, and how little they seem interested in your enjoyment. The Edge of Tomorrow , above all else, knows what I need to enjoy myself, and it wants me to have it.

–Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Inherent Vice (2014) Based on: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (2009)

The reputation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 adaptation of Pynchon’s gonzo-PI novel has been growing fairly steadily since its first release, when, let’s be honest, it was hard to know exactly what to make of this thing. First off, like just about any PI story worth its salt, the “plot” doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Sense isn’t the point. (See, e.g. The Long Goodbye , book and movie; rinse, repeat.) Atmosphere is the point—an ambiance, some style, a little confusion, a little tension, and in this case a fine, drug-laced balancing act somewhere between ennui and paranoia, a certain feeling in the air that went hand-in-glove with the mourning of a decade’s promise, innocence lost, friends disappeared, dead and gone. Based on the 2009 Pynchon neo-noir, Inherent Vice is set in 1970s “Gordita Beach”—a stand-in for Manhattan Beach in its scruffy bohemian heyday—and follows the dubious private eye casework of one Doc Sportello, a man capable of walking the city’s mean streets in the mode of Chandler’s Marlowe, though in this case the streets are full of 1960s washouts and burnouts, and the bete noir is one Bigfoot Bjornsen, the LAPD’s local fascist hippie-hater. That’s a fairly ineffable mood but Paul Thomas Anderson manages to capture it along with some help from Joaquin Phoenix, Katherine Waterston, Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro and a long, strange cast of characters. What starts out seeming to be an exercise in oddness and unexpected detour slowly, almost inexplicably morphs into something far more tender and poignant, a weird, lovely meditation on the people and scenes that move in and out of our lives, gone forever.

Elle (2016) Based on: Oh… by Philippe Djian

Elle is a brilliant, disturbing movie that I will not watch again. Isabelle Huppert plays Michèle Leblanc, the artistic director of a video game company, who is one day raped in her home by a masked assailant. After the assault, Michèle does not call the police but instead cleans up the blood and broken glass, and resumes her life. One might list Elle among a long list of “rape revenge” movies, as many critics have, though it was immediately clear that the film was attempting something much bolder than the usual fare. The fact that director Paul Verhoeven wasn’t able to convince American actresses or film studios to make the film says something about the ugly frankness of Elle’s Machiavellian attempts to rebuild her life and self-image after such a heinous violation. Elle , which was released in 2016, the year before the #MeToo movement spiked in popularity, was an inadvertent bellwether of soon-to-be-revived debates around male and female power, sex, and sexual ethics. –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Lady Macbeth (2017) Based on: Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov (1865)

Has there ever been a protagonist more terrifying than Katherine, the Lady Macbeth of William Oldroyd’s haunting adaptation of Leskov’s novella (itself inspired by Shakespeare’s most famous female character)? Sure, a lot of characters are cold, and a lot of characters start with one little murder and then work their way up in intensity (of method and victim), but as I’ve written in this space before , most of them don’t, well, win at the end, and most of them aren’t played by Florence Pugh, who nails Katherine as a blank, amoral antiheroine in a fairy tale—one of the original fairy tales, where people routinely die, disappear and get dismembered—who suffers, more than anything else, from idle hands. It’s a shame more people didn’t see this film, despite its disturbing imagery; any lovers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Catherine Lacey and yes, the Bard himself, should seek it out.

Hidden Figures (2018) Based on: Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly (2016)

Based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s bestselling nonfiction book of the same name, Hidden Figures tells the little-known story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson—the brilliant black women who were behind one of NASA’s greatest achievements. (Had you heard of them before this? I certainly hadn’t.) Without these women breaking down barriers and fighting for a seat at the table, astronaut John Glenn never would have been successfully launched into orbit. Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe do an incredible job of bringing these women to the forefront of this Space Race story. There is one scene that has stuck in my mind, years after I’ve seen it. Because segregated bathrooms are still in place at NASA when the events of this film unfold, we see Taraji P. Henson running across the campus grounds, crossing a great distance to go to the “colored bathroom.” At first, it’s almost played up for a little bit of comic relief. But as it goes on, we see the toll it takes on her work. Then her white male supervisor berates her in front of her colleagues for leaving her desk for so long, and she finally fires back telling them where she’s been going for forty minutes at a time, screaming that this is something they would never even have to consider. It’s a real turning point in the movie, a cleverly included detail that hits on a terrible reality of the time. But Hidden Figures doesn’t hit you over the head with it. It doesn’t linger in this injustice. The movie is also filled with joy and laughter and small victories and strong female friendship. The story itself is heartwarming and inspiring, and the film adaptation is a fitting celebration of these game-changing women.

–Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) Based on: Can You Ever Forgive Me? by Lee Israel

I find it very comforting to watch characters act out of desperation and that’s not something I intend to examine at all! Even if you don’t share my totally unremarkably interest in downward spirals, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is worth watching. Adapted from Lee Israel’s memoir of the same name, the film is part buddy comedy (Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant play Israel and her friend/partner in crime Jack Hock), part heist, and all spiny dark comedy. It’s also, as A.O. Scott writes , “catnip for the bookish,” as the crime in question is selling forged correspondence from literary giants including Dorothy Parker and Noël Coward. One of the things I love about the film is that while it certainly doesn’t glamorize Israel’s crime spree (she forged 400 letters, which I think qualifies as a spree), it does respect her talent as a mimic. The script—written by Jeff Whitty and the brilliant Nicole Holofcener—is funny and mean and very, very tense, and Melissa McCarthy’s Lee Israel is one of my favorite Unlikeable Women of the decade.

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other adaptations that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

127 Hours (2010) · The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) · Moneyball (2011) · Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1) (2011) · Jane Eyre (2011) · Anna Karenina (2012) · Cloud Atlas itself (2012) · The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) · Cosmopolis (2012) · Under the Skin (2013) · Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) · The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013) · Divergent (2014) · Room (2015) · The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) · The Martian (2015) · Still Alice (2015) · Spotlight (2015) · The Lost City of Z (2016) · If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) · Blackkklansman (2018) · We the Animals (2018) · The Sisters Brothers (2018) · The Wife (2018).

Emily Temple

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COMMENTS

Adaptation
Introduction. Studies of cinematic adaptations—films based, as the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences puts it, on material originally presented in another medium—are scarcely a century old. Even so, particular studies of adaptation, the process by which texts in a wide range of media are transformed into films (and more ...
A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation
This is a comprehensive collection of original essays that explore the aesthetics, economics, and mechanics of movie adaptation, from the days of silent cinema to contemporary franchise phenomena. Featuring a range of theoretical approaches, and chapters on the historical, ideological and economic aspects of adaptation, the volume reflects today's acceptance of intertextuality as a vital and ...
In/Fidelity. Essays on Film Adaptation
In/Fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. ISBN (10): 1-84718-402-2 ISBN (13): 9781847184023 Despite both critical and institutional progress over the past decade, it appears that adaptation studies will never be rid of the fidelity debate. David L. Kranz and Nancy C. Mellerski's collection ...
Filming John Fowles : critical essays on motion picture and television
Filming John Fowles : critical essays on motion picture and television adaptations. Publication date 2015 Topics Fowles, John, 1926-2005 ... This book examines the film and video adaptations of these stories, and Fowles's role in adapting his literary genius to visual media. It gives deserved recognition to Fowles as a contributor to cinema, a ...
From Literature to Cinema: A Critical and Literary Study on the Film
Adaptation of literary texts, be it Indian or foreign, into Indian cinema or Indian literary. texts into foreign cinema, is not new for film makers, rather one can say that such adaptation is. as ...
'Adaptation', the Film, the Process and the Dialogue
The film Adaptation (2002) makes the process of adaptation explicit and through the narrative deals with several important dilemmas in adaptation. ... My essay applies this critical paradigm to the 2002 film Adaptation, which, in grappling with the question of literature's relationship to the world, ultimately arrives at a conclusion similar ...
Introduction: Adaptation's Past, Adaptation's Future
Adaptation scholars regularly acknowledge that the practice of adapting and retelling stories is roughly as old as storytelling itself. Linda Hutcheon begins her foundational A Theory of Adaptation (2006) with a warning against a critical over-reliance on contemporary forms and methods: "If you think adaptation can be understood using novels and film alone, you're wrong" (xiii).
Adaptation Studies: New Approaches
Adaptation Studies: New Approaches. Christa Albrecht-Crane, Dennis Ray Cutchins. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 2010 - Literary Criticism - 306 pages. This collection of essays offers a sustained, theoretically rigorous rethinking of various issues at work in film and other media adaptations. The essays in the volume as a whole explore the ...
In/Fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation
In/Fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation. Description. Editor Bio. This volume explores a timely and controversial theoretical issue in cinematic adaptation studies: the necessity and value of fidelity as a yardstick by which to measure film adaptations of literary and dramatic works. Recent publications in the field have argued that adaptation ...
In/fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation
In/fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation. David L. Kranz, Nancy C. Mellerski. Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2008 - Performing Arts - 251 pages. This volume explores a timely and controversial theoretical issue in cinematic adaptation studies: the necessity and value of fidelity as a yardstick by which to measure film adaptations of literary and ...
André Bazin on Adaptation: Cinema's Literary Imagination
The critical genius of one of the greatest film and cultural critics of the twentieth century is on full display in this collection, in which readers are introduced to Bazin's foundational concepts of the relationship between film and literary adaptation. ... the book begins with a selection of essays that show Bazin's film theory in action ...
The Sociology and Aesthetics of Film Adaptation
The modern cinema is increasingly interested in just this sort of intersecting. Bresson, naturally, has given us his Joan of Arc from court records and his Mouchette once again from Bernanos. Jean-Marie Straub has filmed Corneille's Othon and The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach. Pier Paolo Pasolini audaciously confronted Matthew's gospel with many later texts (musical, pictorial, and ...
(PDF) Literature and Film Adaptation Theories: Methodological
Adaptation Studies, edited by Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins, Rosemond, 2010, pp.11-22. Andrew, Dudley. "The Well-Worn Muse: Adaptation in Film History and Theory." Narrative Strategies: Original Essays in Film and Prose Fiction, edited by Syndy Conger and Janice R. Welsch, West Illinois University Press, 1980, pp. 9-17.
Film adaptations
The most critical central step in this transformation of a literary source to the screen is the writing of the screenplay. ... This collection of forty new essays is the most comprehensive volume on adaptation ever published. ... With a basis in source-oriented studies, such as novel-to-stage and stage-to-film adaptations, this volume also ...
THEORIES OF ADAPTATION: NOVEL TO FILM
The film version of a novel could be also be a critical essay emphasising the main theme of the novel. Like criticism, the film adaptation selects some episodes, excludes others, and offers preferred alternatives. It may focus on specific areas in the novel, expand or contract details and may also indulge in fanciful flights about some characters.
Writing about Film Adaptations:
The quality of film adaptations varies as much as the quality of original films, so comparing the film to the novel to determine "which is better" does not give the student a valid topic for writing a good essay. There are a few factors to consider when writing essays about film adaptations:
Film Writing: Sample Analysis
The film's first establishing shots set the action in a busy modern office. A woman sits at a computer, absorbed in her screen. The camera looks at her through a glass wall, one of many in the shot. The reflections of passersby reflected in the glass and the workspace's dim blue light make it difficult to determine how many rooms are depicted.
Film Analysis
Film analysis goes beyond the analysis of the film as literature to include camera angles, lighting, set design, sound elements, costume choices, editing, etc. in making an argument. The first step to analyzing the film is to watch it with a plan. Watching the film. First it's important to watch the film carefully with a critical eye.
Adaptation.
Brian Eggert's essay about Adaptation. provides an in-depth critical analysis, exploring its production, history, and themes. ... Critical essays, histories, and appreciations of great films. Adaptation. Essay by Brian Eggert May 21, ... The above paragraph is both a brief background and a plot description to director Spike Jonze's 2002 film ...
Queer/Adaptation: A Collection of Critical Essays
This ground-breaking volume brings together fifteen original essays that critically challenge these assumptions about originality, authenticity, and value. The volume is organized in three parts: The essays in Part I examine what happens when an adaptation queers its source text and explore the role of the author/screenwriter/director in making ...
Critical Analysis Of The Film Adaptation Of Pride And Prejudice: [Essay
Jane Austen's 1813 classic novel, Pride and Prejudice made its way to the silver screen in Joe Wright's 2005 adaptation. The film is filled with romance, sprinkled with humour and intelligent dialogue, keeping the audience continually engaged.
The 10 Best Literary Film Adaptations of the Decade
It's not going to surprise anyone that David Fincher is has a prominent place on a list like this. His 2014 adaptation of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl claims one of the spots in the top 10. His 2011 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo very easily could have made it, too—it was arguably one of the most anticipated adaptations in several decades, and despite a lukewarm critical reception at the ...
PDF Literature Through the Cinematic Lens: Film Adaptations as a Teaching
as well as its adaptation(s), using comparative studies for critical level of comprehension, and valuing students' reactions to the alteration in favour of the artist's concept. Reassessing the Fidelity Issue The discussion of literary film adaptations has long been dominated by the topic of fidelity.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (film)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a 1988 American romantic drama film, an adaptation of the 1984 novel of the same name by Milan Kundera.It was directed by Philip Kaufman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jean-Claude Carrière, and stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche and Lena Olin.The film portrays Czechoslovak artistic and intellectual life during the Prague Spring, and the effect on ...