Introduction: Turning Literature into Film

Films based on literary texts (“adaptations”) pose a

number of important questions. The question of "fidelity" to

the text is one of a large number of critical or ideological

questions raised by such motion pictures. The films are shaped

by, among other factors, the culture in which the adaptation is

produced, the aims and values of filmmakers, the demands of

a studio or network, and the standing of a particular literary

work or artist. They are also, often, as much about the beauty,

wit, ambition, or artistic will to power of a movie star or a

director as they are about literary texts or characters. These

films thus serve to remind us just how vexed an issue

"adaptation" is for students of cinema.

It has been said about films based upon literary sources

that they enable a comparative investigation of the discursive

practices of film and literature but, unfortunately,

commentaries on such motion pictures often take the form of

“fidelity studies”, that is, they suggest that the worth of an

adaptation of a major, canonical novel is largely traceable to

the skill and imaginative power of the author of the original

text. While “fidelity studies" are often disparaged by students

of film-and-literature, the question of how a film makes use of

a work of fiction, and indeed the question of whether a film is

or is not in one way or another "faithful" to a book has not

gone away and probably never will, especially since,

according to a recent estimate, upwards of 30 percent of all

films are based on novels.

Comment [SG1]: A canonical text is a

text that has been pronounced, by the

academic establishment, to be aesthetically

valuable and generally pertinent to the

moral and social concerns of a particular

historical period.

NB: Please remember that films that derive from novels

and other forms of fiction are distinct works of art even though

they have a clear and important link to the texts.

Critics and theorists, who have written about adaptation

over the last 50 years, have tended, at least formally, to reject

fidelity criticism and assert that a discussion of adaptation

must start from the proposition that literature and cinema are

radically different, even incommensurable, art forms. It has

been argued that whereas film works from perception toward

signification, literary fiction works oppositely. It begins with

signs, graphemes and words, building to propositions, which

attempt to develop perception.

Yet although such declarations as these without doubt

constitute the dominant, "official" view of adaptation in film

theory and criticism in the last few decades, writers continue

to privilege literature over film in important ways, and assume

that a film adaptation has a certain responsibility to remain

faithful to either the letter or the spirit of the text on which it is

based.

What is at stake is the definition of the relationship

between the literary text and the film. We can use specific

models for this purpose. Some scholars believe that the film is

a commentary or a translation of the text. Such ways of

looking at adaptation are both illuminating and liberating;

adaptation is thus presented as a creative, critical act and not

just as a transposition or transfer of at least some elements of a

novel to the screen. But there is still a tendency to privilege

the text over the film. Thus, both the commentary and

translation models contain a bias in favour of the text as

against the cinematic work even though at least some of the

writers who employ these models mean to distance themselves

from the tendency of fidelity criticism to privilege fiction over

film.

Such favouring of fiction over film seems almost

inescapable in discussions of adaptation; the very word, after

all, suggest alteration or adjustment in order to make

something fit its new context or environment without,

however, changing that something into something else; one

"adapts," that is, one does not "transform" or "metamorphose."

No wonder, then, that not a few filmmakers and theorists have

rejected the very idea of adaptation. According to Ingmar

Bergman, for example, "film has nothing to do with literature"

and, therefore, "we should avoid making films out of books."

Hungarian film critic Béla Balázs denies that there can be any

transfer or transposition from one art form to the other. He

insists that when a novel is "turned into" a film, although “the

subject, or story, of both works is identical, their content is

nevertheless different.”

Other models indebted to literary theory help to move

discussions of the "metamorphosis of fiction into cinema"

beyond the concept of adaptation. Thus, there is the concept of

intertextuality. By placing the notion of adaptation within the

theory of intertextuality, we can describe the literary source of

a film as one of a series of pre-texts which share some of the

same narrative conventions as the film adaptation. This

description obviously does not exhaust the film's intertextual

space, which also includes codes specific to the institution of

cinema as well as codes that reflect the cultural conditions

under which the film was produced. In important ways the

intertextuality model solves the main problems associated with

adaptation theory by treating the literary text as one of many

items in the multidimensional space in which a variety of

writings, none of them absolutely “original”, blend and clash.

No longer is the novel privileged, and the problem of fidelity

Comment [SG2]: Intertextuality is the

shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It

can refer to an author’s borrowing and

transformation of a prior text or to a

reader’s referencing of one text in reading another.

criticism therefore recedes because there is no sense of

responsibility to a text within such a model. Yet the use of this

concept presents other problems to the critic who wishes to

focus on the relationship between film and fiction. While

intertextuality allows us at least theoretically to place a film

that draws upon a work of fiction within its proper context, we

see the cinematic work as shaped not only by a particular text

but also by a multitude of elements within a cultural setting -

including other films, a star's persona, political discourse, and

potentially almost innumerable narratives and other items

from popular and elite culture. Thus, use of the intertextuality

model might in some cases tend to obscure the relationship

between the two works.

Recent reading theory may offer a solution to the

problems posed by the intertextuality model's account of the

fiction-to-film problematic. Theorists working within this area

refuse to privilege one reading (or work or form) over another

but they nevertheless remain focused to a significant degree

upon particular works and the distinct ways in which they

have been received. These conceptualizations of reading

return us to the idea of adaptation as an act of interpretation,

but in this case with a radically different sense of that process,

in order to help students of film-and-fiction escape from the

bias towards the literary text inherent in most accounts of

adaptation and still allow them to theorize the historically

crucial relationship between literature and cinema and

between particular films and texts. Reading theory in recent

years has been dominated by the view that reading is not a

matter of the decoding of signs that yields something essential

to the text such as its "basic theme" but is instead a creative

act that in "concretizing" a work remakes it and indeed

remakes the artistic field in which it appears. Reading or

reception have been described as an evolving dialogue of

question and answer: texts of whatever character pose

questions to readers - formal, aesthetic, thematic, sociological,

and historical questions, and acts of reception constitute

answers to those questions. Acts of reception, furthermore,

pose, in their turn, new questions. "Reception" includes both

individual concretizations of texts and critical or theoretical

commentaries, and also includes new works of art that

"respond" to earlier works, without "transferring" anything

substantial from the works that they answer.

As a result, all texts-as-answers necessarily alter not only the

field(s) in which the texts exist (cinematic genres, particular

novelistic traditions, contemporary popular culture, cultural

myths) but also the texts-as-questions themselves. Everything,

in fact, is at least potentially changed by every act of

reception.

Following this line of reasoning, one is bound to see a

film based upon a Gothic novel, with its own history of

transformation through reception, as a work that both responds

to the earlier work, casting that work, at least potentially, in a

new light, and yet functions, at the same time, as its own set of

questions posed to a historically distinct audience through the

vehicle of a unique work of art.

NB: a film derived from a literary text is a particular

"reading" of that text that issues from its unique context and

distinct artistic consciousness, emerges within a particular

cultural moment, responds to a text that possesses its own

history, and, crucially, employs radically different artistic

means.

Nevertheless, however sound theoretical declarations of

the incommensurable nature of film and fiction may be, for

many filmgoers the relationship between a literary text and a

motion picture is both important and compelling, and this

includes more than just naive members of the audience

objecting to the omitting, altering, or re-conceiving of trea-

sured characters, incidents, or scenes. Many directors,

including such famous artists as Alfred Hitchcock and Orson

Welles, have made one film after another based on fictional

texts.

Critics, furthermore, remind us that "from its beginnings

the feature film was associated with literary and dramatic

classics," and since motion pictures based on fiction were

often undertaken with a view of securing or holding an

audience, the films were made and presented in such a way as

to encourage potential viewers to search for fidelity to a text.

Such films have done well at the box office by offering the

audience "identifiable and sure attractions.” Thus, the movie

business - at least in America - has never been separable from

the “art” of making moving pictures and has valorized fidelity

to an original text through its use of well-known works of

fiction. Thus while in a theoretical sense we can assert a

radical disjuncture between film and text, in practice we must

acknowledge that when viewing or analyzing a film that refers

to a work of fiction, consideration of questions of how the text

has been rendered on film, what has been retained and what

has been discarded, and the relationship between fictional and

cinematic technique are inevitably raised. The question becomes, then, what kind of criticism treating the

move from novel to film is likely to be illuminating if one embraces

the view that the film has no responsibility to, even though it often has

a compelling relationship with, a text. The idea that film theorists and

critics rid themselves of a concern with fidelity the door opens to

political and cultural criticism is anticipated in Walter Benjamin's

"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Benjamin

argues that "technical reproducibility" undermines the "concept of

authenticity" which is predicated on a sense of the presence and the

uniqueness of "the original"; mechanical reproduction shatters the idea

that a work possesses an "aura," the "unique value of the 'authentic'

work of art" that imparts to that work "a ritual function." As a result,

the very character and function of art change: "instead of being based

on ritual, it begins to be based upon another practice - politics." In

light of Benjamin's argument, it is not surprising that many theorists

and critics have suggested that we abandon the idea that the prior

work of art has a privileged status and character; as a result fidelity

criticism is likely to be replaced by "sociological" or "ideological"

commentary – by Benjamin's "politics.