Movies - Film adaptation

Home > Listing Index > Movies > Film adaptation

	Movies - Film adaptation

Film adaptation is the transfer of a written work to a feature film.

Adaptation introduces complications in audience perception and aesthetics. The most obvious and common form of film adaptation is the use of a novel as the basis of a film, but film adaptation includes the use of non-fiction (including journalism), autobiography, comic book, scripture, plays, and even other films. From the earliest days of cinema, adaptation has been nearly as common as the development of original screenplays.

Novel adaptations

Novels are frequently adapted for films. For the most part, these adaptations attempt either to appeal to an existing commercial audience (the adaptation of best sellers) or to tap into the innovation and novelty of a less well known author. Inevitably, the question of "faithfulness" arises, and the more high profile the source novel, the more insistent are the questions of fidelity.

"Faithful" adaptation

Sergei Eisenstein noted that the novels of Charles Dickens were filmed more often than any material except the Bible, and he explained this by Dickens's style. According to Eisenstein, a good source novel contains a great deal of action and extensive physical description. Novels that feature internal struggles and intellectual debate are difficult to film, but novels that offer descriptions of scenery and which posit their debates in plotting are easy to film. Since Eisenstein's time, film theorists have pointed out that film's tools and fiction's tools are radically different. While film can achieve metaphor, it is difficult and time consuming to do so (with symbolism being more common). Additionally, stream of consciousness and internal monologues can only be filmed by means of intrusive and illusion-breaking techniques (such as voice overs). Therefore, novelists such as Stephen King and Michael Crichton, who concentrate on action and externals, are readier for film than Graham Swift or James Joyce would be. At the same time, film has the ability to employ slow motion, time-lapse, and, most essentially, montage -- techniques that have no fictional equivalent. Finally, theorists have pointed out that cinema is an event rather than a document. Cinema takes place in time, and time is the ultimate syntax of film. Readers can slow down and ponder, can flip back and forth, and always have the speeches and adjectives to build up the novels they read, while film must roll forward at a particular rate. (Indeed, as abstract expressionism distinguished painting from photography, the pressures of films may have aided in the rise of novels of interiority and time shifting in contemporary artistic fiction or limited the use of such devices in commercial fiction.)

Elision and interpolation

Erich von Stroheim attempted a literal adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague in 1924 with his film, Greed. The resulting film was over sixteen hours long. A cut of the film only eight hours long, then one running to four hours, appeared. Finally, the studio itself cut the film to around two hours, resulting in a finished product that was entirely incoherent. Since that time, few directors have been foolish enough to attempt to put everything in a novel into a film. Therefore, elision is nearly mandatory.

In some cases, however, film adaptations will also interpolate scenes or invent characters. This is especially true when a novel is part of a literary saga. Incidents or quotes from later or earlier novels will be inserted into a single film. Additionally, and far more controversially, film makers will invent new characters or create stories that were not present in the source material at all. Given the anticipated audience for a film, the screenwriter, director, or movie studio may wish to increase character time or invent new characters. For example, William Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Ironweed
, had a very small section with a prostitute named Helen. Because the movie studio anticipated a female audience for the film and had Meryl Streep for the role, Helen became a significant part of the film. However, characters are also sometimes invented to provide the narrative voice. When source novels have exposition or digressions from the author's own voice, a film adaptation may create a commenting, chorus-like character to provide what could not be filmed otherwise. (In the adaptation of John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, the director created a contemporary Englishman in a romance with a woman to offer up the ironic and scholarly voice that Fowles provided in the novel.)

There have been several nominees for non plus ultra of inventive adaptation, including the Roland Jaffe adaptation of The Scarlet Letter with explicit sex between Hester Prynn and the minister and Native American attacks on Salem (changes introduced, according to Jaffe, to increase the market and to make an entirely new morality tale out of the novel). At nearly the same time, Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders
was creatively adapted to make it a romance. A television mini-series of Gulliver's Travels
changed the sexes of characters, made some vanish, and changed the character of Master Bates from a single 3 sentence obscene pun into a villain. The Charlie Kaufman and "Donald Kaufman" penned Adaptation was an intentional satire and commentary on the process of film adaptation itself.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Film adaptation ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Film adaptation; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay