Adaptation Theory and Cinema

Adaptation

Despite common belief there is no coherent, clearly established adaptation theory. In fact according to Leitch there are rather what one could call “adaptations” than “adaptation”. Lacking ‘‘a presiding poetics’’ (Robert B. Ray qtd. in Leitch 149), the field is largely dominated by works on how a particular novel or piece of literature is adapted in film. Studies on how particular literary texts were adapted for cinematic purposes greatly outnumber any general considerations on what entails adapting a text from one medium to another.

Corinne Lhermitte, in her article “A Jakobsonian Approach to Film Adaptations of Hugo’s Les Misérables”, argues that adaptation is a rewriting, a retelling of a story, yet not a mere copy, but a story in itself. There is a fine line separating literary adaptation from plagiarism, even when the screenplay barely resembles the initial plot. Nevertheless, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco and Jacques Derrida claim that is very hard to define the notion of originality. Not to mention the fact that Shakespeare has been adapting all the time, he has no single original plot.

James M. Welsh, in Introduction: Issues of Screen Adaptation: What Is Truth, admits that adaptation has always been central to the process of filmmaking, but underlines that film adaptations continue to be evaluated in terms of fidelity to the original source, usually leading to the notion that “the book was better.” Adaptations are regarded as the unfaithful translations mostly because of the impoverishment of the book’s content due to necessary omissions in the plot and the inability of the filmmakers to read out and represent the deeper meanings of the text (Marciniak 59). However, there is consensus in the present among the critics that film has a separate identity and separate aesthetic principles. According to Bluestone and by Siegfried Kracauer’s roughly contemporaneous Theory of Film, “differences between literary and cinematic texts are rooted in essential properties of their respective media” (qtd. in Leitch 150). Kracauer argues in his study that each medium has a specific nature which invites certain kinds of communications while obstructing others.’

In 1992, in an article titled “Film (Adaptation) as Translation: Some Methodological Proposals”, Patrick Cattrysse claims that cinematic adaptation is similar to the process of translation, especially the intersemiotic one. The words are reconfigured into sound, music and image. However, in the hierarchy of signs, the written word still holds the authority, thus the movie becomes derivative, a simulacrum.

Linda Hutcheon defines adaptation as a repetition with a difference, insisting on its intertextuality feature, on the dialogue between the original and its adaptations. Adaptation can be connected to the post-modern culture of recycling but also with the post-Romantic myth of the creator. According to the same author adaptation is at the same time imitation and emulation because it pays tribute to the original and it is even a way of learning, and what better way of learning than imitating the great authorities. In fact some theorists such as Günter Kress have gone as afar as stating that adaptation is the best way of learning because it comes with something creative. Thus, by adapting the learner becomes a maker of signs, not only a reader.

There is however a distinction between slave imitation and creative imitation and that distinction can be expressed in terms of aura. As long as an adaptation is creative, it may have an aura; mere copies do not have the original’s aura.

We are still under the rule of the written word. Literature is perceived as higher culture while film adaptations for example not only that are seen as copies but they are also regarded as low, popular culture. As Leitch states it ‘‘literature’’ carries an honorific charge ‘‘cinema’’ does not. Since even the term ‘‘classic cinema’’ is a long way from having the same implication as ‘‘literary classic,’’ written texts themselves, unlike films, would seem to fall into two distinct orders, and any film that sought to adapt a work of literature could only hope to fall into a category of films that does not yet have a name (154-155).

Nowadays, however, when young people tend to read less classic literature, film adaptations, through their appeal to a larger audience, may be the afterlife of golden writings, saving the original from oblivion. Globalization has made possible the making of a Chinese Hamlet Feng Xiaogang’s 2006 The Banquet(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgoQ6PDxihY), in which actors’ performance and dance translate the characters’ emotions -, a comic Hamlet in Branagh’s A Midwinter’s Tale (UK, 1996 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBS92ui_h74) or even an animated Hamlet in Disney’s production The Lion King (1996 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sj1MT05lAA).

This can be referred to as “the snowball effect”, as Mary L. Ryan calls it: “a certain story enjoys so much popularity, or becomes culturally prominent, that it spontaneously generates a variety of prequels, sequels, fanfiction or transmedial adaptations.” As Kidnie Jane suggests, these adaptations should be appreciated on their own because they show that any work is a work in progress, still being constructed in several places and in time. Movie adaptations are acquiring more and more autonomy from the text nowadays. As the story is remediated, it tends to come closer to the reader if time and space are taken as reference points, but it is also aspatial and atemporal as transposition takes place with every remediation. We can no longer talk about an author within certain geographical and historical limits. This is how one single world generates many texts such as adaptations or multiple performances. As Mary L. Ryan notices, the story world is no longer linked to the storyteller or to the audience, but also to the contextual relationships while the text is the outcome of these connections.

Lubomir Dolezel, one of the founders of the fictional world theory, identified three ways how one fictional world can be linked to another one: expansion (expanding the original plot), modification (constructing different versions of the protoworld) and transposition (moving the story in a different setting). For these changes to take place there is the need for a fixed and stable centre on which to reconstruct. In the case of adaptations after Shakespeare, what is usually kept is the plot and the relationships between the characters. It is not necessarily that language the one that gets translated, but often the images are the ones that get remediated to such extent that some of the movies do not even state that they are based on Shakespeare. This can be seen as a claim for legitimacy on behalf of the adaptation which involves: attention to context, deployment of history, gendered critique and a distinction between the various cultural perspectives, as Burnett suggests when discussing particularly Shakespeare and the world cinema. Using these techniques, the adaptation is supposed to make the reader relate even more to the story world than the adapted text did.

If Hamlet or any other of Shakespeare’s plays is taken as a reference point, it is clear how cinema adaptations were empowered into offering a reinterpretation of the original text. For example, Zefirelli’s version of Hamlet focuses not so much on the tragedy, but on the mechanisms that generate it.  On the other hand, Omkara focuses on the political rivalries in India, while Michael Almereyda's 2000 modernisation, is interested in typical American racial relationships, is translated into a modern language and is also notable for including elements of modern technology like the murdered king’s ghost first appearing on a closed-circuit TV.

Works Cited:

Burnett, Mark. Shakespeare and World Cinema. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012;

Cattrysse, Patrick. “Film (Adaptation) as Translation: Some Methodological Proposals.” Target 4: 1. (1992): 53-70.;

 Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Incorporated, 2006 Chap. 1;

Kidnie, Jane M. Shakespeare and the Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routedge, 2009. Print;

Kress, Gunther R. Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge, 2003. Print;

Leitch, Thomas M. "Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory." Criticism. Number 2. Vol. 45. Detroit: Published by Wayne State UP, 2003. 149-71. Print;

Lhermitte, Corinne. “A Jakobsonian Approach to Film Adaptations of Hugo’s Les Misérables”, in Nebula, 2.1, March 2005;

Ryan, Mary L. Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality in International Journal of Communication No. 3, 2009. 586-606. Print. 

Welsh, James M. Introduction: Issues of Screen Adaptation: What Is Truth in The Literature/Film Reader Issues of Adaptation. The Scarecrow Press. Lanham, Maryland • Toronto • Plymouth, UK 2007

 CONTRIBUTORS:

Croitoru Corina-Adriana, American Studies MA, 2nd year

Monica Andreea Georgescu, American Studies MA, 2nd year

Alexandra Maria Ciobotaru, American Studies MA, 2nd year