Adaptation is a profound process: Some Recent Films and the Novels they Adapt

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Adaptation is a profound process Some Recent
Films and the Novels they Adapt
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Film v. literature
Film has nothing to do with literature the
character and substance of the two art forms are
usually in conflict - Ingmar Bergman, 1960
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The cinema of attractions

• Term coined by Tom Gunning to describe films
  made during cinemas earliest period - 1895-1905
  that made no attempt to develop narratives, but
  were concerned instead with providing vivid
  spectacle and visceral thrill

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Surrealist cinema
Along with other avant-garde filmmakers, Luis
Buñuel and Salvador Dalí sought to break with
narrative left Un chien andalou (1928) right
Lage dor (1930)
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Early adaptations (1)
Left two images from the 1911 Italian film,
LInferno, inspired not only by Dantes poem but
by the illustrations of Gustave Doré (above)
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Early adaptations (2)
Pioneering French filmmaker Georges Méliès
playing Hamlet in his 1907 adaptation of
Shakespeares play
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Early adaptations (3)
Left scene from Edwin S. Porters film of Uncle
Toms Cabin (1903) right John Barrymore and
Joan Bennett in the first talkie version of
Moby-Dick (1930)
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Non-literary adaptation
comic strip
newspaper cartoon
opera
TV show
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Virginia Woolf at the movies
Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in 1953
adaptation of James Joness novel, From Here to
Eternity (1951)
A kiss is love. A smashed chair is jealousy
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Critique of literary originality
Images from Trigger Happy, a 1998 Space Invaders-
style game/artwork by Jon Thomson and Alison
Craighead, based around sentences from Foucaults
What is an Author?
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The multiplexity of the cinematic narrator
photographic image
music
dialogue
words or other graphics on screen
sound effects
Films five signifying tracks, or matters of
expression, as outlined by Christian
Metz
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Where fidelity criticism is needed
We may want to preserve a moralistic vocabulary
for judging adaptations such as The Scarlet
Letter (1995), based on Nathaniel Hawthornes
1851 novel about Puritan New England
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Case study 1
film (2007)
novel (2005)
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Interior monologue and voiceover
The film adaptation gives Sheriff Ed Tom Bell
only one voiceover compared with his 13 interior
monologues in McCarthys novel
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Actualization and performance
Right Javier Bardems haircut
Right the crackling wrapper in the coin toss
scene
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No Countrys other intertexts
Juxtapose the film with, for example, another
Coens adaptation (left) and another film about
the New American West (above)
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Case study 2
novel (1927)
film (2007)
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Upton Sinclair and the American Left
Left Upton Sinclair Right early 20th-century
poster for the Industrial Workers of the World,
or IWW (the Wobblies)
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The politics of oil
Plainview in There Will Be Blood
Artwork by Parataxic on US dependence on oil
Environmental devastation in Iraq
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The monstrous individual
Does There Will Be Blood direct any critique of
capitalism against the individual, pathologised
exploiter rather than the system or structure?
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Attacking evangelicalism
Left Eli (Paul Dano) in There Will Be Blood
right American televangelist Pat Robertson
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Other intertexts of There Will Be Blood
Citizen Kane (1941)
Giant (1956)
early photographs
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Case study 3
novel (1983)
film (2007)