Starting/Discussion questions

What does adaptation mean for you? How is it related to translation?

What approach does McFarlane take in analyzing filmic adaptation?

Novel and Film Three Different Approaches to Filmic Adaptations

(Structuralist) Critical Approaches

Conrad: “My task which 1 am trying to achieve is, by the powers of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make to see.” (qtd in McFarlane 3)

// D. W. Griffith Novel – mental image physical details

Film – visual image (George Bluestone)

stories

Late 19th century fiction: its “ostensibly unmediated visual language” (5)

Conrad and James -- anticipate the cinema in their capacity

for “decomposing” a scene, for altering point of view so as to focus more

sharp1y on various aspects of an object for exploring a visual field by fragmenting it

rather than by presenting it scenographically…

modern novels (such as those of Proust and Woolf) – influenced by cinema montage (ref. Cohen)

Dickens-Griffith connection Eisenstein – discusses narrative techniques analogous to frame composition and close-up

[McFarlane] critics tend to focus too much on their similarities in themes or narrative patterns,

But not analyzing in details Possible parallels and disparities between the two

different signifying systems, …the range of “functional equivalents” available to

each within the parameters of the classical style as evinced in each medium.

Modern novels (as well as Death of a Salesman, Equus, or M. Butterfly) and films Influences from film: montage, split screen, flashbacks

less easily adaptable to films –Do you agree?

“[they] have lost a good deal of their fluid representations of time and space when transferred to the screen.”

the suture device of the classic narrative film: shot/reverse shot (image source)

The spectator becomes aware of the off-screen space [of frame and absent space] of A and stitched into the film

A

A

B

B

two language systems: codes and their processes of encoding and decoding

(1) Different functions of the codes (one symbolically, and the other through interaction)

(2) tense: films cannot present actions in the past the way novels do.

(3) film’s spatiality gives it a physical presence denied to novels (29)

To Filmic Adaptation

different considerations and approaches:

commercialism, respect for lit. work 3 approaches: visual transliteration, selective interpretation, re-creating an established mood.

a reader’s phantasy of what the novel looks like. common response: violation of the original;

still there is an urge to embody verbal concepts more than 3/4 of Oscar’s “best pictures” were adaptations (Morris Beja qtd in McFarlane 8)

fidelity Partial revision

Creative

(1) Transposition commentary

analogy

(2) Fidelity of transformation

intersection Borrowing

(3) Fidelity to the main thrust

Significantly reinterpreting

Source as raw materials only

Sources (1) (2) (3)

fidelity Partial revision

Creative

BBC Shakespeare or Jane Austen

--Mansfield Park by Patricia Rozema --Mulan (Disney)

The Hours(Mrs. Dalloway)

Conditions of production

ideologies Appropriation for the present?

Your examples?

-- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008; F. Scott Fitzgerald)-- Girls, Interrupted ( Susanna Kaysen's memoir)-- Blade Runner (Philip K. Dick ... (novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?")-- The Shawshank Redemption (1994; Stephen King (short story "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption")

To its physical details

To its (“Romantic”) spirit

To complicate the issue of creation

Adding a Feminist Role

Issues: 1)Respectful adaptation or a pastiche? 2)Conditions of production (p. 10) 3)Supporting which ideologies?

* Chimes at Midnight; Shakespeare’s Lover; etc.

1) The Centrality of Narrative (the chief transferrable element)

e.g. the plot of embourgeoisement (p. 12)

Roland Barthes: distributional and integrational functions Transferrabl

e Distributional--doing

Function proper -- cardinal (turning points)and catylyzer

Adapting Integrational--being

Indices proper (characters and atmosphere) -- adaptableinformants (concrete data-- transferreable

(a) subjective cinema a consistently subjective perspective is less likely: “[w]hile cinema may be more agile and flexible in changing the physical point of view from which an event or object is seen, it is much less amenable to the presentation of a consistent psychological viewpoint derived from one character” (16).

(b) oral narration and voice-over One’s sense of the characters still come more from his/her action than from his/her comments. [different from the first-person narrative fiction]

Or center of consciousness: “there is always a narrator looking

over their shoulder, in the way that the camera may view action over the shou1der of a character in the foreground of a shot, giving the viewer both the character' s point of view and a slightly wider point of view which includes the character” (19).

1) Attributed to various characters in direct speech

2) the narrative, or the apparently authoritative ‘metalanguage,‘ that surrounds the characters -- an issue: the camera’s mise-en-scene serving narrational function? --Yes and no. The camera is not part of the film as an omniscient narrator is of a novel. (pp. 17-18)

Story and discourse enunciation and enunciated character function and fields of action

Mythic and psychological pattern Linearity and spatiality

frame and its spatial impact (richer than a word)

the frame is not a discrete entity as a word is

Codes

McFarlane, Brian. “Part I Backgrounds, Issues, and a New Agenda.” Novel Into Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford UP, 1996.

“Suture.” Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts.

Works mentioned by McFarlane –George B1uestone’s Novels into FilmAlan Spiegel' s Fiction and the Camera EyeKeith Cohen' s Film and Fiction.Eisenstein’s discussion of Dickens’ cinematic technique(1) Geoffrey Wagner, The Novel and the Cinema (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press: Rutherford, NJ, 1975), 222.(2) Dudley Andrew, 'The Well-Worn Muse: Adaptation in Film History and Theory' , in Syndy Conger and Janice R. Welsch (eds.), Narrative Strategies ( West Illinois University Press: Macomb, Ill., 1980), 10.(3) Michael Klein and Gillian Parker (eds.), The English Novel and the Movies ( Frederick Ungar Publishing: New York, 1981), 9-10.