Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ
Thomas Leitch
Language: English
Pages: 372
ISBN: 0801892716
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Most books on film adaptation―the relation between films and their literary sources―focus on a series of close one-to-one comparisons between specific films and canonical novels. This volume identifies and investigates a far wider array of problems posed by the process of adaptation.
Beginning with an examination of why adaptation study has so often supported the institution of literature rather than fostering the practice of literacy, Thomas Leitch considers how the creators of short silent films attempted to give them the weight of literature, what sorts of fidelity are possible in an adaptation of sacred scripture, what it means for an adaptation to pose as an introduction to, rather than a transcription of, a literary classic, and why and how some films have sought impossibly close fidelity to their sources.
After examining the surprisingly divergent fidelity claims made by three different kinds of canonical adaptations, Leitch's analysis moves beyond literary sources to consider why a small number of adapters have risen to the status of auteurs and how illustrated books, comic strips, video games, and true stories have been adapted to the screen. The range of films studied, from silent Shakespeare to Sherlock Holmes to The Lord of the Rings, is as broad as the problems that come under review.
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as literature over their capacity to engage and extend our literacy. It is ironic that literature and literacy, intimately related notions stemming from the Latin littera (letter), should have become so blankly opposed as centers for contemporary English studies. Elbow has noted that “the word literacy really means power over letters, i.e., reading and writing. But as literacy is used casually and even in government policy and legislation, it tends to mean reading, not writing.”33 As commentators
itself is constructed as a series of discontinuous theatrical spectacles readily subject to abridgment, expansion, or elaboration.11 The Edison film breaks the story into a series of fifteen vignettes, most of them unfolding in single camera shots introduced by the following title cards: [1] The day before Christmas. Scrooge, a hard-fisted miser, receives an appeal from the Charity Relief Committee. [2] His nephew calls to wish him a Merry Christmas. [3] The ghostly face of his former partner,
lovers time for one last living embrace. The generally breakneck pace and MTV editing are only the most obvious tokens of Luhrmann’s updates and superimpositions of his house style. 3. Luhrmann’s motivic creation of a visual track and a sound track pointedly at odds with Shakespeare’s poetry (as when the Montagues and Capulets fight at the service station where they are gassing up 124 Film Adaptation and Its Discontents 4. 5. 6. 7. their pimpmobiles or on the beach where the Montagues are
often interactive, publicity features that took potential viewers inside the making of the films assumed that the target audience would approach the film not in a credulous spirit (“so that’s what it looked like”) but in a spirit of disavowal (“so that’s how they ended up doing it”) far deeper and more technically informed than the audience who delighted in recognizing Clark Gable in every one of Rhett Butler’s scenes. At the same time, the making-of slant of New Line’s publicity empowered viewers
Jr. of Cornell University.” The credits for the 1935 A Tale of Two Cities, which include a bibliography of historical works on the French Revolution, must mark the only time in Hollywood history that either Thomas Carlyle or the word bibliography has appeared in a film’s credits. The credit sequence of Scrooge (1951) focuses not only on its source text but on Dickens’s career by opening with a shot of a hand taking down a fat volume marked A Christmas Carol from a shelf of identically bound books,
