Starting/Discussion questions

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Starting/Discussion questions

• What does adaptation mean for you? How is it
  related to translation?
• What approach does McFarlane take in analyzing
  filmic adaptation?

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Outline

• Novel and Film
• Three Different Approaches to Filmic Adaptations
  
• (Structuralist) Critical Approaches

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Novel and Film
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Novel Film (1) major differences

• 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

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Novel Film (2) Continuity

• 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)

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Novel Film (3) Analogy difference

• 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.

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Novel Film (4) influence difference

• 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

B
A
A
B
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Story told vs. Story Presented

• two language systems codes and their processes
  of encoding and decoding
• Different functions of the codes (one
  symbolically, and the other through interaction)
• tense films cannot present actions in the past
  the way novels do.
• films spatiality gives it a physical presence
  denied to novels (29)

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Three Different approaches

• To Filmic Adaptation

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Adaptation The Phenomenon

• different considerations and approaches
• commercialism, respect for lit. work
• 3 approaches visual transliteration, selective
  interpretation, re-creating an established mood.
  
• a readers 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 Oscars best pictures were
  adaptations (Morris Beja qtd in McFarlane 8)

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Three major approaches to Adaptation
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)
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Three major approaches to Adaptation
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")
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(1) Fidelity

• To its (Romantic) spirit

• To its physical details

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(2) Revision Mary Shelleys Frankenstein (1994)

• To complicate the issue of creation

• Adding a Feminist Role

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(3) Creative adaptation

• Issues
• Respectful adaptation or a pastiche?
• Conditions of production (p. 10)
• Supporting which ideologies?

Chimes at Midnight Shakespeares Lover etc.
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Critical Approaches

• 1) The Centrality of Narrative (the chief
  transferrable element)
• e.g. the plot of embourgeoisement (p. 12)
• Roland Barthes distributional and integrational
  functions

Transferrable Distributional --doing Function proper -- cardinal (turning points) and catylyzer
Adapting Integrational --being Indices proper (characters and atmosphere) -- adaptable informants (concrete data -- transferreable
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First-Person narration

• (a) subjective cinema
• a consistently subjective perspective is less
  likely while 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
• Ones sense of the characters still come more
  from his/her action than from his/her comments.
  different from the first-person narrative
  fiction

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Restricted Consciousness

• 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).

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Omniscient novel? film

• Attributed to various characters in direct speech
  
• the narrative, or the apparently authoritative
  metalanguage, that surrounds the characters
• -- an issue the cameras 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)

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Terms of Structuralist narratology a review

• 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

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References

• 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 B1uestones Novels into Film
• Alan Spiegel' s Fiction and the Camera Eye
• Keith Cohen' s Film and Fiction.
• Eisensteins 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.