O. Selznick’s 1935 adaptation of David Copperfield was marketed to high school English teachers by means of a free illustrated monograph on the art of cinematic adaptation, complete with study questions for students.) Still another function of adaptation, Bazin suggests, is in the creation of national imaginaries. How many of us have actually read Moby Dick, and how many of us have seen one of the comic-book, theatrical, TV, or film adaptations that give it a kind of mythic or folkloric significance for U.S. culture? Some of the most highly adaptable authors—Twain and Shakespeare are preeminent examples in the Anglo-American world—have been especially important to the formation of national identity, and for this reason it would be interesting to have more analysis of the ways books, plays, movies, and TV shows have been subject not only to remediation and remaking but also to cross-cultural or cross-national adaptation. Such uses are sometimes overlooked because of what Bazin refers to as “a rather modern notion for which the critics are in large part responsible: that of the untouchability of the work of art.” The nineteenth century, he says, “firmly established an idolatry of form, mainly literary, that is still with us” (45). And the idolatry of form blinds us to the fact that all great novels—even the ones by Flaubert or Joyce—create characters that can be appropriated for many uses.
At this juncture and many others in his essay, Bazin sounds like a populist and a postmodernist. “The ferocious defense of literary works,” he says, “is to a certain extent aesthetically justified; but we must also be aware that it rests on a rather recent, individualistic conception of the ‘author’ and the ‘work,’ a conception that was far from being ethically rigorous in the seventeenth century and that started to become legally defined only at the end of the eighteenth. . . . All things considered, it is possible to imagine that we are moving toward a reign of adaptation in which the notion of the unity of the work of art, if not the very notion of the author himself, will be destroyed” (49). Some people today believe we have already arrived at that point. I hope not, but it’s time that writers on adaptation recognize what Bazin saw in 1948. The study of adaptation needs to be joined with the study of recycling, remaking, and every other form of retelling in the age of mechanical reproduction and electronic communication. By this means, adaptation will become part of a general theory of repetition and will move from the margins to the center of media studies.
POSTSCRIPT
The argument above is a revised version of an introduction I wrote for Film Adaptation, published in 2000. Several books on adaptation were published in the wake of that volume, and I should mention a few particularly good ones here.
Robert Stam’s Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (2005) elaborates further on the theme of dialogism and intertextuality, in the process making significant contributions to the poetics of cinema and prose fiction. With Alessandra Raengo, Stam has also edited two large anthologies, Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation (2005) and A Companion to Literature and Film (2005), both of which treat adaptation as what one of the writers, Dudley Andrew, calls “the life principle” of cultural production. Guerric DeBona’s Film Adaptation in the Hollywood Studio Era (2010) is an incisive, well-researched account of “prestige” adaptations in classic Hollywood and is especially good at showing how the films in question were shaped not simply by their sources but by industrial and sociopolitical factors. Colin McCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner are the editors of True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (2011), which ends with an afterword by Fredric Jameson. In modernist fashion, and in contrast with most contemporary writers, Jameson argues that at some level all the individual media and their artists “seek each other’s death, in the sense in which they brook no other gods besides themselves.” The most productive course to follow in thinking about adaptation, he concludes, is to emphasize the “antagonism and incompatibility” between the media, at the same time insisting on the formal pleasures, ideological differences, and “psychoanalytic analysis or class receptivity” that become “most visible in the process of comparison” (231).
David Boyd and R. Barton Palmer have edited an intriguing anthology of essays on Hitchcock’s adaptations, Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adapter (2011). A refreshingly wide-ranging discussion of literary and other kinds of cinematic adaptation is Thomas Leitch’s Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (2007), which also offers a convincing argument about how the study of adaptation can help students write and think clearly. In addition to Literature/Film Quarterly, which has published scholarly articles on the subject since 1973, we now have Adaptation, which since 2008 has published articles on a variety of topics involving film and TV. But the recent theorist who most emphasizes the ubiquity of adaptation, covering everything from literature to Barbie dolls, is Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation (2006). Hutcheon’s concluding chapter poses the question “What is not an adaptation?” She defines the key term as “an extended, deliberate, announced revisitation of a particular work of art” (170); hence, for her, not all adaptations involve remediation (as examples, she cites J. M. Coetzee’s Foe [1986], which revisits Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe [1719], and Vincente Minnelli’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse [1962], which remakes Rex Ingram’s 1921 film of the same name). On the production side of adaptation, she points out, texts or works of art can be adjusted or altered by revision, editing, publication, display, and performance; on the reception side, they can be destabilized by translation, bowdlerization, censorship, and “cultural revision,” in which receivers begin to refashion the initial works by remaking or remediating them. This “continuum model” offers several ways of thinking about adaptation—as retelling, rewriting, remediation, reinterpretation, and re-creation (172). Hutcheon also poses the question “What is the appeal of adaptations?” One of her answers, which requires that audiences know the source (often they do not), is that successful adaptations involve pleasures similar to theme and variation in music: “We find a story we like and then do variations on it. . . . It is not a copy in any mode of reproduction, mechanical or otherwise. It is repetition but without replication, bringing together the comfort of ritual and recognition with the delight of surprise and novelty” (173).
Finally, I should call attention to another of André Bazin’s essays, “For an Impure Cinema: In Defense of Adaptation,” which has been given a new translation by Timothy Barnard for What Is Cinema (2009), his English-language edition of Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Although this essay is already well known, it deserves rereading, especially with Barnard’s helpful editorial notes. Bazin gives us a salutary reminder that adaptation has a very old cultural history: like André Malraux, he describes Renaissance painting in its initial phase as an adaptation of Gothic sculpture, and he points out that Byzantine miniatures were enlarged in stone to the size of cathedral tympana. (He doesn’t mention an equally early and perhaps even more striking example: Le jeu d’Adam, one of the oldest medieval mystery plays of the twelfth century, which dramatizes the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve.) His essay is filled with fine critical discrimination of individual film adaptations and also has interesting things to say about the relation between modernist literature and film. Unlike Claude-Edmonde Magny and most other critics, Bazin argues that cinema learned more from modern literature than modern literature learned from cinema: “It is impossible to tell whether Manhattan Transfer and La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate) would be very different without film, but I am certain that The Power and the Glory and Citizen Kane would never have been conceived without James Joyce and John Dos Passos” (120).
Notes on Acting in Cinema
Even a moment’s observation should make it obvious that the art of acting is extremely important to most films, and yet critical literature on the subject is relatively sparse. There are excellent sociological studies of the star system and of individual stars, but not much close analysis of what actors do in specific films. In one sense, of course, movie actors are merely agents of narrative who are assisted by machinery; Lev Kuleshov famously attempted to prove that their performances can be constructed in the editing room, and Alfred Hitchcock once described them as experts in the art of “doing nothing extremely well.” Nevertheless, the vast majority of films depend on a form of communication whereby meanings are acted out. The experience of
