Adaptation: from Novel to Film

FILM IN THE CLASSROOM ADAPTATION: FROM NOVEL TO FILM I used to teach Jane Austen, and in a way doing what I In novels, we often come to know characters best do now is a bit like doing those lectures in which I say not through what they say, but through what they are “This is the way I see it. Don’t you see it like this?” [Now, thinking or what is said about them in the narration. as a filmmaker] I have got millions of dollars worth of A narrator mediates the meaning of what we read visual aids and actors to prove my point. through his or her point of view: a coming-of-age story reads much differently if we hear about what happens — ANDREW DAVIES, SCREENWRITER FOR FOUR MASTERPIECE JANE AUSTEN FILMS* from the point of view of the person growing up than if we learn about it from that person’s mother, sister, or ohn Harrington, in his book Film And/Is Art, teacher. But in film, the narrator largely disappears. Jestimated that a third of all films ever made have Sometimes a narrator’s perspective is kept through the been adapted from novels, and, if you included other use of a voice-over, but generally the director, cast, and literary forms, such as drama or short stories, that crew must rely on the other tools of film to reproduce estimate might well be 65 percent or more. Nearly all what was felt, thought, and described on the page. of the works of classic literature students study in high For example, consider the famous scene from the school have been adapted for film—some many times 1998 film adaptation of Rebecca, where the narrator, a and in multiple young, naïve girl who has just become the second wife languages, settings, of the wealthy Maxim de Winter, first meets Mrs. or formats. For Danvers, the forbidding housekeeper of his estate, example, there are Manderley. Rebecca’s terror and awkwardness, over 200 film revealed in two pages of first-person narration in the versions of Sherlock book, are made clear to the viewer in the film simply Holmes, from a by the way Mrs. Danvers first emerges from the silent film made in shadows with just her severe face lit and the way 1916 by William the camera lingers there uncomfortably, making the 2010. Gillette to the LTD viewer cringe with the same fear that the new reimagined 2010 Films Mrs. de Winter feels. Masterpiece version The major difference between film and books is Hartswood starring Benedict © that visual images stimulate our perceptions directly, SHERLOCK (BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH) Cumberbatch. There while written words can do this indirectly. Reading the are nearly 50 film versions of Romeo and Juliet, from word chair requires a kind of mental “translation” that a 1900 French version called Roméo et Juliette to the viewing a picture of a chair does not. Film is a more 2011 animated American film Gnomeo and Juliet. But direct sensory experience than reading—besides verbal turning a novel into a screenplay is not just a matter language, there is also color, movement, and sound. of pulling dialogue from the pages of a book. * See the full interview with Andrew Davies at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/austen/davies.html. © 2011 WGBH EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION 15 ADAPTATION: FROM NOVEL TO FILM Yet film is also limited: for one thing, there are no time foolish—even, some have said, a “betrayal” of the constraints on a novel, while a film usually must original work. Instead, the filmmaker has to refashion compress events into two hours the spirit of the story with his or her own vision or so. (The 2002 adaptation of and tools. David Copperfield, for example, here are three main reasons a filmmaker or compresses a novel that runs to screenwriter might make major changes in 800 pages into just 180 T adapting a literary work to film. One is simply the minutes.) For another, the changes demanded by a new medium. Film and meaning of a novel is controlled literature each have their own tools for manipulating by only one person, the author, wikipedia.com. narrative structure. In a novel, a new chapter might while the meaning we get from Source: take us back to a different time and place in the COVER, FIRST SERIAL a film is the result of a narrative; in a film, we might go back to that same EDITION OF DAVID collaborative effort by many COPPERFIELD, 1849, time and place through the use of a flashback, a BY PHIZ people. Film also does not allow crosscut, or a dissolve, such as the various techniques us the same freedom a novel does—to interact with the the filmmakers in Wuthering Heights employ to keep plot or characters by imagining them in our minds. the complex narrative coherent. Or consider the For some viewers, this is often the most frustrating flashback that begins the 2009 film adaptation of Little aspect of turning a novel into a film. Dorrit, with the violent birth of Amy Dorrit in the How faithful to the original written work should a Marshalsea debtors’ prison. In the novel, “little Dorrit” film version strive to be? In Reading the Movies, herself isn’t even introduced until some 70 pages in, William Costanzo quotes George Bluestone, one of the but in the film version she is clearly the center of the first critics to study film adaptations of literature. story: the first sound we hear in the film is the sound Bluestone believes the filmmaker is an independent of her cry as she is born, and in the next several scenes artist, “not a translator for an established author, but a (in which she is a young girl) she is costumed in a new author in his own right.” Some agree with robin’s-egg-blue cape, the only bright spot of color in Bluestone that a literal translation of a book is often an otherwise gray world. BBC. ©2008 LITTLE DORRIT (CLAIRE FOY) © 2011 WGBH EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION 16 ADAPTATION: FROM NOVEL TO FILM For other works, the problems of adaptation might Andrew Davies understands all too well the third main be even more difficult. Filmmakers working with The reason for a filmmaker to make dramatic changes to Diary of Anne Frank, a contemporary classic that is, an adaptation, and it is one that anyone who works on after the Bible, one of the most read books in the a Masterpiece classic is motivated by: how to make a world, realized they needed to tread lightly if they were classic story “new” for a contemporary audience. to “update” a figure as beloved as Anne. Here is what screenwriter Deborah Moggach says about her decision to make Anne less “sanctified” in the For more about screenwriter Andrew Davies’s views Masterpiece film version: on adapting four Jane Austen novels, see “Longing, Betrayal, and Redemption: An Interview with Like many people, I read the diary when I was young. Andrew Davies.” For more about using Jane Austen Now, on rereading it, I’m struck by how contemporary in the classroom, check out The Complete Guide to Anne is…obsessed with boys, with her looks…rebellious, Teaching Jane Austen and the Jane Austen Book & highly critical of her mother. In other words, a thoroughly Film Club. modern teenager. In past adaptations, she has been somewhat sanctified—a bit cheeky and talkative maybe, but also over-sweet. I want to be true to the real girl. Sure, she got on people’s nerves; but she was also full of life, her own sternest critic and, above all, she made people laugh.* ometimes filmmakers make changes to highlight Snew themes, emphasize different traits in a character, or even try to solve problems they perceive in the original work. Allan Cubitt, who wrote the screenplay for the 2001 film Anna Karenina, says in an interview on the Masterpiece website that he always felt Vronsky’s suicide attempt was “undermotivated,” and therefore he tried to strengthen the character’s sense of rejection and humiliation in the film version. Sometimes this means subtle substitutions or Similarly, Andrew Davies wanted to add a male additions of language or props that are more perspective to Jane Austen, so he wrote in scenes “that recognizable to a modern audience; at other times it Jane Austen somehow forgot to write.” He explains: means depicting events or characters in the novel in a Actually [Austen] didn’t forget to write them, but she made way that better fits a modern sensibility. a rule for herself that she wouldn’t follow the men when the One of the most striking examples of adaptation, women weren’t there.... [as if ] she said, “I’ve never been in is Steven Moffat’s and Mark Gatiss’s startling 2010 a scene where two men had a conversation together without reinvention of Sherlock Holmes. In their series, a woman present. I have no idea how they’d be. I’d never Sherlock, Mr. Holmes is a private detective in today’s write a scene for one man on his own.” But I think that London. He has a smart phone and a website, and he robs us of seeing the male characters as a whole so the enjoys baiting the police via text messages when they scenes that I add are generally scenes for the men doing aren’t solving a case adroitly enough for his liking. manly things—going hunting, going shooting, going As Mr. Moffat says, Conan Doyle’s stories “lend swimming, riding their horses—so you get a sense that they themselves incredibly well to a modern setting...[they] have a life apart from when they are being polite to the were never about frock coats and gas light; they’re women in the drawing rooms.

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