1 the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation

1 The Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation Before analyzing the reasons for Madame Bovary’s popularity with film directors and dealing with the practice of adaptation as it applies to this novel, I would like to make some general comments about film adaptation and the theory driving the field that has come to be known as “adaptation studies.” No hard and fast rules govern the way in which novels are made into films, and this is perhaps as it should be. As Delphine Jayot has noted, novels escape their authors’ control as soon as they are published and read, and indeed, their very survival depends upon their being read and reread, interpreted and re-interpreted (Jayot, 3). Film adaptations are part of this process. Short of the need to require rights to adapt a work that is still under copyright (which is not the case with Madame Bovary), there are no legalities at all involved in the process of screening novels (Brady 4). It follows that there are many different modes of adaptation, and the relationship between literary text and film is anything but stable. The film credits often offer a clue as to this relationship. Films that are merely “inspired by” or “suggested by” novels often invent their own titles, and their overlap with the source text may be minimal. Such is the case with Unholy Love, Albert Ray’s 1932 adaptation of Madame Bovary, which is set in Rye, New York, during the flapper era. Notwithstanding the choice of a town which, by its name, recalls Ry, the Norman village that claims to have been the model for Yonville-L’Abbaye, this film parades its independence from the novel in countless ways, as we shall see later. At the opposite extreme is Chabrol’s Madame Bovary (1991), a heritage film that bears witness to an almost slavish faithfulness to the novel. So extensive is the overlap between novel and film that the credits do not 24 Madame Bovary at the Movies even use the word adapté (adapted) but instead present the film as “Madame Bovary de Gustave Flaubert.” Between these two poles one finds films that are truly “adapted” from novels in that they reproduce their basic plots and main characters while taking certain liberties demanded by good cinematic practice. Spectators who have read the novels on which these films are based will have no difficulty recognizing them, but they may regret—rightly or wrongly—certain excisions that have been made in the transfer from page to screen. A number of critics have attempted to classify film adaptations according to their degree of overlap with the source text. Geoffrey Wagner, for example, suggests three possible categories, ranging from the most overlap to the least: transposition, commentary, and analogy (222-27). As useful as such categories may be, they encourage scholars to think in binary terms when dealing with film adaptations, and to judge the film solely by its relationship with the book. Indeed, for decades, discussion of film adaptations turned almost exclusively on the issue of fidelity. Scholarly essays, structured by the comparison of film to novel, shuttled back and forth between the two. Their interest centered on the way a particular screen adaptation “reproduced” a particular novel, and the films were judged according to whether or not they were “faithful” to the fictional narratives that inspired them. This evaluation turned out to be more complicated than it seemed at first blush, for it was generally acknowledged that films could be faithful to the “spirit” of a literary text without being faithful to the “letter.” Just exactly what the “spirit” of a text was, nobody knew for sure (Christopher Orr 2). In fact, the inability to define this elusive concept eventually gave way to the realization that “spirit” was clearly a matter of personal interpretation. The business of adapting literary fiction to the screen was seen in a new light; what were filmmakers if not interpreters? Moreover, since it had long been acknowledged that the literary text was open, subject to multiple, equally valid readings, it stood to reason that film adaptations would differ from each other. Such a conclusion followed naturally from the assessment that, as Neil Sinyard put it, “adapting a literary text to the screen is essentially an act of literary criticism” (x). In recognizing the subjectivity of what was once considered simply the pictorialization of the literary work, critics delivered the first blow to the fidelity argument. The second attack, more damaging, came when the technical complexities of the transfer were considered. .

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