Film Adaptation

1. Seminar Presentation
on
Film Adaptation: A Study of Rushdie’s Midnight
Children
Lakhyajit Nath
M.Phil Scholar

2. What is Film adaptation?
“Film adaptation is a profound process, which
means you try and figure out how to thrive in the
world.” (The “Orchid Thief” in Spike Jonze’s
Film Adaptation .63)
“I would suggest that what we need instead is a
broads definition of adaptation and a sociology
that takes into account the commercial apparatus,
the audience and the academic culture industry.”
(James Naremore, “Introduction: Film and Reign
of Adaptation”)

3. Linda Hutcheon’s Theory of
Adaptation
• Multilayered meaning
 The entity or product which is the result of
transposing a particular source
the process through which the entity or product
was created (including reinterpretation and re-
creation of the source)
 the process of reception, through which “we
experience adaptations as palimpsests through our
memory of other works that resonate through
repetition and variation”

4. Stam's Dialogical Approach
• The shift from a single-track, uniquely verbal
medium such as the novel . . . to a multi track
medium such as film. (Resembles with
Bakhtin's notion)
• complex material infrastructure in contrast to
the relative simplicity surrounding the
individual writer

5. Film Adaptation as Translation
a) Every act of translation is simultaneously an act
of interpretation,
b) Through the process of translating, a new text
emerges as a unnique antity- not a mutation of
the original matter but a fully new work, which
in form and in function, is independent from its
literary source.
c) Film translations of literature face the same
challenges, dilemmas, interpretative choices,
latitudes, responsibilities that any translator
much face.

6. Midnight’s Children as Novel and Film
• As a novel Midnight’s Children (1981) is
written by Salman Rushdie where he shows
the chaotic, dilemmatic conditions of the time
of partition of India and Pakistan.
• As a film with the same title and the same
storyline of the novel is made by Deepa Mehta
in 2012

7. Midnight’s Children as a Novel Midnight’s Children as a Film

8. Comparison between Midnight’s
Children as a Film and a Novel
• Question of fidelity
• Compression (600 pages into 130 pages)
• See a little deconstructed version
• Mehta used some exaggerations
• Impact of culture and society
• Clearly depicts the magic realism through
visualization

9. Comparison between Midnight’s
Children as a Film and a Novel
• Viewers taste
• “Monstration”
• Dialogism
• Realism in novel and in Film
• Relevance of the Theory of Visual Pleasure
(Laura Mulvey)

10. Thank you