1. Introduction: Turning Literature into Film
Films based on literary texts (“adaptations”) pose a
number of important questions. The question of "fidelity" to
the text is one of a large number of critical or ideological
questions raised by such motion pictures. The films are shaped
by, among other factors, the culture in which the adaptation is
produced, the aims and values of filmmakers, the demands of
a studio or network, and the standing of a particular literary
work or artist. They are also, often, as much about the beauty,
wit, ambition, or artistic will to power of a movie star or a
director as they are about literary texts or characters. These
films thus serve to remind us just how vexed an issue
"adaptation" is for students of cinema.
It has been said about films based upon literary sources
that they enable a comparative investigation of the discursive
practices of film and literature but, unfortunately,
commentaries on such motion pictures often take the form of
“fidelity studies”, that is, they suggest that the worth of an
adaptation of a major, canonical novel is largely traceable to
the skill and imaginative power of the author of the original
text. While “fidelity studies" are often disparaged by students
of film-and-literature, the question of how a film makes use of
a work of fiction, and indeed the question of whether a film is
or is not in one way or another "faithful" to a book has not
gone away and probably never will, especially since,
according to a recent estimate, upwards of 30 percent of all
films are based on novels.
Comment [SG1]: A canonical text is
text that has been pronounced, by the
academic establishment, to be aesthetica
valuable and generally pertinent to the
moral and social concerns of a particular
historical period.

2. NB: Please remember that films that derive from novels
and other forms of fiction are distinct works of art even though
they have a clear and important link to the texts.
Critics and theorists, who have written about adaptation
over the last 50 years, have tended, at least formally, to reject
fidelity criticism and assert that a discussion of adaptation
must start from the proposition that literature and cinema are
radically different, even incommensurable, art forms. It has
been argued that whereas film works from perception toward
signification, literary fiction works oppositely. It begins with
signs, graphemes and words, building to propositions, which
attempt to develop perception.
Yet although such declarations as these without doubt
constitute the dominant, "official" view of adaptation in film
theory and criticism in the last few decades, writers continue
to privilege literature over film in important ways, and assume
that a film adaptation has a certain responsibility to remain
faithful to either the letter or the spirit of the text on which it is
based.
What is at stake is the definition of the relationship
between the literary text and the film. We can use specific
models for this purpose. Some scholars believe that the film is
a commentary or a translation of the text. Such ways of
looking at adaptation are both illuminating and liberating;
adaptation is thus presented as a creative, critical act and not
just as a transposition or transfer of at least some elements of a
novel to the screen. But there is still a tendency to privilege
the text over the film. Thus, both the commentary and
translation models contain a bias in favour of the text as
against the cinematic work even though at least some of the
writers who employ these models mean to distance themselves

3. from the tendency of fidelity criticism to privilege fiction over
film.
Such favouring of fiction over film seems almost
inescapable in discussions of adaptation; the very word, after
all, suggest alteration or adjustment in order to make
something fit its new context or environment without,
however, changing that something into something else; one
"adapts," that is, one does not "transform" or "metamorphose."
No wonder, then, that not a few filmmakers and theorists have
rejected the very idea of adaptation. According to Ingmar
Bergman, for example, "film has nothing to do with literature"
and, therefore, "we should avoid making films out of books."
Hungarian film critic Béla Balázs denies that there can be any
transfer or transposition from one art form to the other. He
insists that when a novel is "turned into" a film, although “the
subject, or story, of both works is identical, their content is
nevertheless different.”
Other models indebted to literary theory help to move
discussions of the "metamorphosis of fiction into cinema"
beyond the concept of adaptation. Thus, there is the concept of
intertextuality. By placing the notion of adaptation within the
theory of intertextuality, we can describe the literary source of
a film as one of a series of pre-texts which share some of the
same narrative conventions as the film adaptation. This
description obviously does not exhaust the film's intertextual
space, which also includes codes specific to the institution of
cinema as well as codes that reflect the cultural conditions
under which the film was produced. In important ways the
intertextuality model solves the main problems associated with
adaptation theory by treating the literary text as one of many
items in the multidimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them absolutely “original”, blend and clash.
No longer is the novel privileged, and the problem of fidelity
Comment [SG2]: Intertextuality is
shaping of texts' meanings by other texts
can refer to an author’s borrowing and
transformation of a prior text or to a
reader’s referencing of one text in readin
another.

4. criticism therefore recedes because there is no sense of
responsibility to a text within such a model. Yet the use of this
concept presents other problems to the critic who wishes to
focus on the relationship between film and fiction. While
intertextuality allows us at least theoretically to place a film
that draws upon a work of fiction within its proper context, we
see the cinematic work as shaped not only by a particular text
but also by a multitude of elements within a cultural setting -
including other films, a star's persona, political discourse, and
potentially almost innumerable narratives and other items
from popular and elite culture. Thus, use of the intertextuality
model might in some cases tend to obscure the relationship
between the two works.
Recent reading theory may offer a solution to the
problems posed by the intertextuality model's account of the
fiction-to-film problematic. Theorists working within this area
refuse to privilege one reading (or work or form) over another
but they nevertheless remain focused to a significant degree
upon particular works and the distinct ways in which they
have been received. These conceptualizations of reading
return us to the idea of adaptation as an act of interpretation,
but in this case with a radically different sense of that process,
in order to help students of film-and-fiction escape from the
bias towards the literary text inherent in most accounts of
adaptation and still allow them to theorize the historically
crucial relationship between literature and cinema and
between particular films and texts. Reading theory in recent
years has been dominated by the view that reading is not a
matter of the decoding of signs that yields something essential
to the text such as its "basic theme" but is instead a creative
act that in "concretizing" a work remakes it and indeed
remakes the artistic field in which it appears. Reading or
reception have been described as an evolving dialogue of

5. question and answer: texts of whatever character pose
questions to readers - formal, aesthetic, thematic, sociological,
and historical questions, and acts of reception constitute
answers to those questions. Acts of reception, furthermore,
pose, in their turn, new questions. "Reception" includes both
individual concretizations of texts and critical or theoretical
commentaries, and also includes new works of art that
"respond" to earlier works, without "transferring" anything
substantial from the works that they answer.

6. As a result, all texts-as-answers necessarily alter not only the
field(s) in which the texts exist (cinematic genres, particular
novelistic traditions, contemporary popular culture, cultural
myths) but also the texts-as-questions themselves. Everything,
in fact, is at least potentially changed by every act of
reception.
Following this line of reasoning, one is bound to see a
film based upon a Gothic novel, with its own history of
transformation through reception, as a work that both responds
to the earlier work, casting that work, at least potentially, in a
new light, and yet functions, at the same time, as its own set of
questions posed to a historically distinct audience through the
vehicle of a unique work of art.
NB: a film derived from a literary text is a particular
"reading" of that text that issues from its unique context and
distinct artistic consciousness, emerges within a particular
cultural moment, responds to a text that possesses its own
history, and, crucially, employs radically different artistic
means.
Nevertheless, however sound theoretical declarations of
the incommensurable nature of film and fiction may be, for
many filmgoers the relationship between a literary text and a
motion picture is both important and compelling, and this
includes more than just naive members of the audience
objecting to the omitting, altering, or re-conceiving of trea-
sured characters, incidents, or scenes. Many directors,
including such famous artists as Alfred Hitchcock and Orson
Welles, have made one film after another based on fictional
texts.
Critics, furthermore, remind us that "from its beginnings
the feature film was associated with literary and dramatic
classics," and since motion pictures based on fiction were
often undertaken with a view of securing or holding an

7. audience, the films were made and presented in such a way as
to encourage potential viewers to search for fidelity to a text.
Such films have done well at the box office by offering the
audience "identifiable and sure attractions.” Thus, the movie
business - at least in America - has never been separable from
the “art” of making moving pictures and has valorized fidelity
to an original text through its use of well-known works of
fiction. Thus while in a theoretical sense we can assert a
radical disjuncture between film and text, in practice we must
acknowledge that when viewing or analyzing a film that refers
to a work of fiction, consideration of questions of how the text
has been rendered on film, what has been retained and what
has been discarded, and the relationship between fictional and
cinematic technique are inevitably raised.
The question becomes, then, what kind of criticism treating the
move from novel to film is likely to be illuminating if one embraces
the view that the film has no responsibility to, even though it often has
a compelling relationship with, a text. The idea that film theorists and
critics rid themselves of a concern with fidelity the door opens to
political and cultural criticism is anticipated in Walter Benjamin's
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Benjamin
argues that "technical reproducibility" undermines the "concept of
authenticity" which is predicated on a sense of the presence and the
uniqueness of "the original"; mechanical reproduction shatters the idea
that a work possesses an "aura," the "unique value of the 'authentic'
work of art" that imparts to that work "a ritual function." As a result,
the very character and function of art change: "instead of being based
on ritual, it begins to be based upon another practice - politics." In
light of Benjamin's argument, it is not surprising that many theorists
and critics have suggested that we abandon the idea that the prior
work of art has a privileged status and character; as a result fidelity
criticism is likely to be replaced by "sociological" or "ideological"
commentary – by Benjamin's "politics.