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Adaptation: book to screen
Chapters… (Farkas)
The Adaptation Paradox
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“[…] nobody loves adaptations”
(J. G. Boyum, Double ExposureFiction into Film, 1989)
“[…] adaptation is theoretically impossible yet culturally
ubiquitous [omnipresent]”
(Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, 2003)
“What no-one seems to love today is […] adaptation theory.”
(Á. I. Farkas, “To whose self be true?”, 2015)
Behind the paradox
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• Cultural and historical
interart and interdisciplinary rivalries –
literature vs movie; lit. crit. vs media studies
• Theoretical
opposing views of ekphrasis –
i.e. verbal evocation of the visual and its reverse
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Behind the paradox 1.
Cultural and historical
Changing times
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A Trip to the Moon (1902)
dir. by Georges Méliès
Pride and Prejudice (2005)
dir. by Joe Wright
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Triplets, quadruplets,
quintuplets, remakes
• The Great Gatsby (1926, 1974,
2013)
• Pride and Prejudice (1938, 1940,
1995, 2005)
• The Turn of the Screw (1959, 1961,
1971[…], 1995, 2005 […?]
Thirteen altogether!
Changing terms of suspicion
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“[The] making of film out of an earlier text is virtually as old as the
machinery of cinema itself.”
(D. Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, 1984)
“The suspicion clinging to the cinematic appropriation of canonical texts has
never been quite dispelled by the ever-renewing popularity of films based on
books. True, the terms of disapproval have changed considerably during the
more than century-long history of literature on screen.”
(Á. I. Farkas, 2015).
Whose embarrassment?
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“[…] in the beginning literature
was believed to be sullied by
consorting with the lowly
newcomer the motion picture,
later it was the art of film whose
autonomy came to be regarded
as potentially compromised by
the association.”
(Farkas)
Raising brows
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From mutoscopes, kinetoscopes,
and nicelodeons …
… to palatial cinemas and
grand movie theaters
Literature an excuse
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The motion picture originally “cheap
entertainment for the masses”
(Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents)
=>
•“extend their [filmmakers’] reach to the lucrative middle-class
market” (Leitch)
•“legitimize cinema-going as a venue of ‘taste’” (Leitch)
•and fend off censorship attacks on cinema’s perceived vulgarity
(Hayward, Cinema Studies, 2000)
Vulgar? Dominant?
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“[…] the dominant ideology […] continues
to treat adaptation as inherently vulgar”
(C. MacCabe, True to the Spirit:
Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity, 2011).
“Whatever positions old-style proponents of ‘the aesthetic
appreciation of literature’ may still retain in English departments here
and there as Leitch claims (Leitch 5), the preeminent position occupied
in recent years by cultural and media studies in academia has made
unthinkable the branding of film, any kind of film, vulgar.”
(Farkas)
The music hall
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Marie Lloyd (1870-1922)
“With the decay of the musichall, with the encroachment
of the cheap and rapid
breeding cinema, the lower
classes will tend to drop
into the same state of
protoplasm as the
bourgeoisie”
(T. S. Eliot,
1922)
“The Cinema”
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"The cinema fell upon its prey with immense rapacity, and […]
subsists upon the body of its unfortunate victim. But the
results are disastrous to both. The alliance is unnatural”.
(Virginia Woolf, 1926)
The turning of tables
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“What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the
basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to
create cinema.”
(François Truffaut, Hitchcock, 1983)
“[I had] ‘Heart of Darkness’ in one hand and the script of
Apocalypse Now in [the] other hand on the set.”
(The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclopedia, 2010)
<=>
Joseph Conrad missing from credit list!
Adaptation? ADOPT[AT]ION!
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“Tanulmányom nem az
adaptációról szól, hanem arról,
hogy miként tudja a film nem
adaptív módon felhasználni az
irodalmi szöveget.”
[My piece is not about adaptation
but is meant to explore how film
can use text in a non-adaptive
manner.]
(Nánay Bence, “Túl az
adaptáción” [Beyond Adaptation])
Theoretical paradigms
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“[…] to gender words male, images female, and hybrid arts
androgynous, after feminist models, or to read literary film
adaptation as a subversive subjugation of the phallic to the
presymbolic realm under psychoanalytic rubrics, or to feed
canonical literature and popular film into Marxist class
categorizations of high and low art would not serve to
unravel false oppositions of novels and films, but would
rather intensify them and place them in the service of new
ideological oppositions.”
(K. Elliott, 2003)
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Behind the paradox 2.
Theoretical
The Adaptation Paradox
and its restatement
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“[…] adaptation is theoretically impossible yet culturally ubiquitous
[omnipresent]”
(Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, 2003).
“According to a strictly esthetic vision on Cinema, literature works
like a kind of poison. In spite of this vision, film is still all too
often compared to literature.”
(Peter Verstraten, “Cinema as a Digest of Literature:
A Cure for Adaptation Fever”, 2012)
The word-image wars:
historical antecedents
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The two main branches of the 18th century
poetry and painting debate go back to:
Simonides of Ceos:
“Poetry is a speaking picture; painting is a mute poem.”
(c. 556 – 468 BC)
Horace:
“ut pictura poesis,” i.e. “as is painting so is poetry (i.e.
imaginative texts; literature"
(“Ars Poetica”)
The wordimage war
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The Laocoön Group
No scream!
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Laocoön:
Winckelmann and Lessing
Johann Joachim Winckelmann:
Visual arts are also moral; e.g. Laocoon stoically
repressing scream: goodness (1717 – 1768)
<=>
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing:
Visual arts are purely aesthetic; Laocoön shown before
screaming: open mouth would be against law of beauty
(Laocoön, or the Limits of Painting and Poetry,1766)
Lessing’s categorical conclusions
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The plastic arts (painting, sculpture, architecture): spatial
<=>
Dance, poetry, drama: temporal
=>
Poetry and plastic arts are subject to quite different laws
Lessing and modern adaptation theory
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George Bluestone: “The film and the novel [should] remain separate
institutions, each achieving its best results by exploring unique and specific
properties.”
(“The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film” Novels into Film, 1968)
Dudley Andrew: “[Study] achievements of equivalence in the absolutely
different semiotic systems of film and language. […] Such a study is not
comparative between the arts but is instead intensive within each art”
(Concepts of Film Theory, 1984)
Brian McFarlane:
NOVEL: linear and conceptual <=> FILM: spatial and perceptual
(Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation, 1996)
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Lessing and the
20th c. savants
Michel Foucault: “The drawing of the pipe and
the text that ought to name it cannot find a place
to meet.” (This Is Not a Pipe, 1976)
Roland Barthes: “there is never a real incorporation since the
substances of the two structures (graphic and iconic) are
irreducible.” (“The Photographic Message,” 1961)
J. Hillis Miller: „Neither the meaning of a picture nor the meaning
of a sentence is by any means translatable. The picture means
itself. The sentence means itself. The two can never meet.”
(Illustration, 1992)
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Ekphrasis
The Synergy of Intermediality?
Ekphrasis: a narrow definition
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Etymology: ek and phrasis, 'out' and 'speak' (Gr.)
Leo Spitzer: “[…] the poetic description of a pictorial
or sculptural work of art.” (“The ‘Ode on a Grecian
Urn,’ or Content vs. Metagrammar”)
David Mikics: “[…] literature’s conversation with a
silent counterpart.” (A New Handbook of Literary
Terms)
Example 1:
Homer
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Iliad (book 18)
Heroic epic extensive totality through synechdoche
(Lukács)
=>
Thetis has Hephaistos make replacement armor for son
Achilles.
Newly forged shield decorated with relief-images of
(mostly) peaceful life back home
Example 2: John Keats
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Meditative description of images covering the urn showing “the
picture-making capacity of words in poems […] to interrupt the
temporality of discourse” (Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis)
“Ode on a
Grecian Urn”
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
Example 3:
R. M. Rilke
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Function of ekphrasis: “making them
speak out or speak up”
(John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit)
“Apollo’s Archaic Torso” (1875)
And this stone would seem disfigured and stunted,
the shoulders descending into nothing,
unable to glisten like a predator's pelt,
or burst out from its confines and radiate
like a star: for there is no angle from which
it cannot see you. You have to change your life.
Example 4: W. H. Auden
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Dynamic ension
through
montage/counterpoint
“The Shield of Achilles”
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
Achilles’ shield made of real metal
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Abraham Flayman
(1821)
Reverse ekphrasis
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When artefacts “seek to create what is […] a
reverse ekphrasis in that they seek in the visual
arts to produce an equivalent of the verbal text
instead of the other way around.” (Krieger)
Definition applicable to the film adaptation of
literature, too?
Ekphrasis: Hellenistic definition
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 “a verbal description of something, almost anything, in
life or art […] so that our ears could serve as our eyes
[…]”
 “called upon to […] rivet our attention upon a visual
object to be described, which it was to elaborate in rich
and vivid detail”
 […] “to interrupt the temporality of discourse, to freeze
it during its indulgence in spatial exploration.” (Murray
Krieger) <=>
Lessing
Ekphrasis: a broad definition
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ANYTHING GOES … ANYWHERE
 a rhetorical device in which one medium of art tries to relate
to another medium by defining and describing its essence and
form, and in doing so, relate more directly to the audience […]
 [the spirit of the source work] can be conveyed by virtually
any medium and thereby enhance the artistic impact of the
original [work] through synergy […]
 A painting may represent a sculpture, and vice versa; a poem
portray a picture; a sculpture depict a heroine of a novel; in fact
[…] any art may describe any other art (Wikipedia)
Intermediality1:
Pictorial => Musical
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Whose composition?
What is the title?
Modest Mussorgsky,
Pictures from an Exhibition –
A Remembrance of Viktor Hartmann (1874)
Intermediality1:
Pictorial => Musical
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Pictures by Viktor Hartman. Which one is
described by the music played?
10.
9.
8.
Modest Mussorgsky
Pictures at an Exhibition, Movement 9.
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Critic’s background info and
composer’s complementation:
"Hartmann's drawing depicted a
clock in the form of Baba Yaga's
hut on fowl's legs. Mussorgsky
added the witch's flight in a
mortar.” (Vladimir Stasov)
Intermediality 2: Pictorial => Musical + Verbal
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Shine, shine, the light of good works shine
The watch before the city gates depicted in their prime
That golden light all grimy now
Three hundred years have passed
The worthy Captain and his squad of troopers standing fast
The artist knew their faces well
The husbands of his lady friends
His creditors and councillors
In armour bright, the merchant men
Official moments of the guild
In poses keen from bygone days
The city fathers frozen there
Upon the canvas dark with age
King Crimson, “Night Watch”
1973
Intermediality 2: Pictorial => Musical + Verbal
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The smell of paint, a flask of wine
So many years we suffered here
And turn those faces all to me
Our country racked with Spanish wars
The blunderbuss and halberd-shaft
Now comes a chance to find ourselves
And Dutch respectability
And quiet reigns behind our doors
We think about posterity again
They make their entrance one by one
Defenders of that way of life
And so the pride of little men
The redbrick home, the bourgeoisie
The burghers good and true
Guitar lessons for the wife
Still living through the painter's hand
Request you all to understand
Whose picture is the
song about?
Intermediality 2: Pictorial => Musical + Verbal
The Night Watch (1642) by Rembrandt van Rijn
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Intermediality 3a:Musical=> Verbal
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The application of ekphrastic language to music rather
than painting did not occur much before the early
nineteenth century: not, in other words, until the
autonomous instrumental work had established itself as
a norm and a problem. Thereafter the verbal paraphrase
of musical expression […] an important literary device,
with famous examples by Robert Browning, Marcel Proust,
Thomas Mann, E. M. Forster, and James Baldwin, among
others.
(Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning:
Toward a Critical History. 2002.)
Intermediality 3b: Musical=> Verbal
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Ludwig van Beethoven,
Symphony Nr. 5
IT WILL be generally admitted that
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the
most sublime noise that has ever
penetrated into the ear of man.
(E. M. Forster, Howards End, 1910)
Intermediality 3c:
Musical => Verbal
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Chapter 5
[…] the Andante had begun—very beautiful, but
bearing a family likeness to all the other beautiful
Andantes that Beethoven has written, and, to
Helen’s mind, rather disconnecting the heroes and
shipwrecks of the first movement from the heroes
and goblins of the third. She heard the tune
through once, and then her attention wandered,
and she gazed at the audience, or the organ, or the
architecture. […]
(E. M. Forster, Howards End)
Intermediality 3c:
Musical => Verbal
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Helen said to her aunt: “Now comes the wonderful
movement: first of all the goblins, and then a trio of
elephants dancing […] look out for the part where you
think you have done with the goblins and they come
back,” breathed Helen, as the music started with a goblin
walking quietly over the universe, from end to end.
Others followed him: They were not aggressive
creatures; it was that that made them so terrible to
Helen. They merely observed in passing that there
was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the
world. […] Helen could not contradict them, for, once
at all events, she had felt the same, and had seen the
reliable walls of youth collapse. Panic and emptiness!
Panic and emptiness! The goblins were right.
Intermediality 3c:
Musical => Verbal
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Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the
ramparts up […] But the goblins were there. They could
return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can
trust Beethoven when he says other things.
Helen pushed her way out during the applause.
She desired to be alone. The music summed up to her all
that had happened or could happen in her career. She
read it as a tangible statement, which could never be
superseded. The notes meant this and that to her, and
they could have no other meaning, and life could have no
other meaning. She pushed right out of the building, and
walked slowly down the outside staircase, breathing the
autumnal air, and then she strolled home.
Intermediality 4a: Musical => Verbal
=> Cinematic
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Howards End (1992), U.K.,
directed by James Ivory,
adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala;
Merchant-Ivory
Featuring
Anthony Hopkins
Vanessa Redgrave
Helena Bonham Carter
Emma Thompson
Howards End, Ch. 5: print => screen
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What changes have been effected?
• Excision (what has been removed?)
• Inclusion (what has been added?)
• Transposition (what has been relocated?)
(the narrative, the setting, the cast, the narrator’s function,
the music /both diegetic and extradiegetic/)
• What is the likely rationale of each change?
• What is the result? What has been lost and what has been
gained?
• Relate the sequence to ekphrasis.
Word-image: War and Peace
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The theoretical literature […] is complex, but its main argument
is this: Ekphrasis poses poet against artist, word against image,
in a struggle for representational ground. The conventional
paragone, or contest, of word and image in western thought is
played out in particularly specific and visible terms in
ekphrasis as the poet contemplates the work of art and tries to
make a poem at least equal to that work of art. […]
[H]owever, ekphrasis also plays out relations that are more
complex, more nuanced, more interesting, and more responsive to
the range of human relationships and thought than the focus on
contest – […] ekphrasis may be born of and express
friendship, communion, and sympathy
(Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, “Yeats’s Poems on Pictures,” 2002)