COLT 62.08 Film Adaptation and Literature
Since the advent of cinema, literature has provided a rich medium from which filmmakers could draw to tell their stories. Adaptation studies explores the exchanges and connections between these mediums, as well as others, from theater to dance, music, graphic novels, and art. What makes an adaptation successful? How important is textual fidelity – should a film, for example, try to follow a novel as faithfully as it can, or is it possible for something to be gained, not lost, in the “translation” of a story from one form to another, from the words of a poem to the music of an orchestra, or the words of a novella to the visuals of a film? Is the cliche that “the book is always better than the movie” true – that is, is there some authentic “spirit” of a text that can be preserved in an adaptation of that text? How might sociopolitical concerns influence the ways in which adaptations are conceived, especially considered comparatively across different times and different cultures? In critically analyzing the translation of a narrative from one medium to another, we will ask questions related to intertextuality, textual fluidity, the idea of authenticity, and what it is that we consider to be a unique and cohesive text in the first place (and simultaneously, the problems with these assumptions). Readings and viewings may include works by Shakespeare, Satrapi, Sophocles, Kurosawa, Esquivel, Melville, and Mallarme.