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The Reign of Adaptation

My title alludes to a relatively little-known essay by André Bazin, “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,” written in 1948 but not translated into English until 1998, when it appeared in Bert Cardullo’s useful anthology Bazin at Work. I especially recommend this essay to readers who think of Bazin almost exclusively as an eloquent proponent of a certain kind of humanist realism in the cinema. Without denying the importance of Bazin’s writings on the phenomenology of the photographic image and the realistic uses of the camera, we need to remember that an entire volume of the French edition of his posthumously collected criticism, published in four volumes under the title What Is Cinema?, was devoted to the relationship between film and other media. The essay on adaptation is one of his most intriguing statements on behalf of what he called “impure cinema,” and it enables us to see him in a new light, as a writer who has something to contribute to what academics today call cultural studies.

I shall return to Bazin, but first I want to comment on some of the reasons why his essay may have been neglected and why the very subject of adaptation has until fairly recently constituted one of the most jejune areas of scholarly writing about the cinema. One of the major reasons, as Robert B. Ray has pointed out, is institutional: a great many film programs in the academy are attached to literature departments, where the theme of adaptation is often used as a way of teaching celebrated literature by another means (Ray, “The Field of ‘Literature and Film,’” 44–47). Thus we immediately think of Mrs Dalloway (1998) or even of the more freely derivative Orlando (1993) as adaptations, but not of The Set Up (1949, based on a narrative poem), Batman (1989, based on a comic book), His Girl Friday (1940, based on a play), Mission Impossible (1996, based on a TV series), or Twelve Monkeys (1995, based on an art film). Even within the realm of the novelistic, the range of things usually discussed under the rubric of adaptation is quite narrow. Twentieth Century Fox’s 1940 production of The Grapes of Wrath is nearly always seen in relation to John Steinbeck, but the same studio’s 1944 production of Laura is rarely viewed as an adaptation of Vera Caspary (even though the film’s main title reads “Laura, by Vera Caspary”)—probably because Caspary’s protofeminist thriller has long been out of print and has seldom been taught by English teachers.

Unfortunately, most discussions of novelistic adaptation in film can be summarized by a New Yorker cartoon that Alfred Hitchcock once described to François Truffaut: two goats are eating a pile of film cans and one goat says to the other, “Personally, I liked the book better.” Even when writing on the topic isn’t directly concerned with a given film’s artistic adequacy or fidelity to a beloved source, it tends to be narrow in range and constitutive of a series of binary oppositions that poststructuralist theory has presumably taught us to reject: literature versus cinema, high culture versus mass culture, original versus copy. Such oppositions are the products of what was once the submerged common sense of the average English department, which was composed of a mixture of Kantian aesthetics and Arnoldian ideas about society.

When I use the term “Arnoldian,” I’m referring chiefly to Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), which argues that culture is synonymous with great works of art and that the inherited cultural tradition of the Judeo-Christian world, embodied in “the best that has been thought and said,” can have a civilizing influence, transcending class tensions and leading to a more humane society. The study of English literature in American universities owes its very existence to this argument, which was more subtly elaborated by such later figures as T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis; and, until recent years, English professors have been especially suspicious of mass-produced narratives from Hollywood, which seem to threaten or debase the values of both “organic” popular culture and literary culture. When I use the term “Kantian,” I’m speaking of a slightly older, more complex mode of idealist philosophy that emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, and that we commonly associate not only with Immanuel Kant but also with Georg Hegel, Johann von Schiller, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing throughout the period of high literary modernism, all art in the European world was theorized under what might be roughly described as a Kantian set of assumptions; that is, both the making and the appreciation of art were conceived as specialized, autonomous, and transcendent activities having chiefly to do with media-specific form (see Eagleton, 17–53). A locus classicus of such theorizing (perhaps even a parody of it) is the fifth chapter of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914), in which Stephen Dedalus tells us that art differs from pornography because it does not elicit desire, from propaganda because it does not teach or move to political action, and from market goods because it has no entertainment value or practical utility. The proper effect of art, Dedalus says, is the “luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure,” which can be achieved only through the contemplation of formal matters.

Never mind that Joyce’s own novel problematizes such ideas, and that his next novel, Ulysses, pushes aestheticism beyond its sustainable limits; some variation of aesthetic formalism rightly underpins every modern discipline that claims to be dealing with art. Consider, for example, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s excellent college textbook Film Art, which has long been used in introductory film study courses throughout the United States. Bordwell and Thompson are quite different from the literary dandies and philosophical idealists of the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries; their approach is practical and undogmatic, grounded in empirical evidence from an exceptionally wide range of films, and their chief theoretical influences are contemporary narratology and the Russian formalists. Even so, they devote themselves to teaching us how to recognize cinema-specific codes and how to appreciate part-whole relationships within individual movies.

I, too, am something of an aesthete, and I strongly believe that no proper criticism of art can ignore questions of form. I was also an English major, and I don’t think we can dismiss Matthew Arnold or that we should stop reading Great Books and seeing films based on them. It’s nevertheless important to understand that both Arnold’s defense of high culture and the aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century are historically situated ideologies, generated largely in response to industrial capitalism and mechanical reproduction. Their culminating or extreme instance, and in one sense their crisis, was the period immediately before and after World War II, when New Criticism was in the ascendency in American universities and modernist intellectuals, including otherwise quite different theorists Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg, enunciated an idea of “authentic” art in defense against the culture industries. Greenberg’s famous essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” for example, describes the essential project of modernism as “Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself” (25).

Greenberg’s essay was written in 1939, when Fascism had overtaken Europe, when modern art, which had already been assimilated into bourgeois culture, was being assailed from both the left and the right for its decadence and elitism, and when aestheticism seemed caught in a struggle to survive capitalism and Stalinism. For Greenberg, the only refuge for “authentic” art lay in the realm of the “merely artistic,” or in the radically formal exploration of artistic media. The artistic imitation of the natural or social world, he argued, needed to be replaced by the study of “the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves” (23). Unfortunately, as Juan A. Suarez has observed, the result of this policy was “an exacerbation of formalism and a sort of art in exile from the values of audiences; that is, an art which seeks to remain untainted by reigning mercantilism and instrumental rationality” (6–7).

The capitalist movie industry, especially in Hollywood, operated by a dialectically opposite logic. It recognized from the beginning that it could gain a sort of legitimacy among middle-class viewers by reproducing facsimiles of more respectable art or by adapting literature to another medium. Film scholars William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson have demonstrated that as early as 1908, at the height of the nickelodeon boom and partly in response to the Reform movement in American politics, the Vitagraph film company in New York engaged in an aggressive, concentrated effort to appeal to the middle class by making one-reel adaptions of Shakespeare and Dante. At virtually the same moment, Parisian financiers established the Société Film d’Art, which made quite profitable feature-length films based on the dramas of Rostand and Sardou, as well as silent versions of Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Historian David Cook remarks, “For a while it seemed as if everything written, sung, or danced (for photographed ballet and opera formed a large part of the film d’art corpus) in Western Europe between 1900 and the Renaissance, and Greek tragedy as well, found its way into one of these stage-bound and pretentious productions” (53). But uncinematic as the early adaptations may seem today, they were among the first feature films, and their drive for respectability pointed toward the development of the star system, the picture palace, and in one sense Hollywood itself. Equally important were the hugely successful Italian historical pictures of the same period, especially Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis? (1912), a nine-reel spectacular based on a novel by Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz, which established the market for “blockbuster” movies such as Birth of a Nation (1915), also an adaptation.

The advent of the talkies and the Fordist organization of the major film studios produced a great appetite for literature among Hollywood moguls, who provided a source of major income, if not artistic satisfaction, for every important playwright and author in the United States, including Eugene O’Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner. But here we encounter an important historical irony. At the same time that modernity and capitalism were bringing the movies, the legitimate theater, and the book publishing industry closer together, sophisticated literary artists in general were in active rebellion against bourgeois culture and were intentionally producing work that could not be easily assimilated into mainstream adaptations. Modernism was not only willfully difficult and formally “experimental,” it was also sexually scandalous, critical of progress, and offensive to the Babbitts and the Bovarys who supposedly made up the viewing audience. Thus, at the height of the classic studio system, when Hollywood was absorbing every kind of artistic talent and establishing itself as the very emblem of modernity, the Production Code Administration (PCA) began to engage in what Richard Maltby calls “a conscious ideological project” aimed at preventing what one of its leaders described as “the prevalent type of book and play” from becoming “the prevalent type of movie” (Maltby, “To Prevent the Prevalent Type of Book,” 81). This did not mean that modern literature was no longer adapted. Classic Hollywood wanted to acquire every sort of cultural capital, but it was especially interested in source material that could easily be recuperated into an aesthetically and morally conservative form of entertainment. Even after the qualified relaxation of censorship restrictions in the 1950s, the most adaptable sources for movies were the “readerly” texts of the nineteenth century rather than the “writerly” texts of high modernism, which were explicitly designed to resist being reduced” to anything not themselves.

Meanwhile, in still another historical irony, film was being regarded in some quarters as the quintessential medium for modernist and avant-garde art. Some of the most talented movie directors in the first half of the century approached the problem of literary adaptation in the spirit of intense aestheticism, as in Erich von Stroheim’s version of Greed (1924) or Eisenstein’s abortive attempt to film An American Tragedy. Modern experimental fiction was sometimes directly influenced by cinema, as when John Dos Passos began his USA trilogy shortly after meeting Eisenstein and reading the Soviet theories of montage. Eventually, the cinema was theorized as the dominant “way of seeing” in the modern world and as a condition toward which most of the visual and literary arts aspired. Cultural critic Arnold Hauser placed the whole of twentieth-century art, including such things as Cubist paintings and poems like The Waste Land, under the evocative rubric of “the film age.” French critic Claude-Edmonde Magny proposed that the period between the two world wars should be called “the age of the American novel” and that the leading American writers, especially Hemingway and Faulkner, were guided by a “film aesthetic.” American critics Alan Spiegel and Keith Cohen each wrote books arguing that modern Anglo/European literature, including Flaubert, Proust, James, Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf, was fundamentally “cinematic” in form.

It was not until 1957 that the movies seemed to have matured enough to produce the first full-scale academic analysis of film adaptation in America: George Bluestone’s Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema. In this book Bluestone argues that certain movies (his examples are all from Hollywood, including The Informer, Wuthering Heights, and The Grapes of Wrath) do not debase their literary sources; instead, they “metamorphose” novels into another medium that has its own formal or narratological possibilities. Such an argument seems unlikely to provoke controversy; one of its difficulties, at least insofar as Bluestone’s general aim of giving movies artistic respectability is concerned, is that it takes place entirely on the grounds of modernist aestheticism. Given Bluestone’s thesis, film can’t acquire true cultural capital unless it first theorizes its own media-specific form. Hence Bluestone argues that “the end products of novel and film represent different aesthetic genera, as different from each other as ballet is from architecture” (5). At the same time, however, he tends to confirm the artistic priority and superiority of canonical novels, if only because they provide the films he discusses with their sources and artistic standards.

When we start from Bluestone’s position, the only way to avoid making film seem belated, middlebrow, or culturally inferior is to devalue adaptation altogether. That’s more or less what happened in Europe at almost the same moment when Bluestone’s book was published. The central importance of the French New Wave in the history of worldwide taste and opinion was that it was able to break with traditional movie criticism and establish a truly modernist (as well as somewhat Arnoldian) film criticism by launching an attack on what Truffaut called a “tradition of quality” made up of respectable literary adaptations. One of the best-kept secrets of the New Wave was that many of their own films were based on books; the sources they chose, however, were often lowbrow, and when they closely adapted “serious” works or wrote essays about film adaptations (such as Bazin’s essay on Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest), they made sure that the auteur would seem at least as important as the author. Along similar lines, they gave legitimacy to art-film directors who were less interested in adapting literature than in interrogating or “reading” it. One of the many who followed in their wake was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, an explosively antibourgeois filmmaker who once argued that cinematic transformation of a literary work should never assume its purpose is to realize the images that literature evokes in the minds of its readers. Such a goal is preposterous, Fassbinder wrote, because there are so many different readers with different fantasies. His own aim, as he described it in relation to Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and Querelle (1982), was to avoid a “composite” fantasy and to engage in what he called “an unequivocal and single-minded questioning of the piece of literature and its language” (Fassbinder, 168).

The French auteurists never treated movies as a “seventh art” or a separate but equal member of the cultural pantheon. Instead, adopting Alexandre Astruc’s idea of the camera stylo, they spoke of film as a language and the director as a kind of writer, wielding a lens instead of a pen. They elevated the cinematic mise-en-scène to a greater importance than the scenario, and partly as a result it’s now commonplace for film historians to speak of directorial masterpieces or canonical works of cinema that revise and far surpass their sources. (My list includes Eisenstein’s October [1928], Murnau’s Sunrise [1927], Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons [1942], Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman [1948], Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960], and Godard’s Contempt [1963].) They also made it a critical commonplace to observe that some of the best movie directors avoid adaptation of respected literature or radically deviate from their literary sources. The practice is enshrined during Hitchcock’s interview with Truffaut, in which Hitchcock claims that the approach he usually takes to sources is to “read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget about the book and start to create cinema” (71). He would never adapt Crime and Punishment, he says, in part because he thinks that feature films are more like short stories than like novels and in part because “in Dostoyevsky’s novel there are many, many words and all of them have a function” (72). Truffaut quickly agrees, voicing one of the axioms of modernist aesthetics and pure cinema: “That’s right. Theoretically, a masterpiece is something that has already found its perfection of form, its definitive form” (72). And indeed, Hitchcock’s films lend support to these conclusions, although it should also be noted that there are exceptions to the rule: The 39 Steps (based on a novel by John Buchan), Sabotage (based on a novel by Joseph Conrad), and The Birds (based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier) are quite free adaptations, but the half-hour TV film “Lamb to the Slaughter,” one of Hitchcock’s minor but most perfect achievements, is a quite literal approach to a Roald Dahl short story, scripted by Dahl himself.

Since the 1980s, academic writing has become more aware that the relationship between film and literature is complex, involving a good deal more than the art of adapting books into films—see, for instance, Timothy Corrigan’s useful textbook Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader (1999), which explores a number of important sociological and historical issues. Where formal analysis is concerned, the study of adaptations has gained sophistication by making use of the structuralist and poststructuralist poetics of Roland Barthes, the narratology of Gérard Genette, and the neo-formalism of Bordwell and Thompson. For the most part, however, adaptation study has remained literary in nature and continues to waver back and forth between the two approaches exemplified by Bluestone and the auteurists. The Bluestone approach relies on an implicit metaphor of translation, which governs all investigations of how codes move across sign systems. Writing in this category usually deals with the concept of literary versus cinematic form and pays close attention to the problem of textual fidelity in order to identify the specific formal capabilities of the media. By contrast, the auteurist approach relies on an implicit metaphor of performance. It, too, involves questions of fidelity, but it subordinates media specificity and formal systems to an analysis of individual style.

The problem with most writing about adaptation as translation is that it tends to valorize the literary canon and essentialize the nature of cinema. One example is Seymour Chatman’s “What Novels Can Do That Film Can’t (and Vice Versa),” first published in Critical Inquiry in 1981. A theoretically informed, highly intelligent discussion of Jean Renoir’s 1936 adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s “Une Partie de campagne,” it shows how the same narrative is represented in different media. Chatman is unconcerned with questions of value, but his argument is based on respected literary and cinematic examples. He makes important observations about the ways description and point of view are treated respectively in realist fiction and narrative cinema, but he also makes dubious generalizations about the film medium. In the last analysis, cinema is an audiovisual recording and projection technology tied to a system of production, distribution, and exhibition. At the purely technical level, whether based on photography or digital imaging, it’s capable of representing the whole range of signifying practices, including the printed pages of books. It obviously makes sense to ask what conventional novels can do that conventional narrative films can’t (and vice versa), but the qualifying adjective “conventional” needs to be stressed, and we might learn somewhat more by broadening the textual milieu. Charles Willeford’s relatively little known Pick-Up, a pulp-fiction masterpiece of the 1950s, would present more difficulty for a filmmaker than Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (which has, in fact, been turned into a movie) for the simple reason that a crucially important word describing the central character doesn’t appear until the final sentence. I refrain from a spoiler quotation of the word and simply recommend the book.

Another problem with most writing on adaptation as translation is that it deals of necessity with sexually charged materials and can’t avoid gendered language associated with the notion of “fidelity.” George Bluestone tries to defend certain movies against the accusation that they “violate” their sources; Seymour Chatman spends almost half of his essay analyzing the way Renoir adapts a description of a flirtatious young woman on a swing; and in a New York Times essay that is far less systematic and far more judgmental than Chatman’s, “What Only Words, Not Film, Can Portray,” novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick derides Jane Campion’s 1997 adaptation of A Portrait of a Lady because it “perverts” Henry James, replacing his “gossamer vibrations of the interior life” and “philosophy of the soul” with “crudity,” “self-oriented eroticism,” and “voluptuous gazing” (January 5, 1997). Ozick reverses the standard imagery of high-cultural disdain, making the movies seem less like an ignorant shopgirl and more like a crude, lascivious male bent on despoiling a loved object. I’m reminded of the first sentence of Fredric Jameson’s Signatures of the Visible (1990), a book about film by the most distinguished contemporary proponent of the modernist tradition: “The visual is essentially pornographic,” Jameson declares, as if the very act of translating words into photographic images involves a move toward something bodily and nasty.

Brian McFarlane’s extremely useful and well-informed study of adaptation as translation, Novel to Film (1996), is aware of some of the problems I’ve been describing. It begins with an attack on “fidelity criticism” and contains analysis of an interesting variety of adaptations, including MGM’s Random Harvest (1942), which is based on a best seller, and Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), which is a remake of a film based on a pulp novel. And yet McFarlane himself is obsessively concerned with problems of fidelity—necessarily so, because his major purpose is to settle the issue of just how faithful an adaptation can be. He gives us a scrupulous demonstration of the degree to which the “cardinal” features of narrative, most of them exemplified by canonical nineteenth-century novels from British and American authors, can be transposed intact to movies. As he puts it, he sets up a distinction between “those novelistic elements which can be transferred and those which require adaptation proper, the former essentially concerned with narrative, which functions irrespective of medium, and the latter with enunciation, which calls for a consideration of two different signifying systems” (195).

Here as in most other places, the study of adaptation stops at the water’s edge, as if hesitant to move beyond important formalist concerns and ask other, equally interesting questions. Writing about adaptation should be a flexible, animating discourse because it can address such a wide variety of things. As Dudley Andrew pointed out in 1984 in a seminal essay, every representational film (and every representational artifact) could be regarded as an adaptation—hence the very word “representation” (Andrew, “Adaptation,” 96–106). Andrew estimates that more than half of all commercial movies have derived from novels, a figure that may be high but isn’t wildly exaggerated. In 1985 the New York Times reported that one in fifty novels published in this country were optioned by Hollywood (July 14, 1985), and if we extend the idea of adaptation beyond novels, the number of “derivative” films is quite large. In 1998, Variety published statistics indicating that 20 percent of the movies produced that year had their sources in books of one kind or another (authors included John Grisham, Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Howard Stern, James Ellroy, and Leo Tolstoy), and another 20 percent was based upon plays, sequels, remakes, TV shows, and magazine or newspaper articles—meaning that only about half of the pictures that year were “originals” (February 2–8, 1998). Academics have limited the issues at stake, not only by focusing largely on novels but also by insisting on what Andrew calls the “cultural status” of a prior model. “In the case of those texts explicitly termed ‘adaptations,’” Andrew writes, “the cultural model which the cinema represents is already treasured as a representation in another sign system” (97). Precisely; one could hardly expect to find a better definition of what adaptation means to most critics and historians. But the definition reveals that adaptation study in the limited sense is only partly about enunciative techniques or the “cardinal” features of narrative; it’s also about the interpretation of canonical literature in more or less traditional fashion, a system of critical writing that tends to reproduce cultural orthodoxies.

To his credit, Andrew argues that “It is time for adaptation stud[y] to take a sociological turn” (104), although the things he recommends for investigation, while valid, are conventionally literary—for example, the changing history of naturalism in Zola, Gorky, and Renoir. What we need is a broader definition of adaptation and a sociology that takes into account the commercial apparatus, the audience, and the academic wing of the culture industry. Academics need to move the discussion of adaptation slightly away from the great-novels-into-great-films theme and give more attention to economic, political, and broadly cultural issues. For example, we need more analysis of the relation between TV and theatrical film. Postmodern Hollywood has created a virtual genre out of big-screen adaptations of old TV shows (The Fugitive, The Mod Squad, Charlie’s Angels), while, in an ironic reversal, TV has become increasingly interested in the literary canon. Until quite recently, Masterpiece Theater was the major producer of filmed adaptations of “respectable” literature in America, reaching audiences as large as Hollywood in its heyday and probably helping to identify a niche market for the successful Merchant Ivory adaptations of E. M. Forster that played in theaters. By the end of the twentieth century, cable TV was producing a good deal of similar material. In the United States in 1999, the A&E network aired a miniseries based on C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower, the USA network produced Moby Dick, and Bravo broadcast a new version of the much-adapted The Count of Monte Cristo. During the 1999–2000 season, TNT produced adaptations of Animal Farm, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, and Don Quixote. As this list suggests, Edwardian and nineteenth-century classics are the favored sources for “prestige” TV movies, just as they were for classic Hollywood, in part because they have a presold audience and are comparatively easy to adapt. Along similar lines, the literature most frequently adapted for twenty-first-century prestige TV is the popular mystery or melodrama, as in 2011, when Masterpiece Mystery adapted Michael Dibdin’s novels about police detective Aurelio Zen and HBO produced Todd Haynes’s adaptation of James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce.

The current economic environment, which is characterized by enormous mergers in the communications industry and the growth of home theater systems, makes it especially important for us to understand the purely commercial relations between publishing, cinematic, and broadcast media. We need to ask why certain books (or comic books) become of interest to Hollywood in specific periods, and we need more investigations into the historical relation between movies and book publishing. We also need to ask what conditions of the marketplace govern the desire for fidelity. As one example, an audience survey conducted by David O. Selznick in the 1940s determined that relatively few people had read Jane Eyre and that a movie based on the novel did not need to be especially faithful; on the other hand, Selznick had been a fanatic about maintaining fidelity in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940) because he knew that a substantial part of the audience had read Margaret Mitchell’s and Daphne du Maurier’s best-selling books (Sconce, 140–62).

In addition to expanding the questions we ask, we need to augment the metaphors of translation and performance with the metaphor of intertextuality, or with what Mikhail Bakhtin called dialogics. This approach to adaptation is best demonstrated by Robert Stam, who emphasizes “the infinite and open-ended possibilities generated by all the discursive practices of a culture” and the “entire matrix of communicative utterances within which the artistic text is situated” (Stam, “Beyond Fidelity,” 64). Stam takes us beyond simple attempts to compare “originals” with “transformations.” If we followed his advice, adaptation study would be brought more into line with both contemporary theory and contemporary filmmaking. We now live in a media-saturated environment dense with cross-references and filled with borrowings from movies, books, video games, and every other form of representation. High modernism resisted adaptation and emphasized media-specific form, but postmodernism and the entertainment industry are bent on a busy crossbreeding between the media (thus satisfying the aims of late capitalism). Books can become movies, but movies themselves can also become novels, published screenplays, Broadway musicals, television shows, or remakes.

A minor but charmingly clever example of a film that reflects this protean, highly allusive environment is Richard Kwietniowski’s Love and Death on Long Island (1998), which tells the story of a sheltered British novelist who goes to see an E. M. Forster adaptation at the local Cineplex and wanders by mistake into Hot Pants College II. The novelist develops a crush on a young actor he sees on the screen, who reminds him of a Pre-Raphaelite painting of the death of Chatterton that he has seen in the Tate Gallery. I won’t describe the plot any further, except to note that it’s based on a novel by Gilbert Adair, which offers a rewriting of Mann’s Death in Venice and Nabokov’s Lolita. The film complicates things still more by introducing full-scale parodies of Hollywood B movies and TV sitcoms; it brings high culture and low culture, the literary and the cinematic, into ludic juxtaposition. Notice also that Hot Pants College II, the film that stimulates the lonely novelist’s desire, is a sequel. On a theoretical level, sequels, remakes, parodies, and pastiches are quite similar to adaptations; they seldom if ever involve questions of media-specific form, but all are derivative or imitative, in danger of eliciting critical opprobrium because in one sense or another they copy “culturally treasured” originals. We need only compare the critical discourse surrounding Hitchcock’s Psycho, a film adaptation that some American critics once regarded as a tasteless horror movie but that nearly everyone now acknowledges as a masterpiece, with the discourse surrounding both its sequels/prequel and its 1998 remake, which encountered nearly universal derision.

Viewed from the larger perspective of the engines of modernity, every movie tends to problematize originality and autonomy, if only because its photographs or digital images of the living world are taken out of their initial contexts. Walter Benjamin was aware of this phenomenon in his famous essay on mechanical reproduction, where he quotes Abel Gance’s enthusiastic 1927 pronouncement, “Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films.” “Presumably without intending it,” Benjamin remarks, Gance was issuing “a far-reaching liquidation” (151). André Bazin was aware of much the same issues in his 1948 essay on adaptation, to which I alluded at the beginning. In this remarkable essay, Bazin discusses adaptation mostly in terms of remediation (one of his examples is a concert orchestra broadcast over a radio) and asks us to think of film adaptations as similar to engravings that make the so-called original “readily accessible to all.” Most discussion of such films, he notes, has been conducted on the level of formalist aesthetics, which is preoccupied with the nature of the “cinematic.” But “one must first know,” he writes, “to what end the adaptation is designed: for the cinema or its audience. One must also realize that most adaptors care far more about the latter than about the former” (Bazin, “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,” 44).

Bazin attacks the “clichéd bias according to which culture is inseparable from intellectual effort,” and the “classical modes of cultural communication, which are at once a defense of culture and a secreting of it behind high walls” (45). He notes that adaptation has a number of important social functions, one of which, not always involving remediation, is directly pedagogical, taking the form of “digests” such as the “abridged” editions of classic literature used in classrooms. (Most film adaptations of novels are in fact digests or condensations of their sources, but one could add such things as Classics Illustrated comics, Reader’s Digest condensed books, and plot summaries in Cliff Notes. Where the pedagogical uses of the digest are concerned, an interesting study could be written about the long and complex relationship between educational institutions and Hollywood. As one instance, Guerric DeBona has pointed out that David O. Selznick’s 1935 adaptation of David Copperfield was marketed to high school English teachers by means of a free illustrated monograph on the art of cinematic adaptation, complete with study questions for students.) Still another function of adaptation, Bazin suggests, is in the creation of national imaginaries. How many of us have actually read Moby Dick, and how many of us have seen one of the comic-book, theatrical, TV, or film adaptations that give it a kind of mythic or folkloric significance for U.S. culture? Some of the most highly adaptable authors—Twain and Shakespeare are preeminent examples in the Anglo-American world—have been especially important to the formation of national identity, and for this reason it would be interesting to have more analysis of the ways books, plays, movies, and TV shows have been subject not only to remediation and remaking but also to cross-cultural or cross-national adaptation. Such uses are sometimes overlooked because of what Bazin refers to as “a rather modern notion for which the critics are in large part responsible: that of the untouchability of the work of art.” The nineteenth century, he says, “firmly established an idolatry of form, mainly literary, that is still with us” (45). And the idolatry of form blinds us to the fact that all great novels—even the ones by Flaubert or Joyce—create characters that can be appropriated for many uses.

At this juncture and many others in his essay, Bazin sounds like a populist and a postmodernist. “The ferocious defense of literary works,” he says, “is to a certain extent aesthetically justified; but we must also be aware that it rests on a rather recent, individualistic conception of the ‘author’ and the ‘work,’ a conception that was far from being ethically rigorous in the seventeenth century and that started to become legally defined only at the end of the eighteenth. . . . All things considered, it is possible to imagine that we are moving toward a reign of adaptation in which the notion of the unity of the work of art, if not the very notion of the author himself, will be destroyed” (49). Some people today believe we have already arrived at that point. I hope not, but it’s time that writers on adaptation recognize what Bazin saw in 1948. The study of adaptation needs to be joined with the study of recycling, remaking, and every other form of retelling in the age of mechanical reproduction and electronic communication. By this means, adaptation will become part of a general theory of repetition and will move from the margins to the center of media studies.

POSTSCRIPT

The argument above is a revised version of an introduction I wrote for Film Adaptation, published in 2000. Several books on adaptation were published in the wake of that volume, and I should mention a few particularly good ones here.

Robert Stam’s Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (2005) elaborates further on the theme of dialogism and intertextuality, in the process making significant contributions to the poetics of cinema and prose fiction. With Alessandra Raengo, Stam has also edited two large anthologies, Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation (2005) and A Companion to Literature and Film (2005), both of which treat adaptation as what one of the writers, Dudley Andrew, calls “the life principle” of cultural production. Guerric DeBona’s Film Adaptation in the Hollywood Studio Era (2010) is an incisive, well-researched account of “prestige” adaptations in classic Hollywood and is especially good at showing how the films in question were shaped not simply by their sources but by industrial and sociopolitical factors. Colin McCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner are the editors of True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (2011), which ends with an afterword by Fredric Jameson. In modernist fashion, and in contrast with most contemporary writers, Jameson argues that at some level all the individual media and their artists “seek each other’s death, in the sense in which they brook no other gods besides themselves.” The most productive course to follow in thinking about adaptation, he concludes, is to emphasize the “antagonism and incompatibility” between the media, at the same time insisting on the formal pleasures, ideological differences, and “psychoanalytic analysis or class receptivity” that become “most visible in the process of comparison” (231).

David Boyd and R. Barton Palmer have edited an intriguing anthology of essays on Hitchcock’s adaptations, Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adapter (2011). A refreshingly wide-ranging discussion of literary and other kinds of cinematic adaptation is Thomas Leitch’s Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (2007), which also offers a convincing argument about how the study of adaptation can help students write and think clearly. In addition to Literature/Film Quarterly, which has published scholarly articles on the subject since 1973, we now have Adaptation, which since 2008 has published articles on a variety of topics involving film and TV. But the recent theorist who most emphasizes the ubiquity of adaptation, covering everything from literature to Barbie dolls, is Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation (2006). Hutcheon’s concluding chapter poses the question “What is not an adaptation?” She defines the key term as “an extended, deliberate, announced revisitation of a particular work of art” (170); hence, for her, not all adaptations involve remediation (as examples, she cites J. M. Coetzee’s Foe [1986], which revisits Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe [1719], and Vincente Minnelli’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse [1962], which remakes Rex Ingram’s 1921 film of the same name). On the production side of adaptation, she points out, texts or works of art can be adjusted or altered by revision, editing, publication, display, and performance; on the reception side, they can be destabilized by translation, bowdlerization, censorship, and “cultural revision,” in which receivers begin to refashion the initial works by remaking or remediating them. This “continuum model” offers several ways of thinking about adaptation—as retelling, rewriting, remediation, reinterpretation, and re-creation (172). Hutcheon also poses the question “What is the appeal of adaptations?” One of her answers, which requires that audiences know the source (often they do not), is that successful adaptations involve pleasures similar to theme and variation in music: “We find a story we like and then do variations on it. . . . It is not a copy in any mode of reproduction, mechanical or otherwise. It is repetition but without replication, bringing together the comfort of ritual and recognition with the delight of surprise and novelty” (173).

Finally, I should call attention to another of André Bazin’s essays, “For an Impure Cinema: In Defense of Adaptation,” which has been given a new translation by Timothy Barnard for What Is Cinema (2009), his English-language edition of Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Although this essay is already well known, it deserves rereading, especially with Barnard’s helpful editorial notes. Bazin gives us a salutary reminder that adaptation has a very old cultural history: like André Malraux, he describes Renaissance painting in its initial phase as an adaptation of Gothic sculpture, and he points out that Byzantine miniatures were enlarged in stone to the size of cathedral tympana. (He doesn’t mention an equally early and perhaps even more striking example: Le jeu d’Adam, one of the oldest medieval mystery plays of the twelfth century, which dramatizes the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve.) His essay is filled with fine critical discrimination of individual film adaptations and also has interesting things to say about the relation between modernist literature and film. Unlike Claude-Edmonde Magny and most other critics, Bazin argues that cinema learned more from modern literature than modern literature learned from cinema: “It is impossible to tell whether Manhattan Transfer and La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate) would be very different without film, but I am certain that The Power and the Glory and Citizen Kane would never have been conceived without James Joyce and John Dos Passos” (120).