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Film Adaptation

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lightbulbAbout this topic
Film adaptation is the process of transforming a written work, such as a novel, play, or short story, into a cinematic format. This involves interpreting the source material's themes, characters, and narrative structure to create a new visual representation while often making alterations to suit the medium of film.
lightbulbAbout this topic
Film adaptation is the process of transforming a written work, such as a novel, play, or short story, into a cinematic format. This involves interpreting the source material's themes, characters, and narrative structure to create a new visual representation while often making alterations to suit the medium of film.

Key research themes

1. How can Translation Studies frameworks elucidate shifts in meaning and context during film adaptation?

This theme investigates film adaptation through the lens of Translation Studies, emphasizing adaptation as a form of intersemiotic translation where narratives transfer from literary texts to audiovisual media. It focuses on the shifts—both semantic and contextual—that occur in adapting novels and stories into films, considering production and reception contexts. This approach transcends ideology-based fidelity criticism by analyzing adaptation as a negotiated, culturally situated communication act, thus offering a systematic methodology to analyze how meaning and narrative transform across media.

Key finding: This paper presents a model from Translation Studies to analyze adaptation shifts, arguing that film adaptations function as intersemotic translations involving bidirectional communication between literary source texts and... Read more
Key finding: Building upon the interdisciplinary nexus of Adaptation and Translation Studies, this paper applies a model combining descriptive/comparative and interpretive components to identify adaptation shifts from novel to film. The... Read more
Key finding: Utilizing Perdikaki’s adaptation shift model grounded in Translation Studies taxonomy, this study critically analyzes the film adaptation of 'The Handmaid’s Tale' as intersemiotic translation. It identifies significant shifts... Read more

2. What narrative and stylistic strategies enable film adaptations to negotiate fidelity and auteurial expression?

This theme explores how film adaptations balance fidelity to the literary source material with the filmmaker’s artistic vision, particularly through screenplay modifications and directorial choices. It examines how adaptations are reshaped to fit the visual and temporal constraints of cinema, how narrative elements are restructured, and the extent to which filmmakers privilege their auteurist perspective. The focus lies on the negotiation of narrative priorities and cinematic language in transposing novels, addressing challenges like pacing, characterization, and suspense in adaptation.

Key finding: This study reveals how Ron Howard’s adaptation of 'The Da Vinci Code' illustrates the auteurist function by intentionally repudiating certain narrative elements from Dan Brown’s novel to suit cinematic storytelling. It... Read more
Key finding: By comparing Mohsin Hamid’s novel with Mira Nair’s film, this research underscores the distinct narrative techniques and modes of 'telling' vs 'showing' intrinsic to literature and film. It shows how filmmakers address... Read more
Key finding: This comparative study of two animated adaptations reveals how different directors and studios use style and aesthetic to support divergent interpretations and creative ‘appropriations’ of the same literary source. It... Read more

3. How do multimodal and intersemiotic techniques in film enable the preservation or transformation of complex literary narrative strategies such as unreliable narration and multilingualism?

This theme focuses on how film adaptations employ audiovisual techniques to render complex narrative features present in literature, including unreliable narration and the nuanced use of language. It examines strategies like voiceover, framing, camera perspective, sound design, and code-switching that translate literary ambiguities and multilingual contexts into cinematic form, thereby negotiating audience comprehension and artistic representation of narrative voice and linguistic diversity.

Key finding: This analysis of 'Inglourious Basterds' foregrounds the narrative role of multilingualism and interpreters within film, showing how the film’s self-conscious code-switching and language management parody and extend prior... Read more
Key finding: This study systematically identifies six cinematic techniques—verbal habits, voiceover narration, narrative framing, visual effects, soundtrack, and camera perspective—that effectively maintain literary unreliable narrators... Read more
Key finding: While examining the adaptation of Ballard’s novel 'Crash', this paper reveals how director David Cronenberg preserves subtle, avant-garde humor through filmic techniques such as affectless performances, anticlimactic scenes,... Read more

All papers in Film Adaptation

In this book, Nariman Skakov explores the phenomenon of spatio-temporal lapse in Tarkovsky's cinema - from 'Ivan's Childhood' (1962) to 'Sacrifice' (1986). He argues that dreams, visions, mirages, memories, revelations, reveries, and... more
El propósito de este ensayo es poner de manifiesto la confluencia de la tragedia de venganza y las prácticas extremas del arte del cuerpo o body art en la película "El cocinero, el ladrón, su mujer y su amante" (1991) de Peter Greenaway,... more
Trabajo de análisis sobre la adaptación dirigida por Joe Wright, con Kiera Knightle en el papel de Anna.
El presente análisis muestra la riqueza que existe en esta joven rama de la crítica literaria en nuestro país. Por tal razón, este trabajo se apoya en la comparación narrativa del cuento de “Las babas del diablo” de Julio... more
A brief history exploring the development of the practice of adapting literary texts into films.
The essay explores the multifaceted nature of the journey through sex-change narratives; the approach centres on intimacy and the individual. The process of construction and re-construction of identity through sex-reassignment is analysed... more
This study will highlight how rhetorical devices and stylistic techniques are employed both in the novel Pride and Prejudice and in its 2005 film adaptation to transform and mitigate the destabilizing power of passion. The use of tropes,... more
The unprecedented economic growth and immigration that Ireland experienced between 1995 and 2007 did not only challenge national but also ethnic, social, and gender identities. The contributions to this volume explore how films tackle... more
In celebration of the newly created Andrew Davies archive at De Montfort University, Leicester, The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance is issuing a special edition on the British screenwriter.
The article will consider how, based on the sci-fi novel "Roadside Picnic" (1972) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, director Andrei Tarkovsky shot the author's film "Stalker" (1979). film adaptation of a literary work, that is, he... more
This book addresses the motif of literary twinship from the Shakespearean age until today. Twins have all too often been discussed as mere footnotes to the allegedly more nuanced motif of the doppelganger, or as a kind of 'embarrassing'... more
This volume looks at the ways in which adaptations can and have been taught by leading academics in the field of Adaptation Studies from all over the world. While aware that Shakespeare and canonical literature remain the mainstay of... more
Resumen: El escritor cretense Nikos Kazantzakis mantuvo a lo largo de su vida un continuo interés en la figura de Cristo, lo que también tuvo su plasmación en su carrera literaria. Una de sus obras principales, la novela La última... more
This article traces depictions of the character Njai Dasima, created by G. Francis for his novel Tjerita Njai Dasima ('The Story of Njai Dasima', 1896), through Indonesian cinematic history. It examines four feature film portrayals of... more
Following the recent serial adaptation of Richard Adams’ novel Watership Down (1972), this paper will undertake a comparison of various serial and cinematographic adaptations, including the 1978 movie directed by Martin Rosen, the... more
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or... more
In the digital age it has become almost impossible to view children's texts outside the context of the new media. This study will focus on three works of children's fiction, The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, Where the Wild... more
Les novellisations des magazines spécialisés forment le continent oublié de l’histoire culturelle du cinéma, malgré la précocité avec laquelle ce type de presse à grand tirage s’est tourné vers les adaptations romancées de films,... more
The essays collected in this book focus on unusual relations and marginal objects, with the purpose to draw a portrait of Luchino Visconti less fossilized than that resulting from canonical authorial perspectives, and more vividly... more
Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted for the cinema since 1899 in multiple film genres, including silent film, film noire, Western, theatrical film, and Hollywood films. This course examines Shakespeare’s romance play, histories,... more
http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/titles/format/9781612490298 ///////// What is entailed in the cultural practice of screening, in both senses of the verb, Shakespeare in transnational audio-visual idioms in the modern times? The past... more
Many years after queer and queer-of-color theories made such a binary indefensible, art history and film studies remain committed to a distinction between criticality and pleasure. The former remains a desirable activist strategy and the... more
Audiences for blockbuster event-film sequels and adaptations often formulate highly developed expectations, motivations, understandings and opinions well before the films are released. A range of intertextual and paratextual influences... more
Post-Soviet era directors have been searching for the new aesthetic footholds in the images of Gogol’s works. Starting from pure satire denouncing the pre-revolutionary system, they have moved on to the absurdist grotesque. This was... more
Dans les rues embrumées du Havre industriel, Jean, déserteur de la Coloniale, erre en compagnie de son mal-être. Sa rencontre avec la belle Nelly, dans une cabane isolée aux allures de décor fantomatique, précipite son destin tragique.... more
This article provides a stylistic examination of Sidney Lumet's thriller Deathtrap (1982), analyzing how its strategies of staging and performance generate narrational effects of suspense and surprise. It argues that Lumet anchors these... more
Take your projects further by sweetening and mixing sound, compositing footage, adjusting color, using advanced editing techniques, managing projects, working with 360 video for VR headsets, exporting, and much more.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians is a book series, which is based on Greek mythology, written by Rick Riordan. The first book of the series "Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief" is about adventures of twelve year old... more
Opracowanie zostało opublikowane w 2016 r., a więc nie mogło być w nim wzmianki o filmie, którego premiera planowana jest na 2020 r. Oczywiście chętnie napiszę także o nowej wersji, w której Stanisława Kaczyńskiego gra odtwórca roli... more
PALABRAS CLAVE: Homeland, Sully, Clint Eastwood, locura, compromiso, héroe Mediante el análisis de algunas escenas seleccionadas del último capítulo de la sexta temporada de Homeland y de la película Sully, reflexiono sobre el origen... more
Part of a larger, forthcoming project on screen adaptations of novels that have won or been short-listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction, this paper focuses in particular on director Ang Lee’s 2012 adaptation of Yann Martel’s 2002... more
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