CHAPTER – II

LITERATURE REVIEW

2.0.0 INTRODUCTION

“The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That is why we
go to movies and say, "Oh, the book is better.”

Paulo Coelho truly talks about what goes on in the audience's minds after
watching a film adapted from a book. A reader will always expect the book's
characters to come alive; an onscreen adaptation makes that expectation a
reality.

“Audiences have continued to want to see what the books look like. They are
interested in comparing their images with those created by the film-maker”
(McFarlane, 1996)

If we think about it this way, film is the natural next step from the novel. It takes
the book's images and turns them into real-world scenes that seem almost
touchable. This idea is appealing. However, a movie can do more than a novel
because it uses more tools. It works with words, images, and sounds. The idea
that an adaptation should follow a book exactly, word for word, is entirely
wrong.

“Words are always the same on the page, but the picture on the screen keeps
changing according to the direction of our attention. The film, in this sense,
represents a much richer experience” (Monaco, 2009)

However, adaptations can be a double-edged sword due to the need for fidelity
to the original text. Filming an adaptation is a gamble for studios, as they pay
for the literary rights and then for production costs, cast, locations, etc. Straying
too far from the original work risks losing fans and money. There is no sure
formula to predict the success or failure of an adaptation. Yet, many blockbuster

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films from the past were based on literature. This research will analyse various
films and their source books and aim to identify factors that make a story
suitable for film adaptation.

So, how do we decide whether a film would be a good or bad adaptation of a

particular novel? This brings us to Adaptation studies. Fidelity is the most
crucial factor and is always a hot topic for discussion in terms of any adaptation.

“Indeed, there is an old (and sexist) line that says translations are like wives:
they can be faithful but not beautiful or beautiful but not faithful, never both.
That is, literal translations may be more accurate, but relatively free ones are
likely to be more attractive and engaging to readers of the second language.”
(DAVID L. KRANZ, 2008)

In this thesis, fidelity will be defined as the level of faithfulness to the original
text, which is the novel. The level of faithfulness will be compared with the
corresponding novel. In his book "Beyond Fidelity," Robert Stam observed that
these terms express our feelings about a certain adaptation. Words like fidelity,
infidelity, and faithful are universally used as key terms in adaptation studies,
reflecting our appreciation or disappointment with how a literary work is
adapted. Over time, these terms have become central to the field of adaptation
studies. The question of fidelity to the original text is often a major focus in
discussions about adaptations. Sometimes, it seems to be the primary concern
for critics. However, many factors influence the relationship between film and
literature, and fidelity is just one of them.
“The fact that one author finds “boringly faithful‟ a film which another sees as
having only “a tenuous relation‟ to the original while yet another finds it “too
faithful‟ suggests that there is no clear consensus about what “faithful‟ means
in this discourse. Faithful to what” (McFarlane, 1996)? What should the
adaptation be faithful to?

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Fidelity, in its simplest terms, refers to how well a film version portrays the plot,
characters, setting, themes, and events of a story in a way that stays true to the
written version.
“The primary motive for fidelity in the most widely known adaptations is
financial, not aesthetic” (Leitch, 2007)
I want to emphasise a previously mentioned point: the more popular the book,
the higher the chances that studios will choose to adapt it into a film. Audiences
will judge the film based on how closely it matches what they imagined while
reading the book. Unfortunately, the audience's vision often doesn't align with
the filmmaker's interpretation of the same book. McFarlane also observed that
any film adaptation can only aim to reflect the filmmaker’s reading of the
original and hope that it resonates with many other readers and viewers.
“The novel is linear whereas the film is spatial.” (McFarlane, 1996)
This means that, in a novel, a reader learns things linearly, one by one, as he/she
goes through the lines. In a film, however, at one point, a viewer can learn many
things simultaneously. What a writer describes on several pages could be
expressed by one look at the screen. The word-by-word reading of a novel
cannot be compared to the frame-by-frame watching of a film. “The frame is
never registered as a discrete entity in the way the word is” (McFarlane, 1996)

Adaptation involves translating a novel to fit a new medium, target, or audience.

This role of adaptation prompts critics to discuss how faithful a film is to its
literary source. In literature, readers use their imagination to visualise characters
and settings, while cinema provides ready-made characters and a defined space.
Adaptations can make an already-read novel easier to understand by bringing
characters and context to life. Adaptations are not intended to make young
people more interested in reading books. In fact, the opposite is often true:
people are more likely to watch adaptations of books they have already read.
Watching an adaptation does not usually encourage people to read the book.
Sometimes, adaptations can even limit the imagination by showing everything
on screen.

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“Adaptations are condemned as unfaithful because critics read only one way –
from novel to film – and find that the film has made changes. But if one reads
in both directions – from novel to film and then from film back to novel – one
often finds the alleged infidelities clearly in the text” (Elliot, 2003)

Some critics insist on the Fidelity criteria, and hence, they underline the fact
that the filmmaker has a different perception of what the critic saw himself.
However, it is impossible sometimes to talk about fidelity because two readers
of the same book may not see the same thing. The adaptation issue has been
revoked by a lot of authors because of the same reason.

This brings us to another way of categorising the Adaptations.

2.1.0 CATEGORIES OF ADAPTATIONS

Over the years, some writers have proposed strategies which seek to categorise
adaptations so that fidelity to the original loses some of its privileged position.
Dudley Andrew recognises three main approaches to literary material:
Borrowing, transformation and intersecting (Helman, 1996).

Over the years, some writers have proposed strategies which seek to
categorise adaptations so that fidelity to the original loses some of its
privileged position.
Dudley Andrew recognises three main approaches to literary material:
Borrowing, transformation and intersecting (Helman, 1996).

2.1.1. Borrowing can be applied to anything. It literally means that a

Director/ Filmmaker can borrow anything from the book: an Idea, a topic, a
scene, a subplot, a character.
2.1.2. Transformation means that the original text of the book undergoes
a change because of the film. It is a category of adaptation that reproduces
the main ideas of the original text. As Helman suggests, the film can be
faithful either to the text or to the spirit. We have seen many examples of

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this particular style of adaptation in India, and I will study a few of them in
the course of the research.
2.1.3. Intersecting is just a reflection of the literary source. The original
is more important in this film.

Another author, Geoffrey Wagner, distinguishes three main types of

adaptation: transposition, analogy and commentary. (Helman, 1996)

2.1.4. Transposition means plainly to bring the novel to the screen. This
kind of adaptation can be watched as if the audience goes through the pages
of the respective novel, not noticing any differences.
2.1.5. Commentary means an adaptation where the original material is
changed to some extent by the author‟'s deliberate intention.
2.1.6. Analogy is a major departure from the literary text, resulting in a
completely different piece of art.

Michael Klein and Gillian Parker introduced a very similar three-member

model of adaptation: fidelity to the main thrust of the narrative; keeping the
basic structure of the narrative while the actual text is interpreted or
deconstructed; taking an original novel as a raw material, as a starting point
for the creation of different art form. (Helman, 1996)

Some film theories were also taken from the theories of translation, like
John Dryden's:

2.1.7 Metaphrase: Word by word and line by line complete translation

from one language to the other.

2.1.8 Paraphrase: where the overall sense of the literary work is magnified
and translated, but not word by word.

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2.1.9 Imitation: This only takes some general hints from the literary work
and chooses to translate with full liberty, letting go of the word and sense
both as he sees fit.

Like a translator, the filmmaker who adapts must demonstrate some fidelity
to the source text and, at the same time, create a new work of art in a new
language, in this case, the cinematic language. (McFarlane, 1996)

So ideally, the film critic needs first to identify where the particular film
stands in these three categories and then analyse the film. Critics, when
assessing an adaptation work, should first be able to identify the category to
which the work belongs. This attempt to define classes tries to tell that
fidelity criteria is over venerated, and should not be considered a critical
criterion. A faithful adaptation may definitely be interesting and attractive.
This does not make an original work based on a source novel but that has
reinterpreted and even transformed it, less valuable. Even if a film uses the
same language of the novel it is based on, yet words are still different. The
story is told differently, more or less faithfully to the original text.

Overall, there is not a lot of material that can be found in the Indian film
school libraries like Whistling woods, FTII, barring a few textbooks by
foreign authors as listed below, some of these have been cited in the text of
the review.

• Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film

Adaptation by Robert Stam.
• The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen by Imelda
Whelehan, Deborah Cartmell
• A Companion to Literature, Film and Adaptation by Deborah Cartmell
• Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation by Brian
McFarlane

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In Indian universities, the studies have been conducted mostly in the literature
department where they have done a comparative study of the book and it’s
various adaptations, but mostly of the English movies and the classics they were
based on.

My research will also aim to eventually publish my findings so that there can
be some common ground on which future writers and novelists can base their
studies and create an objective structure to select a particular text to be adapted
on screen.

2.4.0 CONCLUSION
The results should ideally provide me with an understanding of the Whys and
Hows of the film adaptation process for the Indian audience and help me find
out the various factors that come into play to make a film adaptation a
commercial/ critical success.

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