Adaptation from the novel to film
Adaption, as a new source of film scripts, belongs to the cross-field of Literature and film, with interdisciplinary particularity. Although film adaptation dates back at least Homer, the study of transformation is still recent; Literature and film are two different arts of narration. Literary works use words as the medium, and the author’s creation relies on the reader’s self-association in one’s mind. The text of literary works is an abstract expression, which depends on the readers’ values and life experience to have all kinds of interpretation and perception. However, film art expresses the specific storyline directly through the picture and sound and the screenwriter’s understanding of literary works, so every film has its cinematic language. Although we can point out how different the novel is from the film, and we realize there are too many novels that have been adapted to films, adapted films can quickly fail. The following review of Literature confirms that movies and books, utterly different mediums, when to transform from one to other (此处请根据需要加一个thesis statement)
To theorize adaptation well, it’s inevitably to examine the essential natures of the two media. The first important book inquiring into films adapted by Literature is from George Bluestone, Novels into Film (1957). He proposed that there are many differences between Literature and film. For example, the novel is language art, and the film is the art of vision. He used the method of parallel research, objectively compared the original text and the film, then accurately recorded deletions on characters, plots and dialogue made in the movie relative to the novel(bluestone pg570). His research method is still influential today. At present, many articles on literary adaptation films rely on the difference between texts as the starting point of research. Besides, George Bluestone further put forward that the ultimately insuperable barrier stood between the two media. There is no comparability when trying to differ in the three tenses of the novel and single present tense in film, and similar examples as “perceptual” and “ conceptual”.
Robert Stam’s Literature also comprehends the fidelity of adaption of the novel to film. He wrote about the adaption of novels in his book titled ‘Beyond fidelity: the dialogics of adaptation. In the case of a person reading a text in a novel and watching a movie, there is a significant difference based on how the two people will interpret the message from the two sources. On the contrary, some of the primary ideas are visible to everybody, and they should be applied when you want to initiate the cinematic adaption of the text. In his publication, Robert argues that the filmmakers may alter a novel to achieve a particular ideology, for example, when Cinderella’s father had to die, which was changed by Disney(Stam pg353).