Adaptations were greeted positively at first, with critics thinking them educational and innovative. Influential film artist D. W. Griffith: “Early movies were met with praise not only for their innovation, but for the promise they offered in educating their audiences.” Of cinematographic reproduction… the word “classic: has some meaning. It is the business of the moving picture to make them available to all.” Jack London believed that motion pictures could break down the “barriers of poverty and environment” and provide “universal education”..

Do you agree that adaptations of books to film serve as an educational tool? Why or why not?

Movies and Film

Notes to use for reference for your next paper

• Citation informationTibbetts, John C., and James M. Welsh.

Introduction. Novels into Film: The Encyclopedia of Movies Adapted from Books. By John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh. New York: Checkmark, 1999. XIII-XX. Print.

Page XIII

• The novel is a narrative that organizes itself in the world, while the cinema is a world that organizes itself into a narrative. – Jean Mitry

• Side note – If you want to use the above quotation, use a signal phrase – Jean Mitry…. And then cite (qtd. in Tibbetts XIII).

Page XIII

• Literature and film– Functions to link opposing elements and

mentalities• Art and commerce• Individual creativity and collaborative fabrication• Culture and mass culture• The verbal and the visual

Page XIIIStanley Kauffman – film critic – 1960s – concluded it was

relatively pointless to adapt literary classics to the screen since at best cinema could only approximate what our best writers had created in print.

• Filmmakers can tell stories by means of visualizing spectacular action and dramatizing overweight passion and desire

• Classic novels, any novel, will become grist for the Hollywood mill.

1902 – Georges Méliés – first director to adapt classic to film (Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon into the black-and-white, silent, science-fiction film A Trip to the Moon.)

Page XIV

• The movies could bring literary properties to a public that otherwise would not bother to read them.

• From 1912 on filmmakers had to pay copyright fees to use literary properties

Page XV

• Charles Dickens has long been held up as a model for the consummate novelist as well as a visionary profit of photographic – and by extension, cinematic – effects– Dickens wrote with a kind of camera eye

realizing his scenes with ultra-sharp focus and clarity, achieving the literary equivalents of close-ups, long shots, aerial perspectives, soft-focus

Page XV

• 1895 – The Time Machine – H.G. Wells – regarded as a prototype of the modern science fiction novel – did indeed preside over the development of the cinema and its box-office potential as a spectacle of greed and depravity.

Page XVI

• Clearly a number of obstacles stand between intent and result:

1.the pressure of mass consumption2. the Hollywood studio system3. censorship

Page XVI• It is precisely the point that Hollywood distorts and

corrupts serious literature for the entertainment pleasures of a mass audience but that doesn’t excuse the fact that adaptations may replace novels for students who are either not disposed to read or who simply find it more convenient to locate inferior Hollywood adaptations on videotape rather than take the time to read the originals. (predictably, a consequence of this is regarding the novel as one more disposable commodity in a throwaway society.)

Page XVI• A movie cannot begin to approximate the narrative

approach, let alone capture its nuances, when it turns into an objective visual narrative. The novelistic narrator mediates the meaning of the novel for the reader, and that continuing mediation cannot be captured by the film.

• One of the first literary works to directly consider and exploit the effects and implication of the cinema

• When filmmakers reveal literary techniques in their works – the effect is bad

Page XVI

• Erich Vin Stroheim in the 1920s made a film of a novel by doing justice to the original work – excessive cost and inordinate length (10 hours)

• MGM head of production ordered Stroheim to cut the film down. Protest after protest – 1st – 7 ½ hours, then 5. Finally –the reels were given to an editor who chopped it to just over two hours. The result was a failed masterpiece involving a huge artistic compromise and simplifying the novel to its bare essentials.

Page XVI

The story of Von Stroheim is an early example of the industry censorship that so often bedevils literary adaptation. The director wanted to do an appropriate treatment to the novel; the studio, on the other hand, had no interest in the novel other than its drawing power as an American classic.

Page XVII

• Question of narrative voice – voiceovers can be good

• The fact remains that even some well-meaning adaptations can never be interchangeable with the original literary texts. Hollywood is not at all interested in this kind of integrity or in the issue of fidelity.

XVII

• Movies do not “ruin” books, but merely misrepresent them

• Even when writers become the screenwriters – certain structural and atmospheric changes are evident, even, perhaps, inevitable – all in the service of retaining the essential meaning of each story.

XVIII

• In some instances Hollywood has improved novels that were popular but not critical successes

• John Updike – Witches of Eastwick – hoped books would live on, regardless of the way they might be commercially exploited and distorted by Hollywood and that perhaps movie versions would stimulate viewers to seek out the original works, so as to discover what the novelist might have originally intended or achieved.