The Issue of Fidelity in Film Adaptations

Films based on written texts are almost always judged according to their

faithfulness to the original. The issue of fidelity has been a battle-ground for film

theorists since the beginning of film theory as an established discipline, that is, when

film became worthy of being studied by specialists. The debate is still active and some

suggest that adaptation and film, in general, is an art-form inferior to literature.

However, film and literature, are two different mediums of story-telling and

thus, extremely difficult to decide if one is better than the other although criticism still

has supporters of this criterion as essential for judging the value of a film adaptation.

Many criticisms complain the lack of embodiment of the critic’s ideal of “fundamental

narrative, thematic and aesthetic features of its literary source” (54). However, Robert

Stam, in his “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation”, affirms that a more

pertinent criticism should be based in “contextual and intertextual history,” and not on

‘fidelity’. “Criticism,” he continues, should pay more attention to “readings, critiques,

interpretations, and rewritings of prior material,” (76). He also thinks that a total fidelity

is impossible because we have two different ways of narrating and the intertextuality

between novels and films. Also bored with the discussion of ‘fidelity’ in film

adaptation, Linda Hutcheon states: “Of more interest to me is the fact that the morally

loaded discourse of fidelity is based on the implied assumption that adapters aim simply

to reproduce the adapted text” (7).

A novel tells the story through written language whereas the film,

through images and sounds, and that is why changes from one medium to another are

inevitable. What the book describes in general terms, the film gives it a specific

appearance. Also, filmmakers possess more instruments to convey a story than a writer

does; music accompanying the action and the audience’s view on the actors are some of

them. Filmmakers use these means as assets to improve the experience of the story but

at the same time they change it precisely by those very means. Film adaptations have

evolved from Stroheim’s first of attempt to adapt McTeague, a film that initially that

had sixteen hours, to present day adaptations equally long, that have a range of two

hours, such as, Lolita, Don Quixote, A Cock and Bull Story or Pride and Prejudice.

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Stroheim’s first intent was to do a literal adaptation of Frank Norris’s novel using

transposition (a technique that proved impossible), while recent directors use

interpretation, that is, interpreting the text by contracting the message to the most

important and letting the camera tell the story.

For example, in Joe Wright’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice,

the director finds himself in the almost impossible position of transposing from a very

well-known book to screen meanings and ideas through image and sound. In the film

sequence of the Assembly Ball, the relationships between the characters are rendered in

terms of dance relationships. Ball-dance steps and traditional English music are both

designed to convey a faithful depiction of the 19 th century English society and the

tension between Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy. As far as the music is

concerned, the tension and excitement is enhanced by the original score of Dario

Marianelli which takes the sound and style of the 19th century and transfers it to piano

music alluding to the romantic character of the protagonists’ relationship and

announcing the tensioned scenes they will participate later in the film.

While Jane Austen had a more difficult task alternating dialogue with narrative

description to communicate the same thing, the director had the advantage of the

simultaneity of the film. Furthermore, any reader of Pride and Prejudice will notice

various important changes in this adaptation; for instance, with the first scene of the

film that does not appear in the book, where Elizabeth is seen walking home while

reading a book. This scene is used as an interpretation of various references of the

book’s author which communicates some of Elizabeth’s important characteristics - she

likes to read and the fact that she is alone outside the house suggests the discrepancy

between her and the rest of the typical characters of the 19th century England; that she is

an outsider in her own world.

Moreover, within the spectrum of fidelity there is also the matter of what the

director and scriptwriter/s are faithful to. Some of them choose to be faithful to the plot

believing that this is the key to a successful adaptation. Ideally, an adaptation would

concentrates on both the plot and the ‘spirit’ of the novel and the majority renounce the

idea of focusing exclusively the plot because they need to compress a several

hours/days read in only two hours of film and they resort to condensing plotlines or

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change them as the directors of Orlando and Pride and Prejudice did with the endings

of both films.

On the one hand, in Orlando, Sally Potter, that was both director and

scriptwriter, not only chronologically structured the plotline, creating a catalogue that

coincides with Woolf’s narrative techniques , but also added various scenes that were

not in the book - she brings the protagonist in the 20th century society continuing

Orlando’s odyssey through time. By adding the final scene she makes the story closer to

the audience; making the film to reach the contemporary public giving them a chance to

relate with the themes circulating the book.

On the other hand, in Pride and Prejudice, Joe Wright and Deborah Moggach,

for commercial reasons this time, make two endings: a standard ending and one for

American audience. The ‘American ending’ shows Darcy and Elizabeth after the

wedding, in a typical ‘in your face’ happy-ending, enjoying each other’s company away

from the prejudices of the 19th century society. Similarly, his treatment of Lady

Catherine is changed in the book’s ending. After her visit to Longbourn to convince

Lizzy not to continue her presumed liaison with Darcy she disappears completely from

the film. In the epilogue of the book, however, it is told that “Lady Catherine comes to a

grudging acceptance of the marriage” (Bluestone, 142). This detail might be of great

importance for the understanding of the social conflict that the author so eagerly tries to

reveal in the novel. It is obvious that Wright intended to convey this conflict throughout

the film; however he failed to see the necessity of showing Lady Catherine, as a

representative of the loosing high- class, accepting the marriage at the end of the story.

Since the author saw fit to highlight this aspect, why not show it in the film?

In addition, regardless of their position on the ‘fidelity’ issue, critics use ‘the

spirit of the novel’ criterion to value an adaptation if the filmmakers’ evident intention

was to depict a relatively close-to-the-truth version of the book. That is, to what extent

have the filmmakers achieved rendering a view according to what viewers think about

the topic they are trying to tackle? Although most of them should have in mind the fact

that there are different readings of the same work of literature, they fail to understand

that there is not a singular vision of a text that can be taken and translated into film.

However, there are films that put aside the plot in order to focus exclusively on

conveying the atmosphere and the true spirit of the original story which seems to be an

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indispensable element when adapting a novel. This occurs in Michael Winterbottom’s

adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s metafictional novel "The Life and Opinions of Tristram

Shandy, Gentleman."

Winterbottom deliberately compresses the plot to only a few scenes of the actual

story in order to render the essential ideas that Sterne wanted to pass on and that the

novel is unfilmable. He does that by making a film-within-a-film, as it is generally

known using the behind-the-scenes process of making the film as a metaphor for the

actual book and the book’s digressive nature. In fact, this is a film how about a group of

filmmakers trying to film the unfilmable novel. Since the book is probably unfilmable,

the film about the book seems to be the same. To be exact, it is a film about the making

of a film based on a novel about the writing of a novel, which attaches another “within

the film to the already existing “film within-the-film”.

Here is what the director says about the adaptation of Tristram Shandy in an

interview for the Spanish newspaper El País:

The book, doesn’t adjust to the traditional concept of narrative. It disperses in various directions,

without following a straight line, and interpolating passages connected tangentially with the central story.

This is one of the aspects of the project that attracted me most. Films, in general, are incredibly

conservative inasmuch the structure and form. Here, I deliberately avoid the lineal structure... (2007)

The director also alludes, as the Woolf/Potter endeavour, to the impossibility of

capturing a life in one narrative be it written or filmed, although he started from a

source-text that apparently is narrated by the protagonist; hence, the fruitless efforts of

knowing the absolute truth about a person.

Point of view is also a requirement for the faithfulness when making an

adaptation. This is usually rendered by the camera focus and movement, and Joe Wright

does it outstandingly in Pride and Prejudice. For example, in the first scene of the film,

the director is trying to suggest that Elizabeth is a Romantic character by showing her

being alone and happy during a walk in the middle of nature and participator / observer

role in regard to her family and implicitly, society in general.

Similarly, along the novel, Jane Austen’s characterisation of Elizabeth as

“lively, sportive, manner of talking” towards the end of the book, (378- 88) the director,

using his own narrative techniques, gives us hints of that liveliness and sportive manner

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by the rapid moves of the camera. He doesn’t stop at Elizabeth, though. It is obvious the

contrast he is trying to make between the gentry (embodied by Lady Catherine and her

surroundings) and the laymen (the Bennetts’). At Rosings, the camera moves slowly

and we can rarely see close-ups, scenes with which the director tries to render the stiff

and impersonal atmosphere imposed by the English high society of the time; whereas,

when the camera is at the Bennetts’ it seems as if it moves freely, with more fluid

movements, suggesting the less charged atmosphere that surrounds people of lower

status. Thus, Wright transfers Austen’s omniscient narrative voice, that throughout the

book makes assessments and shares opinions unknown by most of the characters apart

from the ones she chooses and the reader, by using the camera, he remains faithful to

the book’s point of view.

Joe Wright’s job to make the camera’s point of view coincide with the novels

omniscient narrative is not an easy one; however, it is believed that the subjective

narrator is the most difficult to be transferred onto image, whatever the source may be.

In Gaspar Noè’s Enter the Void, there are scenes where the director is outstandingly

using the first person narrative by placing the camera ‘in the protagonist’s head’.

Although this film is not a book adaptation, I think that it is possibly one of the best

samples of rendering the subjective narrator of a story. It is an innovation that can surely

help a director to be faithful to any first person narration.

Furthermore, the matter of the costumes and decors are of equal importance in

an adaptation, especially in a Period film. When endeavouring to a realistic

representation of a story, as Wright states when he is quoted by Anne-Marie Paquet-

Deyris’s, costumes and appearances of the actors should be faithful. Some changes are

brought but mostly on the important characters; for example: Bingly and Darcy’s hair,

women’s dresses. These are over- modernized versions of early 19 th century England

costumes and physical appearances but not obvious enough to track the audience off

from following the story.

Consequently, if we are to consider how written texts have been adapted into

films throughout the history of cinema, and how criticism has evolved at the same time,

it is safe to say that film (adaptation) is as an important an art-form as any other,

including literature, especially nowadays when literature is more and more influenced

by film. However, ‘fidelity’ in adapting a book should not stand in how similar to the

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book the adaptation is. Besides, there are two types of story -telling mediums in

discussion, and a literal translation from book to film would hinder the creative freedom

of the filmmakers. As Robert Stam states in his book, film adaptation is not just a

unique linear translation of one original novel. In change, it is part of a larger cycle of

related works and it is constantly growing. To put it differently, one person’s idea of

how a novel should look like on screen may differ completely from another’s; hence,

there cannot be a unanimously accepted version of a text but better adaptations.

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References:

-Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957.

-Gómez, Lourdes. Adaptar lo inadaptable. http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cine/Adaptar/inadaptable/elpepucin/20070323elpepicin_5/Tes 28 Jan. 2011

-Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/15-connor.php 28, Jan. 2011

http://staff.washington.edu/cgiacomi/courses/english497/abstracts/Abstract_J.html. 31, Jan. 2011

Filmography:

Wright, Joe. Dir. 2005. Pride and Prejudice. Universal Pictures.

Potter, Sally. Dir. 1992. Orlando. Adventure Pictures

Winterbottom, Michael. Dir. 2005. A Cock and Bull Story. BBC Film, Baby Cow Productions.

Noé, Gaspar. Dir. 2009. Enter the Void. Fidélité Films

Stroheim, Erich von. Dir. 1924. Greed.

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