Adaptation: The Aesthetic Transformation From Novel To Movie

Ever since the invention of movie, there have been continuous efforts adapting literary texts, especially novels, into movie art. And during adapting, the shift of aesthetics effect from a novel to a movie is involved. This paper explored the process from the perspective of aesthetics transference and came to the conclusion that diachrony is the crucial factor to make it possible for the novel-movie adaptation. The adaptation is in fact a visualization process within the framework of movie art and in this process, the adapting is by nature a dynamic process due to the unique traits of movie art.Beginning with a brief review of the dependence of movie production on novels over the past century, the paper in Chapter 1 pointed out that the aesthetic ideas shared by movie art and novel creation make the novel-movie adaptation become possible although the two exhibit distinctive artistic features. It was followed by a comparison in Chapter 2 between the two art forms. Due to the different approaches (novel is represented by words while movie, by visual-audio devices), the movie art and novel show impressive difference in artistic representations. However, because of the inherent diachronic nature shared by the two, plot development constructs a solid bridge between a movie and a novel, hence makes the adaptation workable. Then the paper in the 3~rd Chaptermainly devoted to explore the transference process of adaptation and held that the transference is in fact the re-reading and reproducing the true spirit and the stylistic traits of the novel by means of movie art through extracting or refining the visual components signaled in the novel. These visual signals will be further enhanced with the help of strong visual devices used in movie production. The last Chapter, the fourth one, concluded that novel-movie adaptation provides more direct and also more impressive effect on its audiences with the illustration of a case study — adapting the novel Living into a movie, and that the impressive effect is determined by the nature of movie art itself.