| In 1957, George Bluestone wrote an important piece of film theory entitled Novels into Film where he makes a valiant attempt in trying to get an answer to this question: Why is it that when a novel is adapted into a screenplay, then produced and distributed as a motion picture, the adapted work is not as good as, or ends up being completely different than, the originating source? Bluestone's reasoning, although somewhat discussing the social implications involved in the process of film adaptation, focuses mainly on the idea that there is a distinct binary opposition between the two mediums: one being a "linguistic medium" while the other is visual. What Bluestone speaks on is what I call the aesthetics of adapted cinema or the surface area; in other words, points like time and space constraints, changes in story and narrative constructions, and the addition or subtraction of content, material, and/or characters that ultimately take place when a novel gets adapted into a film are all thoroughly discussed. Bluestone recognizes, in essence, what is different by only reading and seeing the texts he studies.;Thus, because of Bluestone's influential text, an unfortunate trend has taken place in film adaptation studies where other film adaptation theorists like Keith Cohen, Phebe Davidson, Gabriel Miller, and Geoffrey Wagner (amongst others, and with very few exceptions) write primarily on the aesthetics of adapted cinema and disregard or under-play the importance of the de-politicization process that takes place when a novel is adapted. My work, although not totally disregarding the aesthetic nature of literature and the cinema, places its focus on the de-politicization process of film adaptation; how the novel loses its political intent once the text gets filmed and, eventually, after the text gets studied and/or critiqued by film theorists, critics and historians. |
