Fowles into film: Cinematic equivalents of 'The Collector', 'The Magus', and 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' (William Wyler, Guy Green, John Fowles, Karel Reisz)

Comparisons between a literary work and a film based on that work often fail to consider the essential characteristics of, as well as differences between, the separate media formats. Among cinematic adaptations which have drawn critical attention are the films produced from John Fowles' novels The Collector, The Magus, and The French Lieutenant's Woman. Indeed, these novels are significantly challenging for filmmakers not only because of their complex structures and layers of meanings but because of the points of view which Fowles chose for each.; The introductory chapter approaches the problems inherent in effecting the changes from language to image by examining the basic units of each medium. Although the novelist and film director use different building blocks, their ultimate goal is to arrange the structures according to their own points of view. The director, of course, relies on the words provided by the screenwriter, and the screenwriter, who adapts a novel for the screen, must look for semantic elements which can be adapted into the fundamental syntax of film.; The second chapter focuses on Fowles' first published novel, The Collector, which utilizes a dual first-person perspective. William Wyler's film version eliminates about half of the novel--the portion told through Miranda's diary--and maintains primarily an objective perspective. A double-frame first-person perspective dominates Fowles' novel The Magus, the subject of the third chapter. Even though Guy Green's film version employs comparatively straightforward camera angles, he frequently shatters his objective style with daring leaps in time and space to suggest the first-person point of view. The Omniscient and stereoscopic point of view of Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, discussed in chapter four, provided an unusual challenge that director Karel Reisz met by having contemporary characters portray their Victorian counterparts in a film-within-a-film structure.; The concluding chapter points out the ambiguous and multiple endings of the three novels, and the films based on them, as reflecting Fowles' rejection of traditional endings.