Dancing In Fetters

In recent years, with the rapid development of mass media and the prosperity of film and television industry, people begin to pay more and more attention to the film and television adaptations of literary works. Twilight, the first novel of American female writer Stephenie Meyer, has been the bestseller worldwide since its publication in2005, and the film of the same name adapted from the novel also gained great success. This thesis, taking the novel Twilight and the adapted film as the research object, with the theory of film aesthetics and film adaptation, analyses the adaptation from this novel to the film.The thesis illustrates the potential of the film adaptation of the novel Twilight from the two dimensions:rich and wonderful story and cinematic language features. The novel is wonderful and attractive, which not only describes the sincere and soul-stirring romance between a vampire and an ordinary girl, but also relates the fantastic story of the alien creatures as vampires and werewolves, taking the magical story, romantic love, family and school life as a whole and providing very good material for the film adaptation; meantime, the language of the novel has a cinematic character which provides convenience for the film adaptation. Then the thesis compares the novel and movie to explore the adaptation method which innovates artistically on the basis of being faithful to the original spirit to make the film become an independent work of art which is also loyal to the novel. The faithfulness is mainly embodied in the reproduction of the novel’s connotation, the portrait of the characters and the continuation of the artistic style. However, the film created the new image on the screen by the additions and deletions of the original plot, reorganization, additions of the audio-visual designs, as well as the processing of the time and space. Finally, the thesis explores the enlightenment of the success of the movie Twilight on the domestic film adaptation.The vast majority of current studies concentrate on the novel or the film itself, which analyse the novel or the adapted film from the different aspects of religion, philosophy, aesthetics, linguistics and so on. However, this thesis, from the perspective of the film adaptation, demonstrates the adaptative success in this movie by the comprehensive analysis on the novel and the movie, thus Chinese film adaptation could get enlightenment from it.