On The Visualizing Of Pride And Prejudice

Film, as the most influential product of mass culture, is always the concern ofcultural studies. As literary texts are one of the main sources for adaptation since theborn of motion pictures, cinematic adaptation studies is also the focal point of theacademia. Traditional researches on cinematic adaptation are confined to the fidelitystudy, in which the focus is to compare or contrast the adapted movie with the originaltext so as to draw the conclusion whether the movie has ruined the source work or not,in content, theme, etc. While cultural studies attaches importance to the culturalsignificance or the artistic value of cinematic adaptation. In the era when scientifictechnologies are prosperously developing, films, depending on the charm of stars,colourful pictures and the shock of auditory stimulus, have changed literary works intoluxuriant audio-visual feasts. Thus, this thesis, from the perspective of cultural studies,is supposed to take the Hollywood movie Pride and Prejudice as an example to discussabout the transformation from novel to film, and aims at revealing that mass media,especially movie, has brought about positive influence to the development of massculture.Chapter One focuses on the text transformation from novel to film, respectively inthe shaping of characters, the layout of plot and theme. Chapter Two discusses thetransformation of ideographic methods, specifically in the change of story attraction—from the charm of words to stars, the modeling design of characters, the beautiful formof space and scene and the use of music. Chapter Three emphasizes on the alteration ofnarrative strategies, generally in the change of narrator and the arrangement of the pacefor narration.Through the analysis from the above three aspects, this thesis is going to revealthat the cinematic adaptation to classic literary works is actually a process of culturalpractice, during which the classic literature permeates down to the mass entertainmentthrough a modern art form. This practice, on the one hand, provides for the mass with entertaining programmes of a high quality so as to resist the vulgarity; on the other hand,it prolongs the vigorous life of the classic literature, making it as brilliant in nowadaysas in the past. In view of the success of the adaptation in the Western cinema, we shouldreflect on the problems occurred in our Chinese cinematic adaptation, two of whichshould be of great concern: the lack of theoretical thinking and academic researches oncinematic studies, and the insufficient cultural connotations of Chinese films.