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October 1995, Week 2

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Subject:
From:
Ingvald Bergsagel <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Fri, 13 Oct 1995 18:12:08 +0100
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> My question, though, is why
>bother to adapt a book--especially a familiar one--if you're going to
>alter it so radically?  The filmmakers seem to have completely
>misunderstood Hawthorne, if indeed they cared at all.
 
 
There are three main reasons why so many (Hollywood-)films are adaptions of
litterary works:
 
1. If the book is well known, you get a lot of goodwill from the ticket-buyers
2. You get a ready-made story with charachters, plot, scenes and dialog,
and need not spent $$$$$$$ on developing a story that makes sense.
3. The filmmakers get artistic inspiration from the original work.
 
If a film is to be an "succesfull" adaption, the last criteria must be
present, if not dominant, and an adaption from discourse to discourse will
fail as an art-work. One must extract a story-level out of the originally
discourse try to  place this in a new discource. It's the essens of the
novel/short story that must be captured, not the book it self.
 
Film and litterature are basically different media, and you can't say
something in a different media without saying something different. Look at
Coppolas "Apocalypse Now"; different time, different place, different
scenes and characthers, but still a masterfull adaption. And then look at
the new adaption of the same novel ("Heart of Darkness") but now titled the
same as the book, and copyed much more directly. It fails completly.
 
Ingvald Bergsagel
 
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