Novel
Film
• Adaptation
• Narrative
modes
• Conditions
• Codes
 What does adaptation mean for you?
How is it related to translation?
 What approach does McFarlane take
in analyzing filmic adaptation?
 Novel and Film
 Three Different Approaches to Filmic
Adaptations
 (Structuralist) Critical Approaches
NOVEL & FILM (1)
 Conrad: “My task which 1 am trying to
achieve is, by the powers of the written
word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it
is, before all, to make to see.” (qtd in McFarlane
3)
 // D. W. Griffith
 Novel – mental image 
physical details
 Film – visual image
 stories
(George Bluestone)
NOVEL & FILM (2)
 Late 19th century fiction: its “ostensibly
unmediated visual language” (5)
 Conrad and James -- anticipate the cinema in
their capacity
 for “decomposing” a scene,
 for altering point of view so as to focus more
sharp1y on various aspects of an object
 for exploring a visual field by fragmenting it
rather than by presenting it
scenographically…
 modern novels (such as those of Proust
and Woolf) – influenced by cinema
montage (ref. Cohen)
NOVEL & FILM (3)
 Dickens-Griffith connection
 Eisenstein – discusses narrative techniques
analogous to frame composition and close-up
 [McFarlane] critics tend to focus too much on their
similarities in themes or narrative patterns,
But not analyzing in details


Possible parallels and disparities between the two
different signifying systems,
…the range of “functional equivalents” available to each
within the parameters of the classical style as evinced in
each medium.
NOVEL & FILM (4)
 Modern novels (as well as Death of a Salesman,
Equus, or M. Butterfly) and films
 Influences from film: montage, split
screen, flashbacks
 less easily adaptable to films –Do you
agree?
 “[they] have lost a good deal of their fluid
representations of time and space when
transferred to the screen.”
A
A
B
B
 the suture device of the classic narrative film:
shot/reverse shot (image source)
 The spectator becomes aware of the off-screen
space [of frame and absent space] of A and
stitched into the film
TOLD

PRESENTED
two language systems: codes and their
processes of encoding and decoding
(1) Different functions of the codes (one
symbolically, and the other through
interaction)
(2) tense: films cannot present actions
in the past the way novels do.
(3) film’s spatiality gives it a physical
presence denied to novels (29)
To Filmic Adaptation
 different considerations and
approaches:
 commercialism, respect for lit. work
 3 approaches: visual transliteration, selective
interpretation, re-creating an established
mood.
 a reader’s phantasy of what the novel looks
like.  common response: violation of the
original;
 still there is an urge to embody verbal
concepts  more than 3/4 of Oscar’s “best
pictures” were adaptations (Morris Beja qtd
in McFarlane 8)
fidelity
Partial
revision
Creative
(1)
Transposition
commentary
analogy
(2)
Fidelity of
transformation
intersection
Borrowing
(3)
Fidelity to the
main thrust
Significantly
reinterpretin
g
Source as
raw
materials
only
Sources (1) (2) (3)
fidelity
Partial
revision
Creative
BBC
--Mansfield
Shakespeare
Park by
or Jane Austen Patricia
Rozema
--Mulan
(Disney)
The Hours
(Mrs.
Dalloway)
Conditions of
production
Appropriation
for the present?
ideologies
-- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
(2008; F. Scott Fitzgerald)
-- Girls, Interrupted ( Susanna Kaysen's
memoir)
-- Blade Runner (Philip K. Dick ... (novel "Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?")
-- The Shawshank Redemption (1994;
Stephen King (short story "Rita Hayworth
and Shawshank Redemption")
Your
examples?
 To its physical
details
 To its
(“Romantic”)
spirit
To complicate the
issue of creation
Adding a Feminist Role
Issues:
1) Respectful adaptation or a pastiche?
2) Conditions of production (p. 10)
3) Supporting which ideologies?
The Hours *
• Artists’ gender
and social
positions in the
20th century
-- Girls, Interrupted
-- Blade Runner
• Creative
• Melodramatic or
with a Happy
Ending
Frankenweenie
• For different
audience
• Domesticating the
monsters
* Chimes at Midnight; Shakespeare’s Lover; etc.
1) The Centrality of Narrative (the chief
transferrable element)
e.g. the plot of embourgeoisement (p. 12)
Roland Barthes: distributional and
integrational functions
Transferrable
Distributional
--doing
Function proper -- cardinal
(turning points)
and catylyzer
Adapting
Integrational
--being
Indices proper (characters and
atmosphere) -- adaptable
informants (concrete data
-- transferreable
(a) subjective cinema

a consistently subjective perspective is less likely: “[w]hile cinema
may be more agile and flexible in changing the physical point of view
from which an event or object is seen, it is much less amenable to the
presentation of a consistent psychological viewpoint derived from one
character” (16).
 (b) oral narration and voice-over
 One’s sense of the characters still come more from his/her
action than from his/her comments. [different from the
first-person narrative fiction]
Or center of consciousness:

“there is always a narrator looking over
their shoulder, in the way that the
camera may view action over the
shou1der of a character in the
foreground of a shot, giving the viewer
both the character' s point of view and a
slightly wider point of view which
includes the character” (19).
1)
2)
Attributed to various characters in
direct speech
the narrative, or the apparently
authoritative ‘metalanguage,‘ that
surrounds the characters
-- an issue: the camera’s mise-en-scene serving
narrational function?
--Yes and no. The camera is not part of the film
as an omniscient narrator is of a novel. (pp. 1718)
 Story and discourse
 enunciation and enunciated
 character function and fields of
action
 Mythic and psychological pattern
 Linearity and spatiality
 frame and its spatial impact (richer
than a word)
 the frame is not a discrete entity as a
word is
 Codes
McFarlane, Brian. “Part I Backgrounds, Issues, and a New
Agenda.” Novel Into Film: An Introduction to the Theory of
Adaptation. Oxford UP, 1996.
 “Suture.” Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts.

Works mentioned by McFarlane –
George B1uestone’s Novels into Film
Alan Spiegel' s Fiction and the Camera Eye
Keith Cohen' s Film and Fiction.
Eisenstein’s discussion of Dickens’ cinematic technique
(1) Geoffrey Wagner, The Novel and the Cinema (Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press: Rutherford, NJ, 1975), 222.
(2) Dudley Andrew, 'The Well-Worn Muse: Adaptation in
Film History and Theory' , in Syndy Conger and Janice R.
Welsch (eds.), Narrative Strategies ( West Illinois University
Press: Macomb, Ill., 1980), 10.
(3) Michael Klein and Gillian Parker (eds.), The English
Novel and the Movies ( Frederick Ungar Publishing: New
York, 1981), 9-10.
