Cours du 4/01/11 - 5/6

12 fallacies in contemporary adaptation theory

• there is such a thing as contemporary adaptation theory
  
• differences between texts and images come from essential properties of their respective media
  
• literary texts are verbal, films visual.
  
• Novels are better than films
  
• Novels deal in concepts, films in percepts
  
• Novels create more complex characters than movies, because we have immediate and complete access to a character's psychological state
  
• cinema's visual specification usurps its audience's imagination
  
• fidelity is the most appropriate criterion to use in analyzing adaptation
  
• sourcetexts are more original than adaptations
  
• a film adaptation adapts one text only
  
• adaptation are intertexts, texts, simply texts
  
• adaptation study is a marginal enterprise
  
  

VI. The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen

4 parts

- Theories of literature on screen
McFarlane, Reading Film and Literature
T. Corrigan, Literature on Screen : a History in the Gap

- Adaptations in context
P.Brooker, Post Modern Adaptation

- Genre, Industry, Taste
papers about children literature and television adaptation S. Cardwell

- Beyond the Literary
animation cinema, music, novelization Jan Baetans, From Screen to Text : Novelization, the Hidden Continent.


VII. Lessing's Aesthetic Theories

Pb of aesthetic genre categories.

G.E. Lessing, Laocoon (1766)

before = ut pictura poesis, HORACE (worked both ways)

Lessing went against this equation and defined the specificity of each genre in its relation to both space and time
« painting is the art of the Nebeneinander, juxtaposing bodies in space ; poetry is the art of the Nacheinander, presenting action one after the other in time »

The image = space upper body and its description while the text is the time of the event and its narration.
« If it is true that painting and poetry in their imitations make use of entirely different media of expression or signs – the first of form and color in space, the second of articulated sounds in time- if these signs indisputably require a suitable relation to the thing betokened, then it is clear that signs arrange near to one another can only express objects of which the wholes or parts exist near one another, while consecutive signs can only express objects of which the wholes or parts are themselves consecutive. Objects whose whole or part exist near one another are called bodies, consequently, bodies with their visible properties are the peculiar objects of painting. Objects whose whole or parts are consecutive are called actions, consequently, actions are the peculiar subjects of poetry. »

main point : with any given work of art, there are things that you cannot represent, because of the limitation of the media/material you use

but film = space AND time...

first answer = linguistic
Jakobson, De la relation entre signes visuels et auditifs

« Les perceptions visuelles et auditives se produisent visiblement dans l'espace et dans le temps, mais la dimension spaciale prime dans le cas de signes visuels, et la dimension temporelle dans celui des signes auditifs. Un signe visuel complexe comprend une série de composants simultanés, alors qu'un signe auditif complexe est formé
en principe d'une série de constituants successifs. Il existe une différence frappante entre une représentation essentiellement spatiale, visible d'un seul coup, et le flux musical ou verbal qui se déroule dans le temps et qui excite notre ouïe d'une manière consécutive. Même un film exige à tout moment une perception simultanée de sa composition spatiale. »


film is said to be perceived both in time and space, but how does meaning emerge from a film based on simultaneous perception of space and time ?


VIII. Kamilla Elliott


Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003)

Victorian novels and their adaptations. Ground her analysis against the 2 main ones.
Horace defined what is called now « analogy » (the « sister arts ») / Lessing defined categories.

Specificity of films between those 2 theories.

In films = synthesis between text and image (she goes back to Horace's analogy)
separation of what the film says and how it says it. Distinction form / content.

6 models/concepts of adaptation :

[Wuthering Heights, Wyler (1939)]

• Psychic : what matters is to keep the “spirit” of the text, not really question of fidelity, but she doesn't really define this “spirit” of a text. Pure marketing (ex. When the name of the author appears in the title of the film).
  
• Ventriloquist :p.143 “It blatantly empties out the novel's signs and fills them with filmic spirit.”. Purely aesthetic, cinematic ways of expression. (cf. Colonization for Leitch )
  
• Genetic approach : we have to go back to the genesis of the text or the film. Comparison (but not enough, only the basic stage). (Stam)
  
• Derecomposing (= Leitch's Neoclassic Imitation).
  
• incarnation, embodiement, tableau vivant (upper class Victorians would embody famous paintings as a part-time.)
  
• cf Leitch = curatorial. Trumping adaptations, glorify the novel they adapt.