Research Report: Dudley Andrew, "Adaptation"

By Dan Reynolds, Berlin Project

Abstract

An approach, informed by but not entirely beholden to semiotics, to the issue of adaptation from literature to film. Addresses the relationship of the original text to its adaptations and the implications of this “transcendent relation.” Discusses three possible “modes of relation” that can be talked about when discussing an adaptation. Investigates the idea of cross-media adaptation maintaining “fidelity to the spirit” of the original; what can this be taken to mean, and what can it tell us about the specificities of the media involved? Concludes with a call for a “sociological turn” in adaptation studies.

Description

In “Adaptation,” Dudley Andrew uses semiotics and what he sees as the somewhat proto-semiotic ideas of Ernst Gombrich and Nelson Goodman to look at critical issues in adaptation between media forms, with particular interest in adaptation from literature to film. While discourse about adaptation is often “narrow and provincial,” writes Andrew, “it is potentially as far-reaching as you like.” Discussing Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country, an adaptation of “A Country Excursion” by Guy de Maupassant, Andrew claims that de Maupassant’s original short story “bears a transcendent relation to any and all films that adapt it, for it is itself an artistic sign with a given shape and value, if not a finished meaning.” Andrew then goes on to claim that “Adaptations claiming fidelity bear the original as a signified, whereas those inspired by or derived from an earlier text stand in a relation of referring to the original.” (all quotes from the extraordinarily dense page 28)

Andrew identifies three principal modes of relation between the film adaptation and its original text: borrowing, intersection, and fidelity of transformation. Borrowing is an employment of the “material, idea, or form” of an earlier text; to study this mode of adaptation, writes Andrew, the analyst must “probe the source of power in the original by examining the use of it made in adaptation.” (30) Intersection preserves the uniqueness of the original text to such a degree that it is “intentionally left unassimilated in adaptation.” (30) Andrew cites Robert Bresson’s Mouchette and Diary of a Country Priest, among examples from other directors, as exemplary of the “intersecting” adaptation. These films, both adaptations of novels by Georges Bernanos, are “refractions” (31; the term is attributed to André Bazin) rather than classical adaptations of the originals. Calling questions of narrative fidelity “tiresome,” Andrew points out that these are based on the assumption “that the task of adaptation is the reproduction in cinema of something essential about an original text.” (31) This, Andrew writes, could be achieved by a mechanical process. What is more important to Andrew is fidelity to the “spirit” of the original—the manner in which tone, rhythm, and so on are reproduced in or translated into the film form. Since narrative is a system available to both film and literature, comparisons of narrative units should be the work of adaptation, but “the strictly separate but equivalent processes…that produced the narrative units…through words and audiovisual signs…must be studied.” (34) This is where the specificities of the two media become the focus; the study of adaptation ends up being the study of the structures of the two media forms.

Andrew concludes by urging a “sociological turn” in adaptation studies. He points out numerous examples of the “complex interchange between eras, styles, nations, and subjects” (37) that characterizes adaptation within and across media. Historical trends in modes of adaptation are interesting to Andrew as well: these trends “suggest a great deal about the cinema’s sense of its role and aspirations from decade to decade.” (35)

Commentary

Andrew’s “Adaptation” points somewhat obliquely toward one of the goals of our project. This paper is a meta-theoretical argument about possible new directions for film theory; its primary interest is possible modes of theoretical engagement with adapted texts. Our project, however, aims to use adaptation itself as a mode of engagement with an original text. That said, Andrew’s semiotic take on adaptation studies could provide a useful framework for the design of some elements of our project. While our project may not shed much light on the sociological (and historical) approach that Andrew advocates at the end of his article, it could function in part as an exploration of his theoretical ideas about the most common modes of adaptation and the trajectories most often taken in their analysis.

Our group plans to adapt Jason Lutes’s graphic novel Berlin: City of Stones into a number of different forms. Two of these will be cross-media adaptations: we will make a series of film and text representations of the material in the prologue to Berlin. In addition, we will perform a number of “deformative” operations on Berlin, maintaining its serial-image form but removing or changing variables—relationship of image to text, order of panels, and so on—in various combinations. Andrew’s article will be of value not just to the film-adaptation approach, but to the literary-adaptation approach as well.

The three modes of adaptation identified in the paper, borrowing, intersection, and fidelity, will be useful tools in our effective design of our adaptations. Through our collective brainstorming sessions thus far, we have been dancing around these terms without ever really identifying them. Our focus has been on a breadth of approaches, but the parameters of this breadth have been largely determined by our intuitions. In our discussion of the film-adaptation approach, for example, we quickly hit upon the idea that single panels could be displayed sequentially like film shots, with each “shot” lasting an amount of time scaled to the horizontal length of the panel on the page in the original. Another approach that we have discussed is scaling the shot lengths not to the horizontal lengths of the panels but rather to the surface areas of the panels. Intuition tells us that the two resulting films would be of the same “type”; they would, in fact, be the same, save for one variable. This could help us to understand the nature of story duration as portrayed by comics. Andrew emphasizes that study of adaptation always points toward the “the specificity of the signifying systems being at stake.” (32) In this case, we know something about cinematic signification of time that we do not about temporal representation in comic books. This is the case because screen time in the cinema is identical with lived time in our own experience, but we may scan the pages of a comic book at any speed we desire; the inferences we make about story duration lack many of the overt cues that are inherent to the film form.

If something feels “wrong” about a comic book sequence as rendered in cinematic form (and I have it on the authority of a statistically insignificant survey of three people that the panel-length-based film does feel wrong, at least in certain shots), this can point to a flaw in our hypothesis about how to maintain what Andrew calls the “spirit…tone, values, imagery, and rhythm.” (32) Further tweaking is called for; though we will probably not “achieve equivalent narrative units” (34) for the entire sequence, it is the aim of our project to inform thinking about adaptation not through meta-theoretical reasoning, as is Andrew’s approach, but through the process of adaptation itself. Andrew writes that “the study of adaptation is logically tantamount to the study of the cinema as a whole.” (34) The same could be said of conscientious adaptation; it is a goal of our project to be as methodical but innovative as possible, and to, in the process, illuminate not just Lutes’s Berlin but the media to and from which we adapt, and on adaptation, the very thing.

Resources for Further Study

• Andrew, Dudley. “Adaptation.” Film Adaptation. James Naremore, ed. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000.
•  Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Vols. I and II. Berkeley: U of California P: 1967/1971.
•  Gombrich, Ernst. Art and Illusion. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1960.
•  Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976.
•  Lutes, Jason. Berlin: City of Stones. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2001.
•  McCloud, Scott. “The Big Triangle.” scottmccloud.com. 16 February 2008. < http://www.scottmccloud.com>

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