Even though it is problematic to define the happening of an event as a “text” or “hypotext”, works of literary journalism are closely related to the framework of adaptations because an adaptation is defined as the process of making a work of art upon the basis of elements provided in a different medium; furthermore, works of literary journalism often resemble the filmic construction of a screen play.
Before I support my argument by using Stam’s theories about literary adaptations into film from his essay "Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation", I will start with a short summary of Stam’s article.
He starts his essay by complaining “The language of criticism dealing with the film adaptation of novels has often been profoundly moralistic, awash in terms such as infidelity, betrayal, deformation, violation, vulgarization, and desecration, each accusation carrying its specific charge of outraged negativity” (54). He claims that a more effective criticism will be based in “contextual and intertextual history” (75), and less concerned with vague ideas of fidelity. He believes that absolute fidelity is impossible due to (1) the difference in medium between novel and film, (2) the lack of a single absolutely correct reading of a novel, and (3) the intertextuality of all novels and films. He claims that: “Each medium has its own specificity deriving from its respective materials of expression” (59), and explains that the written word is the novels only component of expression, while the film has more components such as “moving photographic image, phonetic sound, music, noises, and written materials” (59). Therefore, certain changes are inevitable.
Stam is also concerned with the term ‘faithfulness’ in film adaptations. Is it...
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...e subdivided into eighty-six scenes which tell the facts of the case by constantly alternating the viewpoint (132), which is obviously a technique of screen writing. In his biography Capote, Clarke also identifies Capote’s style as cinematic when he claims that: “Despite Brook’s effort, it [the movie In Cold Blood], has little of the book’s impact. Paradoxically, it is also less cinematic than the book” (386).
To conclude, the similarities in the process processes of transforming a body of hypotexts, the similarities between mediation filters in the process of adapting a novel into a film and adapting a factual case into a non-fiction novel, as well as the fact that most adaptations are realized in a style that creates a cinematic experience for the reader, are factors that proof my proposal that works of literary journalism can also be seen as adaptations.
Capote’s structure throughout the entire book created an excellent backbone to tell the two alternating perspectives of the book that is of the victims; the clutter family and the murders; Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. This allowed Capote to not have a bias towards the accounts being told. The pattern of victims then the murderers causes an attractive puzzle where the reader collects an amount of information leading to the climax of the actual slaughter. He actually contin...
The film Capote, based on the how the writer of “In Cold Blood” did his research to write his book, a masterpiece of literature, has portrayed Capote’s behavior during his research vividly. Capote’s behavior during the years Perry waits on death row in order to get personal testimony of the night of killings is a controversial topic. Some argue that what Capote did was absolutely necessary for an ambitious writer to create such a master piece while other argue that human ethics is more important than the creation of an ideal “non-fiction noble” and the paths he took to get there are morally ambiguous. Even though he gave the world a milestone in literature, his behaviors seem unethical because he lied, pretended to be a friend of an accused murderer who was in a death row, and did not have any empathy to him.
In "Murder, He Wrote," William Swanson believes the stylistic techniques employed in Truman Capote's novel In Cold Blood are more memorable than the story itself. For Swanson, Capote not only captures the readers' attention with a story about a horrific crime, but his use of diverse voices, sounds, and silences make it an event people will never forget.
For decades there had been people who were racist and others that felt better because of their skin color. In Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood these characteristics are captured; however, since its publishing ideals have changed. Some believed that two killers were not given a truly fair trial. Furthermore there was a fight between the system and if the killers should be sentenced to death. This book although effective with style could have used fewer details.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is one of the most respected and admired novels of all time. Often criticized for lacking substance and using more elaborate camera work, freely adapted films usually do not follow the original plot line. Following this cliché, Roland Joffe’s version of The Scarlet Letter received an overwhelmingly negative reception. Unrealistic plots and actions are added to the films for added drama; for example, Hester is about to be killed up on the scaffold, when Algonquin members arrive and rescue her. After close analysis, it becomes evident of the amount of work that is put into each, but one must ask, why has the director adapted their own style of depicting the story? How has the story of Hester Prynne been modified? Regarding works, major differences and similarities between the characterization, visual imagery, symbolism, narration and plot, shows how free adaptation is the correct term used.
Film and literature are two media forms that are so closely related, that we often forget there is a distinction between them. We often just view the movie as an extension of the book because most movies are based on novels or short stories. Because we are accustomed to this sequence of production, first the novel, then the motion picture, we often find ourselves making value judgments about a movie, based upon our feelings on the novel. It is this overlapping of the creative processes that prevents us from seeing movies as distinct and separate art forms from the novels they are based on.
Capote in his book In Cold Blood set out to create an image of the murders and their motives with the use of rhetorical devices. He uses certain devices, such as diction and syntax to give each character their own distinct personality and also develops their characteristic and tendencies as a person as well. Capote also brings the characters to life with the switching of tone between them and with the things they say about themselves and events going on in the story. Another way Capote develops the reader's perception of the murderers was by the use of imagery to draw the reader a picture in their minds to what the character would look like face to face. With all of these combined he gave each murderer their own personality and views, ultimately
The article begins with the claim from the movie Adaptation that, "adaptation is a profound process, which means you try and figure out how to thrive in the world" (443). While the authors acknowledge that the context of the film might give the impression of this being an ironic statement, in truth the opposite is true: adaptation really is pivotal to the continued survival of a narrative. The manifest problem with adaptation theory, according to Bortolotti and Hutcheon is the tendency of critics to judge adaptations as good or bad based upon the level of fidelity they maintain with the source text. Altering a source text is not a bad thing -- it is necessary. Bortolotti and Hutcheon both describe transformation of source texts as, "a common and persistent way that humans have always told and retold stories" (444). Critic Thomas Leitch agrees with this judgment and states, "every text offers itself as an invitation to be re-written" (16).
Another aspect of reading is that it engages a readers imagination. One can visualize the very scenes, can further their own understanding over characters, and can know minute details about a character through the very wording of a paragraph. In the film industry it becomes much harder to convey this type of information visually instead of mentally. While there is room for creativity within the film industry one often loses a certai...
Relations between sympathy-empathy expressiveness and fiction have become a significant issue in the debate on the emotional responses to the film fiction. Due to their complexity many scholars found it useful to diagram them. With his essay, “Empathy and (Film) Fiction”, Alex Neill tries to develop new theory for analyzing the fiction and, especially, the emotional responses from the audience on it. The project of this essay is represented with an aim to show the audience the significant value of the emotional responses to the film fiction. From my point of view in the thesis of his project he asks a simple question: “Why does the (film) fiction evoke any emotions in the audience?”, further building the project in a very plain and clever way. Tracing the origins of this issue, he distinguishes between two types of emotional responses, sympathy and empathy, as separate concepts in order to understand the influence of both types of emotional responses to fiction. However, relying mostly on this unsupported discrepancy between two concepts and the influence of the “identification” concept, Neill finds himself unable to trace sympathy as a valuable response to fiction. This difficulty makes Neill argue throughout the better part of the text that empathy is the key emotional factor in the reaction to (film) fiction and that it is a more valuable type of emotional response for the audience.
Different forms of literature work apply different styles to communicate its message to the intended people. In most cases, novels and films pass their messages to their audience through expressing particular themes. For a theme to be created, specific techniques are applied by the author of a book or director of a given film. To be precise, this essay discusses the themes displayed by three movies, The birds, Persepolis and Nosferatu. Each film will be considered separately and the comparisons made will be analyzed. Application of different techniques in a movie affects how best the films communicate its theme to the audience. However, not all methods are applicable in bringing out the idea a video director wishes to address.
Each time a scene is visualized, it narrows down the open-ended characters, objects, landscapes, created by the book and imagined by the reader in his mind forming concrete and definite images. The character added to the places, objects, moments and everything that is there in a book, is open to various decoding possibilities of imagining. But a film transmits these in a pre-defined way. The insights of theories of Bakhtin, intertextuality, deconstruction, reception theory, cultural studies, narratology, or performance theory might have relevance to adaptation studies, these connections have only begun to be made. The theoretical impasse in narrative adaptation studies is represented by an ongoing dominance that is usually referred to as “fidelity discourse”. This is a common way of determining the worth of an adaptation work’s success in terms of its faithfulness or closeness to the ‘original’. To be able to understand an adapted film from a point of view of a piece of art is only possible when we distance ourselves from the literary text. It is difficult to watch a cinematic version on screen of the books we have loved and internalized so intimately and made them an integral part of our imagination. When we read a book, it has the ability to take us into a magic realm, into an atmosphere where all our senses are embraced. So when
In contrast to traditional ways, the modern critical thinking has revealed more complicated structures beneath the adaptation skin. As Christopher Orr put it: “Within this critical context [i.e. of intertextuality], the issue is not whether the adapted film is faithful to its source, but rather how the choice of a specific source and how the approach to that source serve the film's
For many years, the film adaptations of books were seen as inferior by the critics and film enthusiasts. Most opined that the film version of the text lacked the essence of the original book. The films were simply penurious versions of the high standard texts. The cinematic versions could do no justice to the written word. It merely flattened everything out onto a screen for the viewer to see. The books with it's meticulous descriptions wonderful schemes of plot offered a lot more to the reader. It provided the reader with the space to imagine as one wished and accordingly delve deeper into the meanings implied. There was certainly more room for absorbing elements and a lot was left to the reader's own interpretation. The critics also argued that unlike books, the films left no room for one to probe deeper into the text. It had many shortcomings. Not everything written in the book could be filmed. In such circumstances, the filmmaker would make a film with wae resources that were available at hand and this in turn was a drawback. The filmmaker provided a ready-to-view version of the text thus not allowing the viewers' to rely on thier own imagination. It was like saying that the viewer was at the mercy of the filmmaker and had to swallow the bite offered to him without protesting of mentioning if he preferred it. The film could never delve deeper into what the book had to offer, lest
Adaptation is a very old “art.” For instance, most performances in medieval theatre were adapted from the Bible; as Hutcheon (2006: 2) writes even Shakespeare transferred his works to stage so that more people could learn about them. But the definition of an adaptation, as we use it today, was developed in the twentieth century, and even so, critics are still arguing about its ultimate definition. Adaptation studies have a wide nature and nowadays they are interdisciplinary, as they represent “a dynamic convergence of diverse academic disciplines, from film, literature, history, languages, creative writing, media, music, drama, performance art, visual art, and new media” (Griggs 2016: 1).Since film adaptations of novels are considered to be