Film Adaptation In Ironweed And A Death In The Family

When Erich von Stroheim ventured to adapt a novel into a series of moving pictures in 1924 for the first time of movie adaptation in the history, the film resulted in being nine and a half hours. Although it was shortened, the movie was put together in a rather fragmentary manner (Film Adaptation). It was a failure, but a milestone. It reminded movie producers that a complete rigid adaptation is not possible at all, modification of some extent must be done. Film adaptation of a story should not be strictly followed the literary works but modified accordingly for better visualization in a contemporary context; movie producers may even be inspired by a literary work and use it as a springboard for a new creation, which is the loosest form of

For example, in the adaptation film of William J. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Ironweed, the movie director created a brand-new character called Helen for better presenting the female ideology in the story tangibly (Film Adaptation). In another case, a six-page description of a little boy’s childhood reminiscences at the beginning of the book A Death in the Family was transferred into a brief scene of two characters walking and talking together about their recent anecdotes, which convey the same feeling as the original text (PBS). Both cases of Ironweed and A Death in the Family adapted the original text, and they either add or subtract elements in the story for the sake of changing the plot into more visually expressive ways. Written stories tend to involve large quantities of details in a single chapter,

For antique works such as Nathanial Hawthorn’s the Scarlet Letter, a story during the 16th century, adaptation would be hard in a 21st century context. However, a bold but successful adaptation was accomplished by the Essay A, a movie follows “a high school student, Olive, who acts as a modern-day Hester Prynne” (The Scarlet Letter). The setting of the adapted movie is totally different from that of the original story－an extremely conservative puritan society. By transferring the story of the Scarlet Letter into a contemporary context, Easy A not only possesses similar themes and plots but also in a more realistic setting for the intended audience—high school student. The scenes, the characters and the events in the Easy A are all so closely correlated to high school’s lives that they can easily arouse sympathy among the audiences. What’s more, since the Scarlet Letter is one of the required books for high school students, the movie may academically help those students on understanding the plots. While Scarlet A was regarded as a perfection among the contemporary movie adaptation for old literacy work, some might argue that the mood and tone of the original story are totally changed and ruined by the new version of the movie. Critics often elaborate their arguments for strict movie adaptation on the overall sensation of an