Screen adaptation

A film adaptation is the transfer of a written work, in whole or in part, to a feature film. Although often considered a type of derivative work, recent academic developments by scholars such as Robert Stam conceptualize film adaptation as a dialogic process.

A common form of film adaptation is the use of a novel as the basis of a feature film. Other works adapted into films include non-fiction (including journalism), autobiography, comic books, scriptures, plays, historical sources, and even other films. From the earliest days of cinema, in nineteenth-century Europe, adaptation from such diverse resources has been a ubiquitous practice of filmmaking.

In 1924, Erich von Stroheim attempted a literal adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague with his moving picture Greed, and the resulting film was 9½ hours long. It was cut, at studio insistence, to four hours, then without Stroheim's input, cut again to around two hours. The end result was a film that was largely incoherent. Since that time, few directors have attempted to put everything in a novel into a film. Therefore, is all but essential.

However, in some cases, film adaptations also interpolate scenes or invent characters. This is especially true when a novel is part of a literary saga. Incidents or quotations from later or earlier novels will be inserted into a single film. Additionally, and far more controversially, filmmakers will invent new characters or create stories that were not present in the source material at all. Given the anticipated audience for a film, the screenwriter, director, or movie studio may wish to increase character time or to invent new characters. For example, William J. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Ironweed included a short appearance by a prostitute named Helen. Because the film studio anticipated a female audience for the film and had Meryl Streep for the role, Helen became a significant part of the film. However, characters are also sometimes invented to provide the narrative voice.

As Sergei Eisenstein pointed out in his landmark essay on Charles Dickens, films most readily adapt novels with externalities and physical description: they fare poorly when they attempt the modern novel and any fiction that has internal monologue or, worse, stream of consciousness. When source novels have exposition or digressions from the author's own voice, a film adaptation may create a commenting, chorus-like character to provide what could not be filmed otherwise. Thus, in the adaptation of John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, the director created a contemporary Englishman in a romance with a woman to offer up the ironic and scholarly voice that Fowles provided in the novel, and the film version of Laurence Sterne's "unfilmable" novel, Tristram Shandy had the main actor speak in his own voice, as an actor, to emulate the narrator's ironic and metafictional voice in the novel. Early on, filmmakers would rely upon voice-over for a main character's thoughts, but, while some films (e.g. Blade Runner) may self-consciously invoke the older era of film by the use of voice over, such devices have been used less and less with time.

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