Narrative film is as we know it today due to literature. From the consolidation of the still prevailing ‘Institutional Mode of Representation’ in early sound film, based on the techniques of the nineteenth-century novel, to the purchase of the rights of bestsellers by contemporary global film conglomerates, and from the recherché literary intertextuality of art house cinema to the lucrative commercial exploitation of a pre-sold book title of Hollywood movies, the influence of literature on film, Raymond Durgnat’s ‘Mongrel Muse’ (1977), is a fact of all cinematic fiction. The history of the relationship between literature and cinema is therefore logically the history of cinema itself, but the study of one particular aspect of this relationship, cinematic adaptations of literary texts, fosters the investigation of two important and specific questions. Firstly the formal nature of cinema in comparison to literature, and secondly the dialogue generated between the different historical, cultural and industrial contexts in which the literary text and its screen adaptation are produced.

Approaches to Adaptation

A field of academic study which is so richly suggestive for the analysis of both aesthetic and ideological questions has, however, been hampered by limiting critical and theoretical approaches. This is because literary adaptations have constantly been the battleground over which film’s status was fought. In the early years, films based on books and plays triggered debate over whether film could be defined as an autonomous art, and, if so, what the ‘essence’ of that art was. Later, adaptation studies were the casualty of the development of film as a legitimate object of academic enquiry.

Early debates about literary adaptations in cinema betray extreme bias. For those seeking to hush up the new medium’s lowly beginnings as a fairground spectacle and justify film as a new art – thereby attracting middle-class audiences – adaptations of canonical texts were proof of film’s artistic credentials. For others, literary adaptations were cited as evidence of precisely the opposite. Since such films foreground their debt to another artistic medium, cinema was pronounced dependent on literature and wanting of its own modes of expression. In both cases, appreciation of the specific nature of literary adaptations was obscured by other ideological agendas.

We find that this was also the case when in the 1950s literary adaptation gave rise once again to discussions regarding the nature of cinema.