Film adaptation and its discontents : from Gone with the wind to The passion of the Christ

Bibliographic Information

Film adaptation and its discontents : from Gone with the wind to The passion of the Christ

Thomas Leitch

Johns Hopkins University Press, c2007

  • : hbk

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [325]-338) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Most books on film adaptation-the relation between films and their literary sources-focus on a series of close one-to-one comparisons between specific films and canonical novels. This volume identifies and investigates a far wider array of problems posed by the process of adaptation. Beginning with an examination of why adaptation study has so often supported the institution of literature rather than fostering the practice of literacy, Thomas Leitch considers how the creators of short silent films attempted to give them the weight of literature, what sorts of fidelity are possible in an adaptation of sacred scripture, what it means for an adaptation to pose as an introduction to, rather than a transcription of, a literary classic, and why and how some films have sought impossibly close fidelity to their sources. After examining the surprisingly divergent fidelity claims made by three different kinds of canonical adaptations, Leitch's analysis moves beyond literary sources to consider why a small number of adapters have risen to the status of auteurs and how illustrated books, comic strips, video games, and true stories have been adapted to the screen. The range of films studied, from silent Shakespeare to Sherlock Holmes to The Lord of the Rings, is as broad as the problems that come under review.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 1. Literature versus Literacy 2. One-Reel Epics 3. The Word Made Film 4. Entry-Level Dickens 5. Between Adaptation and Allusion 6. Exceptional Fidelity 7. Traditions of Quality 8. Streaming Pictures 9. The Hero with a Hundred Faces 10. The Adapter as Auteur 11. Postliterary Adaptation 12. Based on a True Story Notes Bibliography Index

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