Towards an Art of Adaptation: Film and the New Criticism-as-Creation

Abstract

Many filmmakers have chosen what they would call a “faithful” approach to adap­ tation, in which the plot and characters are extracted and utilized as the basis of the action represented in the film. The resulting adaptations have catapulted classic narratives (usually novels or plays) into a more lucrative medium, thereby exploit­ ing the text as a template or stencil and reducing the adapter to a mere copier of plot. What the adapter borrows is essentially the narrative, which, as Seymour Chatman points out, lends itself most easily to such borrowing. Chatman writes: