Meanwhile, in still another historical irony, film was being regarded in some quarters as the quintessential medium for modernist and avant-garde art. Some of the most talented movie directors in the first half of the century approached the problem of literary adaptation in the spirit of intense aestheticism, as in Erich von Stroheim’s version of Greed (1924) or Eisenstein’s abortive attempt to film An American Tragedy. Modern experimental fiction was sometimes directly influenced by cinema, as when John Dos Passos began his USA trilogy shortly after meeting Eisenstein and reading the Soviet theories of montage. Eventually, the cinema was theorized as the dominant “way of seeing” in the modern world and as a condition toward which most of the visual and literary arts aspired. Cultural critic Arnold Hauser placed the whole of twentieth-century art, including such things as Cubist paintings and poems like The Waste Land, under the evocative rubric of “the film age.” French critic Claude-Edmonde Magny proposed that the period between the two world wars should be called “the age of the American novel” and that the leading American writers, especially Hemingway and Faulkner, were guided by a “film aesthetic.” American critics Alan Spiegel and Keith Cohen each wrote books arguing that modern Anglo/European literature, including Flaubert, Proust, James, Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf, was fundamentally “cinematic” in form.
It was not until 1957 that the movies seemed to have matured enough to produce the first full-scale academic analysis of film adaptation in America: George Bluestone’s Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema. In this book Bluestone argues that certain movies (his examples are all from Hollywood, including The Informer, Wuthering Heights, and The Grapes of Wrath) do not debase their literary sources; instead, they “metamorphose” novels into another medium that has its own formal or narratological possibilities. Such an argument seems unlikely to provoke controversy; one of its difficulties, at least insofar as Bluestone’s general aim of giving movies artistic respectability is concerned, is that it takes place entirely on the grounds of modernist aestheticism. Given Bluestone’s thesis, film can’t acquire true cultural capital unless it first theorizes its own media-specific form. Hence Bluestone argues that “the end products of novel and film represent different aesthetic genera, as different from each other as ballet is from architecture” (5). At the same time, however, he tends to confirm the artistic priority and superiority of canonical novels, if only because they provide the films he discusses with their sources and artistic standards.
When we start from Bluestone’s position, the only way to avoid making film seem belated, middlebrow, or culturally inferior is to devalue adaptation altogether. That’s more or less what happened in Europe at almost the same moment when Bluestone’s book was published. The central importance of the French New Wave in the history of worldwide taste and opinion was that it was able to break with traditional movie criticism and establish a truly modernist (as well as somewhat Arnoldian) film criticism by launching an attack on what Truffaut called a “tradition of quality” made up of respectable literary adaptations. One of the best-kept secrets of the New Wave was that many of their own films were based on books; the sources they chose, however, were often lowbrow, and when they closely adapted “serious” works or wrote essays about film adaptations (such as Bazin’s essay on Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest), they made sure that the auteur would seem at least as important as the author. Along similar lines, they gave legitimacy to art-film directors who were less interested in adapting literature than in interrogating or “reading” it. One of the many who followed in their wake was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, an explosively antibourgeois filmmaker who once argued that cinematic transformation of a literary work should never assume its purpose is to realize the images that literature evokes in the minds of its readers. Such a goal is preposterous, Fassbinder wrote, because there are so many different readers with different fantasies. His own aim, as he described it in relation to Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and Querelle (1982), was to avoid a “composite” fantasy and to engage in what he called “an unequivocal and single-minded questioning of the piece of literature and its language” (Fassbinder, 168).
The French auteurists never treated movies as a “seventh art” or a separate but equal member of the cultural pantheon. Instead, adopting Alexandre Astruc’s idea of the camera stylo, they spoke of film as a language and the director as a kind of writer, wielding a lens instead of a pen. They elevated the cinematic mise-en-scène to a greater importance than the scenario, and partly as a result it’s now commonplace for film historians to speak of directorial masterpieces or canonical works of cinema that revise and far surpass their sources. (My list includes Eisenstein’s October [1928], Murnau’s Sunrise [1927], Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons [1942], Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman [1948], Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960], and Godard’s Contempt [1963].) They also made it a critical commonplace to observe that some of the best movie directors avoid adaptation of respected literature or radically deviate from their literary sources. The practice is enshrined during Hitchcock’s interview with Truffaut, in which Hitchcock claims that the approach he usually takes to sources is to “read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget about the book and start to create cinema” (71). He would never adapt Crime and Punishment, he says, in part because he thinks that feature films are more like short stories than like novels and in part because “in Dostoyevsky’s novel there are many, many words and all of them have a function” (72). Truffaut quickly agrees, voicing one of the axioms of modernist aesthetics and pure cinema: “That’s right. Theoretically, a masterpiece is something that has already found its perfection of form, its definitive form” (72). And indeed, Hitchcock’s films lend support to these conclusions, although it should also be noted that there are exceptions to the rule: The 39 Steps (based on a novel by John Buchan), Sabotage (based on a novel by Joseph Conrad), and The Birds (based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier) are quite free adaptations, but the half-hour TV film “Lamb to the Slaughter,” one of Hitchcock’s minor but most perfect achievements, is a quite literal approach to a Roald Dahl short story, scripted by Dahl himself.
Since the 1980s, academic writing has become more aware that the relationship between film and literature is complex, involving a good deal more than the art of adapting books into films—see, for instance, Timothy Corrigan’s useful textbook Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader (1999), which explores a number of important sociological and historical issues. Where formal analysis is concerned, the study of adaptations has gained sophistication by making use of the structuralist and poststructuralist poetics of Roland Barthes, the narratology of Gérard Genette, and the neo-formalism of Bordwell and Thompson. For the most part, however, adaptation study has remained literary in nature and continues to waver back and forth between the two approaches exemplified by Bluestone and the auteurists. The Bluestone approach relies on an implicit metaphor of translation, which governs all investigations of how codes move across sign systems. Writing in this category usually deals with the concept of literary versus cinematic form and pays close attention to the problem of textual fidelity in order to identify the specific formal capabilities of the media. By contrast, the auteurist approach relies on an implicit metaphor of performance. It, too, involves questions of fidelity, but it subordinates media specificity and formal systems to an analysis of individual style.
The problem with most writing about adaptation as translation is that it tends to valorize the literary canon and essentialize the nature of cinema. One example is Seymour Chatman’s “What Novels Can Do That Film Can’t (and Vice Versa),” first published in Critical Inquiry in 1981. A theoretically informed, highly intelligent discussion of Jean Renoir’s 1936 adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s “Une Partie de campagne,” it shows