David Boyd and R. Barton Palmer have edited an intriguing anthology of essays on Hitchcock’s adaptations, Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adapter (2011). A refreshingly wide-ranging discussion of literary and other kinds of cinematic adaptation is Thomas Leitch’s Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (2007), which also offers a convincing argument about how the study of adaptation can help students write and think clearly. In addition to Literature/Film Quarterly, which has published scholarly articles on the subject since 1973, we now have Adaptation, which since 2008 has published articles on a variety of topics involving film and TV. But the recent theorist who most emphasizes the ubiquity of adaptation, covering everything from literature to Barbie dolls, is Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation (2006). Hutcheon’s concluding chapter poses the question “What is not an adaptation?” She defines the key term as “an extended, deliberate, announced revisitation of a particular work of art” (170); hence, for her, not all adaptations involve remediation (as examples, she cites J. M. Coetzee’s Foe [1986], which revisits Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe [1719], and Vincente Minnelli’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse [1962], which remakes Rex Ingram’s 1921 film of the same name). On the production side of adaptation, she points out, texts or works of art can be adjusted or altered by revision, editing, publication, display, and performance; on the reception side, they can be destabilized by translation, bowdlerization, censorship, and “cultural revision,” in which receivers begin to refashion the initial works by remaking or remediating them. This “continuum model” offers several ways of thinking about adaptation—as retelling, rewriting, remediation, reinterpretation, and re-creation (172). Hutcheon also poses the question “What is the appeal of adaptations?” One of her answers, which requires that audiences know the source (often they do not), is that successful adaptations involve pleasures similar to theme and variation in music: “We find a story we like and then do variations on it. . . . It is not a copy in any mode of reproduction, mechanical or otherwise. It is repetition but without replication, bringing together the comfort of ritual and recognition with the delight of surprise and novelty” (173).
Finally, I should call attention to another of André Bazin’s essays, “For an Impure Cinema: In Defense of Adaptation,” which has been given a new translation by Timothy Barnard for What Is Cinema (2009), his English-language edition of Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Although this essay is already well known, it deserves rereading, especially with Barnard’s helpful editorial notes. Bazin gives us a salutary reminder that adaptation has a very old cultural history: like André Malraux, he describes Renaissance painting in its initial phase as an adaptation of Gothic sculpture, and he points out that Byzantine miniatures were enlarged in stone to the size of cathedral tympana. (He doesn’t mention an equally early and perhaps even more striking example: Le jeu d’Adam, one of the oldest medieval mystery plays of the twelfth century, which dramatizes the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve.) His essay is filled with fine critical discrimination of individual film adaptations and also has interesting things to say about the relation between modernist literature and film. Unlike Claude-Edmonde Magny and most other critics, Bazin argues that cinema learned more from modern literature than modern literature learned from cinema: “It is impossible to tell whether Manhattan Transfer and La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate) would be very different without film, but I am certain that The Power and the Glory and Citizen Kane would never have been conceived without James Joyce and John Dos Passos” (120).
Notes on Acting in Cinema
Even a moment’s observation should make it obvious that the art of acting is extremely important to most films, and yet critical literature on the subject is relatively sparse. There are excellent sociological studies of the star system and of individual stars, but not much close analysis of what actors do in specific films. In one sense, of course, movie actors are merely agents of narrative who are assisted by machinery; Lev Kuleshov famously attempted to prove that their performances can be constructed in the editing room, and Alfred Hitchcock once described them as experts in the art of “doing nothing extremely well.” Nevertheless, the vast majority of films depend on a form of communication whereby meanings are acted out. The experience of watching them involves not only a pleasure in storytelling but also a delight in bodies, expressive movements, and familiar performing skills. Perhaps we also derive pleasure from the fact that films enable us to recognize and adapt to the fundamentally acted quality of everyday life: they place us safely outside dramatic events, a position from which we can observe people lying, concealing emotions, or staging performances for one another.
“Performance” is a much broader category than acting: we’re all performers, and anyone who appears in a film, even an unwitting passerby on the street who is caught by the camera, becomes a sort of cinematic performer. Films also make use of acrobats, dancers, and concert musicians who perform much as they would on a stage and act in only a qualified sense. A person becomes a theatrical or cinematic actor of the sort discussed here when she or he functions as a developed character in a dramatic narrative. As with any other art form, there are no hard-and-fast rules for what constitutes the best film acting of this type. Certain players of the classic Hollywood era—I would name Peter Lorre, Agnes Moorehead, and Mickey Rooney—create such vivid characters that they make every film they are in, no matter how good or bad, slightly better; but the dogs who played Rin Tin Tin, Asta, and Lassie were also fine actors in the context of their particular films, and nonprofessionals have given impressive performances in fiction pictures.
All good movie actors understand the characters they play, move to the marks that have been placed for them on the floor of the set, and have the ability to use props and costumes in expressive ways. Only occasionally do they abandon their normal mannerisms and impersonate recognizable historical figures: Helen Mirren’s portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006) is a fine example of movie impersonation because it only suggests Elizabeth without slavishly imitating her. Awards are often given for this or any other kind of performance that makes the work of the actor clearly visible, as when the actor gains or loses weight, speaks with an accent, or pretends drunkenness or deformity. Acting is also made visible by dual roles or by performances within the performance. In Mulholland Drive (2001), for example, Naomi Watts plays two different personalities, one of whom is a perky young aspirant to Hollywood fame who auditions for a role in a movie at Paramount. When she prepares for the audition she interprets her lines literally and speaks in a big, angry voice; when she arrives at the studio, she whispers the same lines in a steamy voice and gives them erotic implication. We view the first performance-within-a-performance as “bad” acting and the second as “good” acting, but both are important to the film and Watts performs them equally well.
Film stars are actors (sometimes very good ones), but they are also iconic, extracinematic characters; their names circulate through all the media, their mannerisms become as familiar as those of the people we know intimately, and the screenplays of their films are often written to conform to the personality-images they’ve established. Their appearances on screen always create a double impression: it’s John Wayne getting on a horse in The Searchers, not simply Ethan Edwards (Wayne is “played” by a man whose real name was Marion Morrison). Because of this effect, the star can show off acting skill by occasionally changing the sort of character she or he plays. Many of the best actor-stars—Marilyn Monroe, for example—create a single character type that they play brilliantly and definitively over and over, sometimes becoming prisoners of their creation. At an opposite extreme is a figure such as Johnny Depp, a “postmodern” performer who has managed to become a chameleon and a star at the same time. There would seem to be no recipe for what makes a star, beyond a certain level of charisma. In most cases the performer needs the requisite glamour and sex appeal to play leading roles in heterosexual romances and action-adventure pictures, but there are many exceptions: Shirley Temple, Marie Dressler, Will Rogers, and Bob Hope were all leading players and major box-office attractions in their day.
It has often been argued that the most cinema-specific form of acting is much less ostentatious and gestural than acting on the stage—more like Naomi Watts’s studio audition in Mulholland Drive. V. I. Pudovkin, who wrote an early treatise on the subject, contended that films were ideal vehicles for what the celebrated