Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Adaptation
From German literature, R. W. Fassbinder’s (1946–
1982) 1974 film of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest surprised
many with the director’s unusually sober and
restrained visual style and sympathetic treatment of the
heroine’s fate, both aspects re-creating the book with
considerable effectiveness. And Eric Rohmer’s (b. 1920)
version of Heinrich von Kleist’s novella ‘‘Die Marquise
von O . . .’’ (The Marquise of O, 1970) transferred successfully
to film the author’s ironic and tongue-in-cheek
presentation of the heroine’s bizarre predicament in finding
herself pregnant with no memory of any sexual
encounter. Thomas Mann’s (1875–1955) novella
‘‘Death in Venice,’’ however, was controversially filmed
by Visconti in 1971 (Morte a Venezia). Some critics
gushed over the visual lushness of the setting and Dirk
Bogarde’s (1921–1999) fine performance, while others
objected to the liberties taken with the central character
and the awkward attempts at conveying the aesthetic and
philosophical themes of the story. By contrast, Visconti’s
earlier film of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s (1896–1957) Il
gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963), especially in its recent
fully restored version in 1996, is a masterpiece both of
filmmaking and adaptation, brilliantly re-creating both
the period setting and the moral and political dilemmas
faced by the main character. Other major Italian successes
are Bernardo Bertolucci’s (b. 1941) Strategia del
rango (The Spider’s Stratagem, 1970), from a story by
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), and Il conformista (The
Conformist, 1970) from Alberto Moravia’s (1907–1990)
novel, with both films expressing their director’s personal
vision.
The first Japanese film to achieve international success,
Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), was based on
two stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927). The
classic novels of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki (1886–1965) and
Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) have provided source
material for several films by Kon Ichikawa (b. 1915) and
Mikio Naruse (1905–1969) respectively, while Hiroshi
Teshigahara (1927–2001) has specialized in adapting the
idiosyncratic fiction of Kôbô Abe (1924–1993), with
Suna no onna (Woman in the Dunes, 1964) becoming
an international art house favorite.
Charles Dickens has been the most frequently filmed
of classical English novelists, followed, especially in the
1990s, by Jane Austen, Henry James, Thomas Hardy,
and E. M. Forster (1879–1970). Each of Austen’s six
novels has been filmed, either for the cinema or for
television, with the most acclaimed versions being Sense
and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995), Persuasion (Roger
Michell, 1995), and the television Pride and Prejudice
(also 1995), which compares favorably with the still
popular 1940 version starring Greer Garson (1908–
1996) and Laurence Olivier (1907–1989). The updating
of Emma as Clueless (1995) retains many of Austen’s
themes but sets them in the context of a contemporary
American high school.
The adaptations of E. M. Forster and Henry James
by the team of Ismail Merchant (1936–2005) and James
Ivory (b. 1928) have often been dismissed as
‘‘Masterpiece Theatre’’ material for their emphasis on
accuracy of costume and setting and their close adherence
to the details of characterization and plot at the expense
of deeper thematic concerns, thus providing merely an
agreeable illustration of the text rather than an interpretation
of it. Perhaps in reaction to the Merchant-Ivory
approach, several recent versions of James’s works have
attempted to modernize and make explicit what is left
unsaid, and to the reader’s imagination, in the originals,
most obviously in The Portrait of a Lady ( Jane Campion,
1996) and The Wings of the Dove (Iain Softley, 1997);
Mansfield Park (Patricia Rozema, 1999) has been accused
of imposing an overtly political meaning on a nonpolitical
text, and Vanity Fair (Mira Nair, 2004) turns
William Makepeace Thackeray’s (1811–1863) manipulative
and possibly murderous Becky Sharp into a feminist
heroine.
Other English classic authors frequently filmed
include Emily (1818–1848) and Charlotte Brontë
(1816–1855), with William Wyler’s (1902–1981) 1939
version of Wuthering Heights, despite dealing with only
half of the book, being still the most powerful and
atmospheric treatment, and the 1944 Jane Eyre maintaining
its superiority to most recent versions. Thomas
Hardy has been well served by Far from the Madding
Crowd ( John Schlesinger, 1967), Tess (Roman Polanski,
1979), and Jude (Michael Winterbottom, 1996). The
exquisitely beautiful Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick,
1975) catches perfectly the sense of waste and decay
beneath the glittering surface of the worlds of high society
and war central to Thackeray’s novel. From the eighteenth
century, Henry Fielding’s (1707–1754) Tom Jones
was filmed as a high-spirited romp by Tony Richardson
(1928–1991) in 1963, an approach that captures one
aspect of the novel but far from all of it, and Daniel
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe has been filmed often, most
surprisingly—and effectively—by Luis Buñuel (1900–
1983) (Las adventuas de Robinson Crusoe, 1954).
Among the ‘‘moderns’’ Graham Greene heads the
list, though his novels have rarely been filmed with much
success apart from the 1947 Brighton Rock, and it is
strange that so inherently cinematic a novelist should
have been so poorly served on film. Of the two versions
of The Quiet American (1958 and 2002) and The End of
the Affair (1955 and 2004), the more recent of each title
has been the more successful, but Greene still awaits
his ideal adaptor. Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) and
D. H. Lawrence, whose works have frequently been
40 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM