Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Witches of Salem, 1957), from The Crucible, with a script
by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980).
In Europe, Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), August
Strindberg (1849–1912), and Anton Chekov (1860–
1904) have often been adapted. The 1951 Fröken Julie
(Miss Julie), directed by Alf Sjöberg (1903–1980), is still
the best Strindberg, but few of the English-language films
of Ibsen and Chekov have been particularly successful. Jean
Renoir (Les bas-fonds, 1936) and Akira Kurosawa (Donzoko,
1957) made very different but equally fascinating films of
Maxim Gorky’s (1868–1936) The Lower Depths.
OTHER KINDS OF ADAPTATION
Detstvo Gorkogo (The Childhood of Maxim Gorky, 1938),
directed by Mark Donskoy (1901–1981), remains one of
the finest of film biographies/autobiographies, but most
such films are bedevilled by questions of authenticity, for
content is more important here than transforming
sophisticated literary techniques into film. Does the leading
actor really resemble the subject (whose photos or
portraits are usually well known)? Is the film factually
accurate or truthful (and is this true of its source)? Is it
slanted in favor of or against the protagonist? Are there
distortions of fact, omissions, invented incidents or
encounters? Some film biographies, such as Finding
Neverland (2004), admit to not being completely factual,
but most do not, and the majority of such films are built
up by drawing on a variety of sources, augmented by
scenes imagined or created by the scriptwriter. The result,
as in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), may be
superb cinema but should not necessarily be considered
a definitive account of the subject’s life.
Comic books and comic strips have proved a consistent
source of film material, though the various treatments
of Batman and Superman, for example, usually
consist of rewritten works based on a variety of incidents
taken from the original rather than an adaptation of one
particular story. Many popular television series have been
turned into films, such as The Addams Family (1991) or
The Brady Bunch (1995), on much the same principle of
selection, and the recent vogue for graphic novels has also
spilled over into film, as with Ghost World (2001) from
the original by Daniel Clowes (b. 1961).
Films for children tend to be either live action, as in
the several versions of Little Women (1933, 1949, 1994)
and The Secret Garden (most recently 1993), or animated,
as with the Disney classics Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Bambi (1942), though more
recent films from that studio are too often saccharine
distortions of what were quite tough-minded originals.
The digital animation of The Polar Express (2004) recreates
the visual world of the book very convincingly.
Opera on film tends to be similar to ‘‘canned theater’’
with a few exceptions, such as Joseph Losey’s (1909–1984)
Don Giovanni (1979) or Francesco Rosi’s (b. 1922) Carmen
(1984), which were well reimagined for film. And longer
poems such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s (1807–
1882) Hiawatha (1952) or Alfred Lord Tennyson’s
(1809–1892) The Charge of the Light Brigade and
Geoffrey Chaucer’s (1340–1400) The Canterbury Tales have
become (very loosely) the basis for feature-length films.
Overall, then, almost anything written, or even drawn,
can be transformed into a film, either faithfully or altered
almost out of recognition, with success depending as much
on the skill and intelligence of the filmmaker as the often
uneven quality of the original material.
SEE ALSO Biography; Comics and Comic Books;
Screenwriting; Theater
Adaptation
FURTHER READING
Ball, Robert Hamilton. Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange,
Eventful History. New York: Theater Arts Books, 1968.
Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? 2 volumes. Translated by Hugh
Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1973 [1957].
Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative
in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1990.
Enser, A. G. S. Filmed Books and Plays: A List of Books and Plays
from which Films Have Been Made, 1928–86. Hampshire,
UK: Gower Publishing, 1987.
Giddings, Robert, Keith Selby, and Chris Wensley. Screening the
Novel: The Theory and Practice of Literary Dramatization. New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.
Jorgens, Jack J. Shakespeare on Film. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1977.
Klein, Michael, and Gillian Parker, eds. The English Novel and
the Movies. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981.
Naremore, James, ed. Film Adaptation. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2000.
Peary, Gerald, and Roger Shatzkin, eds. The Classic American
Novel and the Movies. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977.
———, eds. The Modern American Novel and the Movies. New
York: Frederick Ungar, 1978.
Sinyard, Neil. Filming Literature: The Art of Screen Adaptation.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986.
Smith, Grahame. Dickens and the Dream of Cinema. New York:
Manchester University Press, 2003.
Smith, Murray. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the
Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Wheeler, David, ed. No, But I Saw the Movie: The Best Short
Stories Ever Made into Film. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.
Graham Petrie
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 47