Lost and Gained in Translation

The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen extends the celebrated 'companion' series to the study of film, a field of enquiry which is beginning to emerge in other companion series too, as the popularity of film studies develops slowly but surely in language departments all over the world.

This companion to adaptation studies provides an enticing panoramic view of a source which has fuelled the film industry from its very beginnings. After two introductory chapters addressing theoretical debates, the book focuses on questions such as the impact of Gospel narratives on silent film, filmic adaptations of Shakespeare, Austen, modernist and postmodernist works, 'the woman's film', fantasy literature, and children's books. The final section takes the reader into areas such as animation, film music, and novelisation, culminating in an interview with Andrew Davies, well-known adapter of classic novels.

Despite the fact that some chapters offer few surprises for the cognizant reader, the essays are all lively, insightful, and well documented. Although the volume provides comprehensive treatment of the history and nature of adaptation studies, some readers might leave the volume with a slight hankering for closer readings. The noticeable paucity of in-depth case studies of specific films, or filmic sequences, is of course understandable in a 273-page book with panoptic aspirations. One nevertheless longs to find a chapter that takes the reader through a step-by-step, page-by-page, shot-by-shot account of how specific passages have been adapted to the screen. Many of the contributors, the editors included, are so wary of the past excesses of 'fidelity criticism' that it is no wonder that the book shies away from too much engagement with the minutiae of adaptation.

To some extent, this reticence seems unjustified as 'fidelity criticism' often reaches beyond the narrow margins that the Companion sometimes foists upon it. At its best, fidelity criticism does more than merely berate films for their failure to live up to the standards of their literary source-texts or their lack of faithfulness to their origins. Indeed there is no strict boundary between so-called fidelity criticism and the study of adaptation: a book on adaptation hardly seems possible without some commentary on how far a film departs from or adheres to its hypotexts, on what is added or jettisoned, or both gained and lost in the process. Fidelity criticism hardly precludes discussion of why, for instance, a filmmaker directing in the 1960s would choose to shoot an adaptation of a colourful novel in black and white, despite the refined colour film technology available at that time, or why a scene that takes place during the day in a novel is set at night in the film, to name but two of the almost infinite number of questions raised by the notion of fidelity or infidelity to a text.

This demurral aside, The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen is well worth acquiring and is an excellent primer for any aspiring student of literature or film. The first chapter dwells on the fidelity factor as an assessment of value, pointing out that 'virtually all books devoted to the subject of adaptation, dating back to George Bluestone's pioneering study, Novels into Film (1957), have refuted the efficacy of judging the merits of film versions of literary texts by this standard' (pp. 15–16). The author of this chapter, Brian McFarlane, remarks that a graver misconception that still exists in many quarters is that film is less demanding than literature. McFarlane's point that many still view literature as more strenuous, and therefore 'purifying', can easily be verified in teacher circles at both university and secondary school level. Many teachers of English still regard the study of film with some suspicion, despite abundant pedagogical evidence that multi-modal teaching is highly effective. Films are also still often seen as causing the death of literature, and as little more than a loss of...