Film Adaptation Issues - Essay Example

Film Adaptation Hollywood and the global movie industry have produced many literature film adaptations. From fairy tales of the old to contemporary novels - these are either filmed or televised, a number of them more than once. For example, the works of Charles Dickens such as A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist have been adapted at least 20 times. There are numerous reasons why adaptation is such a favorite among film studios. First is that they are so popular and familiar that the materials immediately assure commercial success. Secondly, the body of literature has many creative and wonderfully interesting features that offer tremendous opportunities in filmmaking. There are other reasons but that they all underscore the fact that this kind of strategy in filmmaking will always be here so long as books and stories come out of the printing press. Richard Beach (2006) cited different types of adaptations: the loose, the faithful and the literal. To quote: In loose adaptation, a director may only use the original situations, story idea, or characters to create a film that bears little resemblance to the original text… Faithful adaptations attempt to recapture the original text as closely as possible… Literal translations are typically older video versions of play productions with limited cinematic effects. (p. 204) There are those who criticize literature adaptations. This criticisms focus a lot on what they call as “fidelity.” Those who criticize views adaptation as a translation from text to the cinema and, so, for an adaptation to be true and successful, they said it must be faithful to the original. Unfortunately, filmmakers today change a lot of elements from the original story in order to achieve cinematic effects. For example, the film adaptations created by Walt Disney from the classic children’s stories like Snow White, Cinderella and Pinocchio demonstrated several alterations from the original texts in such a way that it significantly made it difficult to match the original to the films in terms of characters, plot, meaning, and spirit. (Cullinan and Person 2003, p. 104) This why under most literary examination, literary cinema represents a falling off from the original book and that it is considered to be an inferior reproduction of a superior original - a failed translation. (Eliott 2003, p. 128) On the other hand, there are also those who defend the way literature are being adapted for cinematic exhibition. The main argument from this defense is that there should be a balanced translation model: on one hand, there’s the film’s duty to be faithful to the original work; on the other, to its own system of cinematic signs, conventions, audiences and genres. According to Robinson and Andersen (2004), whatever the measure of criticisms to emerge relating to the fidelity of the adaptation, visually reproduced texts generate audience levels rapidly and far in excess of readership figures. (p. 71-72) Because of this, more and more people are exposed to literary work. Through adaptations, literary materials are able to reach new, transnational, cross-cultural audiences. As a result, more people are likely to know the works of Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, Austen, Bronte, George Eliot and others. Indeed, without the cinema, this body of literature could have just languished and gathered dust in some old library, read from time to time by scholars whose job is to read. All in all, it appears that cinematic adaptations of literary work are entirely different and deserved to be treated as a literary work themselves. They offer visual representations of novels, particularly the classics, characterized by rich melodrama, rich details and remembrance of the past. Instead of a literal interpretation, it seemed to be more appropriate to say that film adaptations are a link between the written and the visual. For this activity, I have adapted, loosely, for my screenplay “The Country of the Blind, in H.G. Wells’ ’The Myth of the New Found Land. This short story revolved around Nunez, an educated and ambitious person. He was entirely consumed and motivated to succeed, but this also leaves him vulnerable to failure. In the characterization of my protagonist – the young film maker - I tried hard to emulate how Nunez was characterized. The main character of the screenplay was ambitious. For example, he attends the film festival and continues to make films in order to be famous. However, his desire cannot be fulfilled particularly when he lost in a film competition. To add a deeper dimension to this aspect, I tried to connect that with losing his sexual power. Thus, he started his journey to find the Taliban, not to do his job as a responsible artist, but to fulfill his desire in making a movie that would make him famous and also to get his sexual power back. So, his ambition stooped to point of the animalistic level not unlike how Nunez wanted to be king in the country of blind even if he loses his eyes in the process. In Well’s story, he notes that when Nunez initially meets the blind villagers, he looks down on them and deems himself superior. The irony that Nunez comes to grips with in dealing with this concept of colonial power is that he has already had it indoctrinated into his understanding and ideology. He enters the village with the quote in mind “in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king.” He is already thinking along the lines of colonization and domination. When he first sees the villagers, even before knowing their physical disposition, he says, “But they did not appear to see him for all his gestures, and after a time, directing themselves towards the mountains far away to the right, they shouted as if in answer. Nunez bawled again, and then once more, and as he gestured ineffectually the word “blind” came up to the top of his thoughts. “The fools must be blind,” he said. He views their behavior on the mountain as inferior and questionable, and likewise he would later find they seem him the same way. What he does not realize is that what he deems to be an advantage the culture that he is self imposing himself on views his fifth sense as a disadvantage or handicap. Both parties view the other as inferior, and thus the struggle for domination over the other is played out during Nunez’s stay in the village. In the screenplay, the young film maker assumed Nunez disposition. In the script, when the film maker saw the Taliban’s the first time, they are praying and bowing for their god. But the boy thought they are bowing to him and he felt like a king. Then he used the camera as a tool of power and sometimes he told the Talibans what to do in front of the camera. But in the end, the Talibans instructed him. They corrected the young film maker all the time and anything that he does, pointing to the fact that most of what the film makers did was against Islam. I have used a Taliban community in place of the country of the blind. I find that there are several similarities so I included them in my description. For example, in H.G. Well’s story, there was a cult –like naivety that was shared by the villagers. This is demonstrated by the fact that they would rather live their lives blind than take the chance to escape their world and finally see. In addition, their insistence on taking away Nunez’s sight in order for him to be accepted into their society is another example of their delusional faith. Freud refers to this in many of his writings when he talks about the delusions that can occur with blind cult like faith in religion. Freud identifies the massive hold which religious factions have on their followers. He points how naïve one must be to maintain devout belief in a religious faction when he says, "the greater the number of men to whom the treasures of knowledge become accessible, the more widespread is the falling-away from religious belief—at first only from its obsolete and objection-able trappings, but later from its fundamental postulates as well (Freud, p49)." All of the villagers believe so devoutly in their way of life that they are willing to disfigure Nunez to maintain the sanctity of their world. And so the Taliban community was very convenient representation for me of the village in Well’s narrative. Another important aspect in my screenplay is Sohrab. He represents Medina-sarote, who was an important figure in H.G. Well’s story. Medina-sarote’s relationship with Nunez helps Nunez to mature and find the meaning of love. Since most of Talibans are men, it would be implausible to use a female-figure, much less a love interest in the story. Another reason was that the main character doesnt have any real friend and the lack of male figure in his life is continually appearing in the script. His relationship then with Sohrab helped him to grow up and find a real friend. My main character also helped Sohrab to learn about the world and introducing him the world of movies, just like what Nunez did in his interaction with Medina-sarote. I would like to outline a more detailed account of this element in my screenplay. One time, the filmmaker asked Sohrab to buy a DVD in the city. The boy was permitted to do so because of the pretext that he is on errand to buy a video cassette for the filmmaker’s camera. Of course, the Imam accepted this because the movie that is being made was about them, and therefore would advance Taliban ideology when shown through the media. So the boy, with an escort (to make sure he doesn’t run away), was able to buy a DVD in the city. The night when he returned to the mountains, when all are asleep, he and the film maker watched the film. Sohrab, who have never seen a movie in his entire life except the religious movies they were forced to watch by the Imam, was naturally amazed. From Sohrab’s end, he also introduced his culture to the film maker and taught him to live in a harsh condition. In one defining scene, the Taliban wanted to circumcise the film maker when the Imam finds out that the he hasn’t undergone circumcision (posthetomy). He ordered his men to make the film maker true Muslim. This scene show how the filmmaker’s ambition rooted in his own ignorance almost cost him his life. He asked Sohrab to do perform the circumcision. The act symbolically took from the film maker his desire and the darkness of his soul. In the end he and Sohrab, who rejected his fathers ideology, decided to escape from the mountains. This escape was aided by a confrontation between the Taliban and the army. As the Taliban were chasing them, the army attacked. These two friends reached the top of the mountain. The boys camera is recording the war. The sound of explosion could be heard. The camera, which was in the boys hand, falling down and it recorded the sky which is filled with the stars. There are other concepts I explored parallel to Wells’ story. For example, Wells discussed the evils of colonialism. When assessing the relationship between colonial power and the act of domination of one group over a lesser group he notes that, “Therefore there exists in the cultural philosophy of the colonial power a series of justifications of what domination is, what it represents and how the invaders should view their activities (Boulton 1995, p10).” He goes on to say, “These concepts can be distilled down to four main ideas: the indigenous population is in some way a cuckoo/non-indigenous culture; the European power of language compels the invader to rule; racial and Darwinist science disqualifies the native from any right to rule; and the biblical and commercial pull of new territory to cultivate demands colonial intervention (Boulton 1995, p10).” In the screenplay I tried to show this in with the power that Imam (religious leader) have on other members of Taliban. I tried to show that their belief and their reasons for killing other people are rooted in their wrong interpretation of the Koran. In one scene, for example, we see the leader teaching the rules of Islam and his audience – those who deferred to him because he was a spiritual leader - listened intently, absorbing without all his wrong interpretations and inflaming their hearts with twisted notion of religion. There are many ways Well’s story can be taken, because the plot is presented in such an open ended fashion. One critique common among literary scholars is that Nunez falls in the beginning of the story and then the rest of his adventure is really just a figment of his imagination, as Foster notes, “ It is possible that the valley of the blind does not tangibly exist, and that it is merely a figment of the delirious Nunezs imagination--a delirium brought on by a concussion from a thousand-foot fall (2009, 129).” He goes on to identify this as the reason due to say, “The original Parascotopetl explorers with whom Nunez has been hiking do not even attempt to retrieve the mountaineers body, automatically assuming that he is dead. As Nunez lies "stunned and insensible," he attempts to dislodge himself from the snow "until he saw the stars" (129).” The idea that he was trapped in the snow and fighting to get free until seeing the stars implies that he might have gone unconscious. Foster identifies the repetition of the statement as the key trigger to this conclusion when he says, “The repetition of this phrase in the ending--Nunezs final resting place is under the "cold clear stars"--suggests that perhaps Wells story takes place wholly in the imagination of the main character (Foster 2009, 129).” In the script, I tried to be faithful to that. Before the film maker started his journey, he looked at the sky which was filled with stars and that the last sentence of the script showed the same imagery. Read More