Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of Christ Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of Christ . Thomas Leitch . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. ix+354.
2010; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 108; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/655687
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoPrevious article FreeBook ReviewThomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of Christ Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of Christ. Thomas Leitch . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. ix+354.Susan M. GriffinSusan M. GriffinUniversity of Louisville Search for more articles by this author University of LouisvillePDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From “Gone with the Wind” to “The Passion of Christ,” Thomas Leitch identifies a split between adaptation theory and film studies. The latter, he explains, judges filmic adaptations of literary texts in terms of their “fidelity” to the literature that they adapt, privileging book over film (6). He connects this practice to the work of cultural critics like E. D. Hirsch who, according to Leitch, define literacy as familiarity with canonical works and to English departments' hierarchical valuation of reading over writing. Leitch argues that an adaptation theory that rejects the fidelity standard can provide the most powerful means of critiquing these tendencies. Rather than rendering judgment about a given film's faithfulness to its original, Leitch wants to investigate and, to some extent, systematize the processes and problems of adaptation. An adaptation theory attuned to intertextuality, revision, and rewriting has, Leitch claims, “unique potential as the keystone of a new discipline of textual studies less ideologically driven, and therefore more powerful, than either contemporary literary or cultural studies” (19–20).It is not a claim that his study convincingly supports. One reason is that the battle that Leitch describes is largely over (thanks, in part, to contemporary literary and cultural studies and in part to renewed institutional recognition of pedagogy and especially writing pedagogy). What Leitch calls “the current orthodoxy of literacy” (11), by which he means training students to recognize what counts as canonical literature, is hardly an uncontested, or even dominant, practice in most English departments today. So, too, intertextuality and process are already central to classroom discourse. Because he sees adaptation theory as relatively neglected, Leitch overstates its potential importance for film and literary scholars.What Film Adaptation does provide is a wide-ranging and astute study of film adaptation that is specific in its analyses even as it traces the contours of film's complex, variable, and fluid relationships with nonfilmic narratives and images. Leitch's scope is impressive. Since “cinematic adaptation is as old as cinema itself” (22), Film Adaptation begins with 1896 and looks forward to 2007, treating turn-of-the-century one-reel films as well as “postliterary” movie adaptations of videogames (268). Included in the book's twelve chapters are studies of the problems involved in filming a life of Jesus and of re-visualizing famous illustrated books (e.g., Alice in Wonderland [1865]), an analysis of films based on Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843), and of the various filmic incarnations of Sherlock Holmes. Leitch discusses the differences between adaptation and allusion, explores the authenticating claim “based on a true story,” and compares the distinct ways Alfred Hitchcock, Walt Disney, and Stanley Kubrick constructed themselves as auteurs, wresting authority from authors. Bringing an encyclopedic familiarity with films to his study, Leitch investigates the cultural moments of their making. His implicit argument is that one can understand a given instance of adaptation only by knowing the economic, political, technological, and personal conditions under which it was conceived, created (and recreated), and filmed. Although this means that, at times, Leitch rehearses familiar facts, it also makes for rich descriptions of moviemaking and generally provides convincing grounds for Leitch's claims.The bulk of Leitch's chapters is taken up with close analyses of particular films. (Although a fully illustrated version of Film Adaptations would have been both impossibly large and ridiculously expensive, the detail of Leitch's discussions, which often refer to specific shots, often made me wish that I could examine these visual images myself.) Leitch is careful to move out from these analyses to make general conclusions about the nature and structure of adaptation, as when he states, “Taken as a group, the Grinch adaptations raise five problems in adapting picture books to the screen” (192). The chapter perhaps most fully dedicated to adaptation theory as such, “Between Adaptation and Allusion,” begins by positing that these two modes—the first hypertextual; the second, intertextual—occupy opposite ends of a continuum. Drawing on and critiquing the work of previous scholars, Leitch explores possibilities for a taxonomy of possible strategies that might be located along this line. “Celebration,” “adjustment,” “revision,” “colonization”—Leitch's delineation of these terms proves to be what he calls a “failed” but productive enterprise. These models for understanding filmmakers' approaches to their materials are illuminating; however, as Leitch demonstrates, individual films remain resistant to rigid categorization: “Even apparently straightforward adaptations typically make use of many different intertextual strategies” (126).So thorough is Leitch's exploration of the structures of adaptation that he turns, in his last chapter, to “films that profess to be based on no source text at all but on a true story” (280). This is a fascinating chapter, and one for which the trajectory of Film Adaptation has well prepared us. Earlier, for example, Leitch demonstrates how the majority of Sherlock Holmes adaptations “take as their primary referent not the particular story they are ostensibly adapting…but the franchise as a whole [texts by Arthur Conan Doyle, illustrations by Sidney Paget, fan ‘scholarship’]” (213), with the aim of becoming ever more “real” versions of the Holmes story (235). “Based on a true story” films go this tactic one better, insofar as their claims refer to “a transcendental precursor master text” (288), one whose utility lies in its simultaneous truth and nonexistence. Leitch's astute analyses of these films brings him up against the question of what, finally, counts as an adaptation: “If Fargo creates its own textual source by creating an original story and then framing it as if it were true, it would seem that anything can be made to assume textual authority” (302).Yet, Leitch argues, confronting such problems is profitable because a new kind of adaptation studies, one that turns us away from texts to textualizing and textuality, can serve as a pedagogical model. Adaptation studies can teach us, and our students, to read (and write) every text as “the work-in-progress of institutional practices of rewriting” (303). Without sharing Thomas Leitch's belief that understanding the theory and practice of film adaptation uniquely qualifies one to learn those lessons, I would agree that reading Film Adaptations is a powerful exercise in learning. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 2November 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/655687 Views: 4528Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
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