Intertextuality and Translation in Film Adaptation

Intertextuality and Translation in Film Adaptation

&nbsp;&nbsp;Even though the relationship between literature and film has evolved and grown extremely complex over the years, the most common mainstream discussions on this topic have centered on the notion of fidelity of the adapted film. However, many have come to realize that a study of adaptation based on fidelity criticism is inadequate and arguable. The fidelity issue overlooks the possibility of viewing cinematic adaptations as intertextual works and as critical interpretations of the literary text, which then enhance and expand our reading of the literary works. The film represents the filmmaker&quot;s subjective understanding of the literary source. The cinematic adaptation of a novel therefore need not be seen uniquely as a question of "fidelity" to the source material.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;A cinematic adaptation of a literary text is essentially an interpretation of the original text using a different medium. It is fundamentally a translation, from one medium to another, of a narrative. Thus, the adaptation of literary texts to the medium of film can be examined within the context of translation.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Furthermore when adaptation is studied along with the concept of intertextuality, the relation between the filmic text and its precursor written text stands less in a hierarchical order and more as an exchange, which adds to both text and source. The study of adaptation can now break out of the fixed notion of &quot;original&quot; versus &quot;copy&quot;, which has dominated much of the discussion of film adaptation in recent years. Thus, the complex relationship between novel and film should now be explored in terms of other theoretical dimensions.