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Adaptation transforms art across styles and mediums, from films to video games. Explore its rich history and cultural impact! 🎬📚 #Adaptation #Film #Literature #Art 🍿✨ https://wp.me/p3JLEZ-3E4
Adaptation is not merely a trend; it is a profound reflection of how art evolves across cultures, mediums, and generations. From the striking visual storytelling found in modern films to immersive narratives in video games, adaptation shapes our understanding of literature and the arts. By exploring the rich history of adaptation, we uncover a tapestry of creativity that invites us to experience familiar tales in fresh and engaging ways. This journey through adaptation studies reveals the interconnectedness of various art forms, illustrating the ways in which they inform and inspire one another. Whether you are a film buff, a book lover, or a gaming enthusiast, understanding the nuances of adaptation enriches your appreciation of these artistic expressions, making this exploration undeniably relevant to our contemporary cultural landscape. Join us as we delve into the transformative power of adaptation and discover its impact on the art we cherish today!
An adaptation is a transfer of a work of art from one style, culture or medium to another.
Some common examples are:
- Film adaptation, a story from another work, adapted into a film (it may be a novel, non-fiction like journalism, autobiography, comic books, scriptures, plays or historical sources).
- Literary adaptation, consists of adapting a literary source (for example, a novel, a short story, a poem) to another genre or medium, such as film, theater or video games. It can also be about the adaptation of the literary work to the same medium or genre, for different purposes. For example: A novelization is a story from another work, adapted into a novel.
- Theatrical adaptation, a story from another work, adapted into a play.
- Video game adaptation, a story from a video game, adapted into media (e.g. film, anime and manga, and television)
Types of adaptation
There is no end to potential media involved in adaptation. Adaptation might be seen as a special case of intertextuality or intermediality, which involves the practice of transcoding (changing the code or ‘language’ used in a medium) as well as the assimilation of a work of art to other cultural, linguistic, semiotic, aesthetic or other norms. Recent approaches to the expanding field of adaptation studies reflect these expansions of our perspective. Adaptation occurs as a special case of intertextual and intermedial exchange and the copy-paste culture of digital technologies has produced “new intertextual forms engendered by emerging technologies—mashups, remixes, reboots, samplings, remodelings, transformations— ” that “further develop the impulse to adapt and appropriate, and the ways in which they challenge the theory and practice of adaptation and appropriation.”[1]
Film Adaptation
Literary works have been adapted into film since the beginning of this industry. Some of the earliest examples come to us from the work of George Méliès, who pioneered many film techniques. In 1899 it released two adaptations: Cinderella based on the story of the same name by the Brothers Grimm and King John, the first known film based on Shakespeare’s works. The 1900 film Sherlock Holmes Baffled, directed by Arthur Marvin, depicted Arthur Conan Doyle’s character, Sherlock Holmes, involved in a pseudo-supernatural robbery. The film, considered the first crime film, was only played for 30 seconds. Initially, it was intended to be projected on cinematographic devices called mutoscopes.
Journey to the Moon, an original science fiction work from 1902 and directed by Georges Méliès, was loosely based on two popular novels of the time: From the Earth to the Moon, by Jules Verne, and The First Men in the Moon, by Herbert George. Wells. The story of Snow White, the first of the many adaptations of the Brothers Grimm, was released in 1902 while the oldest surviving copy is the 1916 version. In 1903, Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow brought out Alice in Wonderland. Wonderland, it was the first film adaptation of the children’s book Alice in Wonderland, whose author was Lewis Carroll.
The first feature film to be shot entirely in Hollywood was The Fugitive, the first work of Cecil B. DeMille, in 1914. This feature film was the first of three versions (all directed by DeMille) based on the work by Edwin Milton Royle, called also The Fugitive.
The most famous of the first adaptations is Greed (1924), by Erich von Stroheim, adapted from the novel McTeague (1899), by the naturalist writer Frank Norris. The director intended to film each element of the novel in the smallest detail, resulting in an epic nine and a half hour feature. Due to the insistence of the studio, the film was reduced to two hours and upon its release it was considered a failure. It has since been restored to over four hours and is considered one of the best films ever made. A book that has been frequently adapted (in one form or another) is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which to date has about twenty film adaptations.
Video Book Review
“Women who love too much” is a video book review by the artist Ra’al Ki Victorieux (Iris Atma). It’s a Bratz-Barbie style book review video. Based on the book “Women Who Love Too Much“, about narcissism and codependency recovery, by Robin Norwood.
History of adaptation
The practice of adaptation was common in ancient Greek culture, for instance in adapting myths and narratives for the stage (Aeschylus, Sophocles’ and Euripides’ adaptations of Homer). William Shakespeare was an arch adaptor, as nearly all of his plays are heavily dependent on pre-existing sources. Prior to Romantic notions of originality, copying classic authors was seen as a key aesthetic practice in Western culture. This neoclassical paradigm was expressed by Alexander Pope who equated the copying of Homer with copying nature in An Essay on Criticism:
“And but from Nature’s fountains scorned to draw;
But when to examine every part he came,
Nature and Homer were, he found, the same.
Convinced, amazed, he checks the bold design,
And rules as strict his labored work confine
As if the Stagirite o’erlooked each line.
Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem;
To copy Nature is to copy them.”
According to Pope in An Essay on Criticism, the task of a writer was to vary existing ideas: “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed”. In the 19th century, many European nations sought to re-discover and adapt medieval narratives that might be harnessed to various kinds of nationalist causes.
Adaptation studies
Adaptation studies is a growing academic discipline, emerging from what was commonly known as “novel to film” or “literature and film” studies.[2]
Adaptations studies are related to:
- Appropiation: In art, appropriation is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them. The use of appropriation has played a significant role in the history of the arts. In the visual arts, “to appropriate” means to properly adopt, borrow, recycle or sample aspects of human-made visual culture. Notable in this respect are the readymades of Marcel Duchamp.
- Intermedia: is an art theory term coined in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the strategies of interdisciplinarity that occur within artworks existing between artistic genres. It was also used by John Brockman to refer to works in expanded cinema that were associated with Jonas Mekas’ Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. Gene Youngblood also described intermedia, beginning in his Intermedia column for the Los Angeles Free Press beginning in 1967 as a part of a global network of multiple media that was expanding consciousness. Youngblood gathered and expanded upon intermedia ideas from this series of columns in his 1970 book Expanded Cinema, with an introduction by Buckminster Fuller. Over the years, intermedia has been used almost interchangeably with multi-media and more recently with the categories of digital media, technoetics, electronic media and post-conceptualism.
- Intertextuality: Intertextuality is the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text, either through deliberate compositional strategies such as quotation, allusion, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche or parody, or by interconnections between similar or related works perceived by an audience or reader of the text. These references are sometimes made deliberately and depend on a reader’s prior knowledge and understanding of the referent, but the effect of intertextuality is not always intentional and is sometimes inadvertent. Often associated with strategies employed by writers working in imaginative registers, intertextuality may now be understood as intrinsic to any text.
- Remediation: Mediation in Marxist theory refers to the reconciliation of two opposing forces within a given society by a mediating object. Put another way “Existence differs from Being by its mediation”….”The Thing-in-itself and its mediated Being are both contained in Existence, and each is an Existence; the Thing-in-it-self exists and is the essential Existence of the Thing, while mediated Being is its unessential Existence …”
- Remix culture: also known as read-write culture, is a term describing a culture that allows and encourages the creation of derivative works by combining or editing existing materials. Remix cultures are permissive of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of other creators. While combining elements has always been a common practice of artists of all domains throughout human history, the growth of exclusive copyright restrictions in the last several decades limits this practice more and more by the legal chilling effect. In reaction, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who considers remixing a desirable concept for human creativity, has worked since the early 2000s on a transfer of the remixing concept into the digital age. Lessig founded the Creative Commons in 2001, which released a variety of licenses as tools to promote remix culture, as remixing is legally hindered by the default exclusive copyright regime applied on intellectual property. The remix culture for cultural works is related to and inspired by the earlier Free and open-source software for software movement, which encourages the reuse and remixing of software works.
- Transmedia storytelling: is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies.
References
- Voigts, Eckart. (2017) “Memes and Recombinant Appropriation: Remix, Mashup, Parody” in Thomas Leitch (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. Oxford: OUP.
- Cartmell, Deborah; Whelehan, Imelda (2014), Cartmell, Deborah; Whelehan, Imelda (eds.), “A Short History of Adaptation Studies in the Classroom”, Teaching Adaptations, London: Palgrave Macmillan UK
- Aguiar e Silva, V.M. (1982) Theory of literature. M. Gredos.
- Dictionary of the Spanish language. (2014) 23rd ed. Royal Spanish Academy.
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