Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood: Transforming Children's Literature into Film

By Robyn McCallum

This book features a cutting edge approach to the study of film adaptations of literature for children and young people, and the narratives about childhood those adaptations enact. Historically, film media has always had a partiality for the adaptation of ‘classic’ literary texts for children. As economic and cultural commodities, McCallum points out how such screen adaptations play a crucial role in the cultural reproduction and transformation of childhood and youth, and indeed are a rich resource for the examination of changing cultural values and ideologies, particularly around contested narratives of childhood. The chapters examine various representations of childhood: as shifting states of innocence and wildness, liminality, marginalisation and invisibility. The book focuses on a range of literary and film genres, from ‘classic’ texts, to experimental, carnivalesque, magical realist, and cross-cultural texts. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jan 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781137395412

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© The Author(s) 2018

Robyn McCallumScreen Adaptations and the Politics of ChildhoodPalgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39541-2_1

1. Introduction: ‘Palimpsestuous Intertextuality’ and the Cultural Politics of Childhood

Robyn McCallum¹ 

(1)

Sydney, Australia

Film and television adaptations of literary texts for children play a crucial role in the cultural reproduction and transformation of childhood and youth and hence provide a rich resource for the examination of the transmission and adaptation of cultural values and ideologies . Historically, film media has always had a partiality for adaptation of literary sources, especially of canonical or ‘classic’ literary texts and of children’s texts, with some of the earliest film adaptations being of children’s novels (for example, Cecil Hepworth’s 1903 silent-film version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and five silent versions of Treasure Island between 1908 and 1922—now all presumed lost).¹ As Linda Hutcheon , a key commentator in the field of adaptation studies, puts it, ‘there are few stories that have not been lovingly ripped off’ (2006, 177). There are a numerous reasons for this partiality, which this study explores, but an obvious effect is the commodification and capitalisation of texts for young people within the cultural economy. With many recent film adaptations of both ‘classic’ and popular texts attracting large budgets and mass audiences , the genre constitutes a substantial economic commodity within film and literary industries, but is also a powerful way of transmitting, sustaining and reshaping the cultural capital that literary texts bring with them. Thus, film adaptations of literary texts for children and young people have also played, and continue to play, a crucial role in the culture wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Following Hutcheon , adaptation is to be thought of as a form of ‘repetition without replication’ (176). Hutcheon’s coinage, ‘palimpsestuous intertextuality’ (21) captures the ‘multilaminated’ (21) nature of adaptations whereby texts are inscribed with the traces and memories, or palimpsests , of other intersecting texts that resonate through ‘repetition without replication’ (176). This way of understanding adaptation is particularly appropriate to scholarship related to children’s textual culture, given the radically intertextual nature of the primary material and the prevalence of ‘retold’ stories within that material (Stephens and McCallum, 1998; Lefebvre, 2013; Müller, 2013). As a repetition , an adaptation may serve to affirm and reinforce cultural assumptions associated with the pretext and hence ensure its status as cultural capital, that is, as telling a story and embodying values and ideas that a society sees as having cultural worth. Thus, the impulse to tell a story over and over in different media, across different cultures may be an expression of a need to assert basic ideologies and values. However, the differing modes of reader/viewer engagement that visual and literary media enact necessitate that change is inevitable, and any adaptation will reshape and reinterpret its pretext, often in the light of contemporary and local issues and concerns. Adaptation, thus, enacts an ongoing dialogue between literary and film texts, their audiences and the discourses around those texts and audiences . Furthermore, film adaptations, especially those aimed at young audiences , can lead to further adaptations with the production of computer games, novelisations and other merchandising. In the case of popular contemporary fiction, film adaptations may prolong the shelf life of a novel; adaptations of older texts may in turn renew that shelf life, and lead to further novelisations and adaptations. Adaptation, in other words is not only a business in itself, but also a process that results in a seemingly endless and intricate web of intertextuality. Thus, the study of adaptation is not simply a matter of comparing the book and the film—there are a whole range of other texts and media that mediate and intersect with these texts. For a viewer familiar with the adapted text, adaptation is an ongoing dialogical process in which the familiar text is compared with the text being experienced, but also with a plethora of other texts (Stam, 2000, 63). Further, while viewers familiar with the adapted text will compare the work they already know with the one they are experiencing, an adaptation, like the work it adapts, is always framed in a context—a time, place, society and culture—and ‘can hence reveal as much about the concerns of its own time as those of the original text’ (Cartmell et al., 2000, 4). Four key questions that concern me throughout this study are: what are the functions of film adaptations for the survival, transmission and change of cultural ideologies ; how does contemporary film culture impact on the production and reception of literary texts; what is the contemporary appeal of adaptation in general; and why do film-makers continue to return to the same texts and genres?²

The application of contemporary adaptation theory to children’s texts has scarcely begun, but has the capacity to articulate the complex relations between literary, film, television and other media texts, their young audiences and their cultural and ideological contexts. I have remarked elsewhere that film studies remain something of a Cinderella in the academic field of child and adolescent literature research (McCallum, 2006, 73). Likewise, texts produced for children and teenagers are late to arrive to the ballroom of film and adaptation studies, despite being a primary resource for film-makers since the early twentieth century. Folk and fairy-tale films, especially those made by the Disney Corporation , have received significant critical attention, though this often takes the fashionable form of ‘Disney bashing’ (for example, Bell et al., 1995; Cartmell, 2007; Giroux, 1999). In her discussion of Deborah Cartmell’s chapter ‘Adapting Children’s Literature’ (2007), Anja Müller , however, acknowledges that while ‘Disney is undeniably the most prolific adaptor’ for the child audience , ‘it is by far not the only adaptive mode available (as [Cartmell ] could make believe)’ (2013, 3). While Jack Zipes (2016, 1) bemoans the lack of critical attention that fairy-tale films have received, folk and fairy-tale films have fared much better than adaptations of children’s literary texts in general, with Zipes’ work making perhaps the most significant contribution to that body of work (1979, 1994, 2011, 2016). Other, recent publications have also turned their attention to fairy -tale films from outside the Disney tradition, for example, Pauline Greenhill and Eva Matrix’s edited collection, Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity (2010); Zipes’ comprehensive cross-cultural history of fairy-tale film , The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy Tale Films (2011); and Zipes’ most recent edited collection, Fairy Tale Films Beyond Disney (2016, with Pauline Greenhill and Kendra Magnus-Johnston ). There have been many excellent studies of film adaptation in recent years, including : Aragay (2005), Bortolotti and Hutcheon (2007), Cartmell and Whelehan (1999, 2000, 2007, 2014), Elliot (2003), Frus and Williams (2010), Hutcheon (2006), Leitch (2003, 2007, 2008a, b), Naremore (2000a, 2000b), Sanders (2006), Stam (1992, 2000, 2005), Stam and Raengo (2004) and no doubt many others . However , only a small number of such studies include more than a token chapter on a children’s film—needless to say, it is usually a Disney film.

While John Stephens and I did not actually use the term ‘adaptation’ in Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature (1998), that study has been retrospectively described as being ‘a decade ahead of its time of publication’ in introducing adaptation studies to children’s literature scholarship (publisher’s blurb for paperback edition, 2014). Our focus then was on how traditional stories are retold within new genres to express changing cultural times and conditions, and our corpus was primarily literary texts (though we analysed a small number of film texts). While we were aware of an increased interest in adaptation studies during the 1990s, having written articles and book chapters, both together and separately , on film adaptations (Stephens and McCallum, 1996, 2002; McCallum, 2000, 2002, 2006), we opted in Retelling Stories for the terms ‘retelling’ and ‘reversion’ , rather than ‘adaptation’. Almost twenty years on, this present study builds on the conceptual framework developed in my prior collaboration with John Stephens and may in some ways be thought of as its sequel—and doing the work that could not have been done prior to the access to resources that the Internet and digital media now afford. Since 1998, further inroads into applying adaptation theories to children’s literature have been made, with Benjamin Lefebure’s Textual Transformations in Children’s Literature (2013) and Anja Müller’s Adapting Canonical Texts in Children’s Literature (2013). Both studies are premised on shifts in adaptation studies throughout the 1990s and early twenty-first century, led by theorists such as Linda Hutcheon , James Naremore , Thomas Leitch and Robert Stam , and both broaden the scope of adaptation studies to include texts for children and to consider the pedagogical and ideological underpinnings of adaptive processes and products that are specific to youth culture. Müller’s collection is primarily focussed on literary adaptations and translations of canonical texts, especially Shakespeare , though there is also some attention to other authors and texts such as Dickens , Milne, Collodi, Beowulf, Arthurian legends and The Nutcracker. The corpus of Lefebure’s collection is more varied, with contributions on film, television and anime , graphic novels, cross-cultural translation of folk and fairy tales and literary adaptations of Shakespeare . As anthologies, a virtue of both collections is the breadth of approaches, methodologies and texts examined; however, as with many anthologies of this kind, neither develop a strong and cohesive conceptual framework within which to examine the phenomena of adaptation as it manifests itself within children’s and youth culture, and instead reflects the interests of the varied contributors. This book aims to utilise the work of Lefebure and Müller , as well as build on my own work with John Stephens through the integration of more recent adaptation theory, especially Stam’s conceptualisation of adaptation as a dialogical and intertextual process (2000) and Hutcheon’s concept of palimpsestuous intertextuality (2006), so as to articulate a conceptual and methodological framework for the analysis of adaptations for children and young people, an area that has received little focussed attention to date.

My study focusses broadly on film adaptations targeted at children and young people, and how those adaptations engage with and transmit cultural ideas and values, seek to impact on young developing minds and reflect and effect cultural change. Such a study has pedagogical implications in its capacity to inform teaching practise, as well as theoretical and methodological implications in terms of expanding the parameters of current children’s literature research. Methodologically, however, I am not focussing directly on actual child readers or viewers. Instead, my interest is two-fold: firstly, with how concepts of childhood are constructed and represented in adapted texts; and secondly, with how texts position their implied audiences dialogically through diverse signifying practises—that is, features such as literary and film genres, codes and conventions, narrative strategies and structures, intertextuality and genre mixing . Hence, the organisation of subsequent chapters is broadly around key literary and film genres: adaptations of ‘classic’ novels; carnivalesque texts; ‘experimental’ texts; fantastic and magic realist texts; and cross-cultural adaptations. Given the wealth of literary and film material available, I am not attempting to produce a comprehensive or encyclopaedic guide to adaptation. Instead, the discussion will proceed through detailed analysis of key texts within these genres. Further, not all of the literary and film texts are specifically for children or young people. As texts are adapted across different media, their audiences can also change, a shift that, as Müller notes, is rarely considered by theorists working more generally in adaptation studies (2013, 2). For example, a novel for older readers such as Neil Gaiman’s Stardust (1998) becomes a PG-rated family film (Vaughn , 2007), whereas a novel for quite young readers such as C.S. Lewis’ Prince Caspian (1951) becomes an M-rated film for mature viewers (2008).³ Likewise, Spike Jonze’s (2009) adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s , Where the Wild Things Are (1963), a picture book popular with preschool children, was rated PG in most countries and widely reviewed as not suitable for young children.

Adaptations of children’s literary texts to film typically involves a triple shift: from book to film obviously, but also sometimes from ‘high’ literary culture to ‘popular’ (film) culture (in the case of ‘classic’ texts), and often from child or adult text to ‘family ’ film (McCallum, 2006). While some children’s films are clearly ‘children’s films’, that is they are produced and marketed for a young audience and will have little to interest an older viewer, the ‘family film’ has emerged as the dominant genre for what we think of as films for children, young people and adults—especially parents. Family films are produced for and marketed to an age-mixed audience and are characterised by a mix of what might be labelled ‘childish’ jokes—a combination of slapstick, toilet humour and comic violence —alongside more ‘adult’-oriented humour and themes. Clearly, such film texts will be characterised by a multiplicity of signifying practices as well as a multiplicity and diversity of audience positionings. The family film has been around for some time now, but adult orientations, especially the incorporation of adult humour and themes, have become increasingly prominent in contemporary adaptations of children’s texts.

The intended audiences for film adaptations are often unclear and it cannot be assumed that all viewers of a typical adaptation will be familiar with its pretexts and intertexts, especially if those viewers are children, though Müller also makes this same point in relation to adult audiences who may potentially only ‘know’ a particular text through its adaptations (2013, 3). As many commentators have pointed out, for many modern Western children and at least two generations of adults, Disney versions of fairy tales and ‘classic’ literary texts have come to represent, potentially, the only version such viewers know as a consequence of the Disney Corporation ’s marketing of books and merchandise associated with such films. In his chapter on adaptations of Treasure Island in Douglass Street’s (1983) collection of essays, Perry Nodelman recounts how upon sitting down as an adult to reread what he remembered as being his favourite novel as a child, he realised that he was actually reading it for the first time. Nodelman confesses: ‘the pirate I’d loved, the one with the parrot on his shoulder and the evil glint in his one open eye, was Robert Newton’s Long John Silver from Disney’s [1950 ] film of Treasure Island’ (1983, 58). Despite these questions of what pretexts and intertexts audiences may or may not be familiar with, however, the idea that a literary text might become irrelevant once a film version exists ignores the complex dialogic cultural and textual processes in which such texts are enmeshed. The fact that audiences may only know a particular text through its adaptations does not diminish or put into question the canonicity of a ‘classic’ text itself and may in fact enhance it (see Müller , 3).

It has been said that literature for children is ‘radically intertextual because it has no special discourse of its own … rather [it] exists at the intersection of a number of other discourses’, which it appropriates and adapts (Stephens, 1992, 86). Furthermore, children’s literature is more generally characterised by a prevalence of ‘retold’ stories and ‘textual transformations ’ (Stephens and McCallum, 1998; Lefebure). As John Stephens and I argued in Retelling Stories, retellings and adaptations of traditional classic and modern texts are amongst the largest number of texts produced for children (1998). Müller also comments on the important role that literary adaptations of canonical adult texts have had in the history of children’s literature, citing Joachim Heinrich Campe’s adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (Robinson der Jüngere 1779/80) as ‘arguably the first European children’s classic’ (2013, 1). The radical intertextuality of children’s literature also applies to children’s film, if not film in general, which is typically seen as a very hybridic medium, that is one that characteristically borrows and mixes various genres, discourses and intertexts (see for example, Hutcheon, 2006; Stam, 2000, 2005; Leitch, 2003, 2008a; Frus and Williams, 2010). As Stam puts it, ‘both novels and films have consistently cannibalised antecedent genres and media’ (2000, 6). Thus, a modern film adaptation may have any number of pre-existing literary pretexts, as well as pre-existing film pretexts. Further, as Frus and Williams argue, ‘lack of originality is no longer considered a weakness’ and ‘detecting a plurality of voices’, and I would add visual quotations, in a text is part of the pleasure and appeal of adaptations; like Frus and Williams, I ‘believe that the more echoes we hear, the richer the text, and … that richness is a sign of value’ (2010, 13). Furthermore, as many commentators have noted, there is a kinship between film and literature, insofar as some of the first short narrative films and feature-length films were adaptations of literary works and the prevalence of adaptations to receive film awards reflects a cultural privileging of the form. What is perhaps overlooked by scholars outside of children’s literature research, however, is that the history of the film industry is closely intertwined with the history of cinematic adaptation of children’s novels. As mentioned, with the exception of Disney films, children’s texts are only occasionally mentioned within adaptation studies more generally, an imbalance that this study seeks to redress. The remainder of this chapter will sketch an overview and synthesis of contemporary theoretical approaches to adaptation and their relevance to the analysis of adaptations for young people.

Approaches to Adaptation

As I commented at the outset, film media has always had a partiality for the adaptation of literary sources as well as a particular preference for canonical, or ‘classic’ literary texts. The motivations of adapters are varied, ranging from ‘crass commercialism ’ (McFarlane, 1996, 7), to a desire to cash in on the cultural capital embodied by ‘classic’ texts—film adaptations of texts by Shakespeare , Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, or J.R.R. Tolkien , for example, are assured of an audience . Motivations may also include a more ‘high-minded respect for literary works’ (McFarlane, 7) and a desire to pay homage to the values embodied in such texts. Motivations are also sometimes expressed in pedagogical or ideological terms—the idea that seeing a film adaptation might inspire the viewer (especially if s/he is young) to read the book or that film can communicate literature (and the high culture cache it carries) to a wider public. Film adaptations and retellings of Shakespeare’s plays, for example, are often characterised by appeals to their universality, the idea that they embody essential and universal stories and values; Shakespeare , ‘the icon of a proper English education’ (Bottoms, 1996, 74) is believed to give ‘access to something that is seen as the mark and property of the cultured and educated’ (73). Thus film adaptations, of classic texts, ‘act as substitute vehicles for bringing literature to a larger public, cutting away class differences inherent in access to literacy and literature ’ (Hutcheon, 120; see also Andre Bazin, 1997). Literary adaptations of adult texts, especially Shakespeare , have an ‘aesthetic and educational agenda’ in that they are ‘intended to initiate young readers to a literary canon that is deemed essential for sharing a common cultural heritage’ (Müller , 1; see also Stephens and McCallum, 1998, 253–67). However, as with retellings more generally , the idea that literature embodies cultural capital that might be communicated through film can be read in two ways: as a democratization of culture, whereby high-culture texts are made accessible and popular for the masses; or as form of cultural imperialism, whereby assertions as to universal appeal looks suspiciously like an imposition of cultural values from above.

I have argued elsewhere that the study of children’s literature is commonly linked with the development of literacy and a desire to foster this in a visually oriented age (McCallum, 2006). However, until relatively recently there has been a concomitant reluctance to cultivate visual literacy at the perceived expense of verbal literacy. While there has been a growing recognition that young people need to learn to penetrate the taken-for-grantedness of media images, applications to film are still largely unpursued. Film versions of novels and plays still tend to be used in the classroom as a supplement to reading and a way of teaching literature, rather than as objects of critical analysis (see Narremore, 2000 and Leitch, 2007, 1–4). Further, as Müller argues, the shift from ‘high’ culture to ‘a genre or medium with a still highly contested cultural status’, that is popular children’s literature, is problematic insofar as it motivates ‘fears of downsizing, dumbing-down, oversimplifying, bowdlerising or even only abridging venerable cultural artefacts’ and that ‘even if the adaptation itself is appreciated the underlying hope seems to be to guide young readers home , that is to the original which alone can guarantee full aesthetic enjoyment’ (2013, 2).

Popular novels can also carry economic and cultural weight, assuring films of an audience. Popular novelists, such as J.K. Rowling , Neil Gaiman , Suzanne Collins , and others have very strong readerships, also assuring film adaptations of their work an audience . Truly ‘popular’ culture texts tend to be ephemeral, that is, short-lived and likely to go out of print quickly. An effect of the popularity of film adaptations, however, is that the space between publication of a novel and production of a film version can be quite short, and furthermore, film versions can effectively prolong the shelf-life of a novel, on the one hand, and lead to further adaptations with the production of computer games, novelisations and other merchandising, on the other hand. Finally, motivation can be expressed in ideological terms: the idea that a contemporary film might update or ‘correct’ an earlier text that for whatever reason is now seen as ideologically or historically ‘incorrect’ (see also Hutcheon, 2006, 117–20 and Stam, 2000, 71). Thus, an adaptation might be used ‘to engage in a larger social or critical critique’ (Hutcheon , 94). Further, as Stam points out, ‘the greater the lapse in time, the less reverence toward the source text’, and the more likely it is that the source text will be reinterpreted through the values of the present (2000, 57). Such reinterpretations become particularly evident in film adaptations that seek to ‘update’ their pretexts, particularly in light of changing social attitudes toward class or gender, and hence represent ‘unfinished cultural business’ (Braudy, 1998, 331). However, in offering a modern rereading of the past, such ‘updates’ can potentially impose ‘anachronistic ideological corrections’ (Hutcheon, 152). As Kamila Elliot has pointed out, ‘when filmmakers set modern politically correct views against historically correct backdrops, the effect is to authorise these modern ideologies as historically authentic’ (2003, 239). Thus as I suggested earlier, an adaptation of a classic text will often ‘reflect the ideologies of the cultural context in which they are produced’ (Cartmell et al., 2000, 4; Orme, 2010, 147). On the other hand, however, the idea that an adaptation might correct an earlier text also applies to previous film versions of a specific literary text; an adaptation might be a return to the pretext in a way that interrogates, and implicitly ‘corrects’ intermediary film adaptations, as with the film versions of Treasure Island discussed in Chap. 2. In short, a discussion of adaptation theory in relation to children’s texts, as it is with many adult texts, is not simply a matter of comparing the book and the film.

Issues of fidelity and the specificity of film and literary media have been thoroughly debated over the past few decades, most notably by Brian McFarlane, Robert Stam, Linda Hutcheon, Thomas Leitch and James Naremore , and, as each of these theorists have pointed out, the language used to discuss film adaptations has been (and often still is) overtly moralistic. As these scholars all variously argue, discourse on adaptation prior to the 1990s was dominated by a concern with how ‘faithful’ particular films were to their literary pretext, with many studies within the field of adaptation studies more generally, and children’s literature more specifically, slavishly comparing the film to the book and finding the film lacking. Thus traditional film adaptation criticism is dominated by pejorative and judgmental language that implies that film performs a disservice to literature. While there has been a growing recognition that young people need to develop enhanced capabilities in visual and critical literacy, there is still a tendency to privilege verbal literacy and literary texts. Pedagogical uses of children’s texts commonly focus on stimulating the imagination, and books are widely considered to do this effectively: ‘a book, telling a story, activates the imagination, forces it to work’ by producing images in the mind (Steinmetz, 1995, 100). As Stam points out, the ‘words of a novel have a virtual symbolic meaning’; the ‘paradigmatic indeterminacies’ within a novel are filled by readers, thus stimulating their imaginations. But such indeterminacies are also filled by screenwriters and directors—a film thus constitutes an always already interpretation of its pretext (2000, 55). In discussing adaptations of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, a novel that hinges on interpretative ambivalence , Hutcheon (2006) suggests that adapters ‘make choices that inevitably reduce the interpretative richness of the written text’ (70). The opposite is also sometimes the case especially with adaptations of narratives derived from picture books or junior fictions, where in expanding the narrative, interpretative richness is either added or given more depth. The orientation of recent adaptations of the Chronicles of Narnia and Where the Wild Things Are toward an older adolescent or adult audience, for example, contributes a thematic depth and resonance not immediately apparent in the pretexts.

Insofar a film is multimodal and comprised of multiple semiotic signs, watching a film is often seen as a more passive activity and, hence, less inclined to stimulate the imagination (Steinmetz , 100; see also Leitch, 2003, 159–61).⁴ Thus, from a pedagogical point of view, visual and multimodal media are sometimes viewed as posing a threat to verbal literacy (see Cartmell, 2007). The defence of adaptations on the grounds that they may foster literacy by encouraging child viewers to read the book implicitly privileges the literary text over the adaptation, but, ironically, such a defence is also underpinned by an unstated fear that the adaptation might replace the ‘real thing’. As both Stam (2000, 58) and Hutcheon (2006, 4) argue, the hierarchical binary opposition between films and books implicit in the fidelity debate hinges on iconophobia (suspicion of the visual) and logophilia (love of the word as sacred). Insofar as pedagogical use underpins so many justifications for adaptation of literary texts for young people, the fidelity debate still underpins and is still to some extent relevant to discussions of adaptations for such audiences.

The adaptation of any novel to a film involves a broad spectrum of changes. There are practical constraints and possibilities involved in translating a novel into a feature-length film. Narrative, that is the ‘story-telling’ function, is one key transferrable element that both media have in common. Beyond that, there are significant features that require adaptation: time is an obvious limitation; hence complex novelistic plot structure will often need to be simplified, because viewing time is much more rigorously controlled than reading time. Such simplifications of plot, however, do not necessarily mean a reduction of thematic resonance; as Hutcheon suggests, ‘when condensed and concentrated, plots can be become more powerful’ (2006, 36). Temporal constraints are quite different when it comes to the adaptation of picture books and books for young readers, where the plot often needs to be either stretched or given more thematic complexity and density, as is the case with adaptations of Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963) and The Waterhorse (Dick King Smith, 1990). As with picture books , film can also convey information more economically than a purely verbal text—the visual representation of character and setting, for example. Thus, in the case of setting, the historical and cultural backdrop of a film can be established in a few short shots and sequences, whereas in a novel this may take much more time and space. The opening few seconds of Mathew Vaughn’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust for example provides enough detail about scientific developments, fashion and so on to place the narrative historically, a process that takes a number of pages in the novel and hence occupies more reading time.

The verbal and visual components of picture books are often contrasted in terms of the temporality and spatiality that each respectively affords—words unfold in time whereas pictures occupy a spatial dimension. Likewise, films and novels are often also contrasted in terms of linearity and spatiality, with an emphasis on the spatiality afforded by film (McFarlane, 1996, 28). As a linguistic media, a literary text is often characterised by its linearity; film is also linear, in the sense that it unfolds in time, but its incorporation of a visual component gives it a spatial orientation lacking in purely verbal narrative, a feature that in turn gives film a ‘physical presence’ (McFarlane, 29; see also Stam, 2000, 71; and Hutcheon, 2006, 63–67). Film is also often characterised as a mode of narration that shows the story, whereas a literary fiction is seen as a mode that tells—this is a simplification, of course, as both modes have the resources to both show and tell ( see McFarlane, 1996, 4–5, 29; and Hutcheon, 2006, 12–13). However, following on from this, literary fictions have recourse to multiple modes of telling—first-person narration, third-person limited and omniscient narration. Literary fictions also have recourse to multiple ways of representing discourse—direct, indirect, free direct and free indirect. Thus the stock formal devices of literary narrative, such as point of view, focalisation, tense and voice, need to be realised by other means. In particular, the shift from narrative focalisation in a literary text to mise en scene in film and the less discriminate ‘eye’ of the camera, cannot help but afford a sense of an omniscient perspective, even while it may be depicting the viewpoint of a single character through the use of shot/reverse shots, eye-line match cuts and point-of-view editing (see also Stam, 2000, 71 and Hutcheon, 55). In this context, it is useful to think about the function of voice-over in film: as MacFarlane argues, ‘while cinema may be more agile and flexible in changing the physical point of view from which an event or object is seen, it is much less amenable to the presentation of a consistent psychological viewpoint derived from one character’ (1996, 16). Oral narration, or voice-over , even when used extensively, is quite distinct from novelistic first person, insofar as ‘visual images take on an objective life of their own’ (16). Even though the camera takes on the function of the narrating discourse, the visual presence of the mise en scene makes that function less visible; there is no longer such a strong sense that everything is being filtered through the consciousness of a narrator (see also Leitch’s discussion of Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory, 2003, 153–54).

While these differences between fiction and film might imply the limitations of film, film has recourse to a range of signifying functions that literature lacks. As a multimodal means of communication, film has a unique range of resources and conventions at its disposal. Whereas a ‘single-track, uniquely verbal medium such as the novel … has only words to play with … a multi-track medium such as film … can play not only with words (written and spoken), but also with theatrical performance, music, sound effects and moving photographic images’ (Stam, 2000, 56). Insofar as these factors contribute to any adaptation of a literary work, the evaluation of any novel-to-film reworking cannot be based on its ‘fidelity of plot, or detail, of tone and of manner of telling’, as Margaret Mackey (1996, 9) proposes in her analysis of multiple reworkings of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911). As I have argued elsewhere, if such a criterion were to be firmly adhered to, it would negate any possibility of acceptable retelling, since it requires total reproduction and would even resist the basic generic transformation necessary to move the book to film (2006). In making value judgments about film, then, it is better to abandon the presupposition of derivativeness and hence the criterion of ‘fidelity’, since that is rarely the purpose of a film, and to think instead in terms of film genres and filmic value. Moreover, this would include a willingness to shed any convert assumptions that novel genres are superior to film genres. Thus it may well be impossible to argue whether Burnett’s novel or Agnieszka Holland’s 1993 film is ‘better’ other than in the tendentious terms of priority and fidelity, but an argument on any other grounds might begin instead with questions such as: ‘is this a good novel, and why (not)? Is this a good film, and why (not)?’ (McCallum, 2006, 75). As an example, in a change which Mackey describes as ‘irritatingly meaningless’ (8), Mary’s parents die in an earthquake instead of a cholera epidemic, as in the novel. The cholera epidemic has no further plot relevance in the novel, though it resonates with the theme of disease and recuperation. In contrast, the earthquake in the film enables a powerful recurrent complex of symbolic visual images; the sequence in which Mary hides beneath her mother’s bed aligns viewers with Mary and is echoed throughout the film through the use of low-angle camera shots and tracking shots as Mary moves around the dark and cob-webbed corridors and rooms of Misselthwaite Manor. This complex facilitates the making of connections, contrasts between enclosed and open spaces, and has