The enterprise has commercial aspects too: it is safer to buy the rights to a work than to develop original material.

Film makers are not known for offering such blunty commerical reasons for making particular adaptations, and, while the writing of the adaptation is itself is a creative undertaking, writers of adaptations rarely announce innovative or bold approaches to their subject matter, tending instead toward caution if not reverence for their 'literary source', and couch their intentions in careful words (McFarlane cites Peter Ustinov, who uses such cautious and respectful phrases as 'selective interpretation' and 'recreate a [certain] mood' etc., p. 7)

Films that are adaptations are generally popular and successful: according to Maurice Beja the biggest box-office successes tend to be adaptations, and he [ie Beja] also notes that since the Oscars began in 1927-28, more than three quarters of the 'Best Picture' awards have gone to films which are adapta

There is the idea of a 'literal' translation, and the lesser adaptation, which is true to the 'spirit' of a novel.

For McFarlane, such ideas are non-starters, despite their prevalence, because they depend upon a co-incidence of one reading (ie 'the meaning') of a novel and another single reading (ie 'meaning') of a film. In McFarlane's words, 'the critic who quibbles at failures of fidelity is realy saying no more than: "This reading of the original does not tally with mine in these and these ways."' (McFarlane, p. 9).

On Faithfulness: ideas about 'fidelity' characterise almost every critical evaluation of an adaptation. McFarlane suggests this is because the novel preceded film. Such ideas depend, moreover, upon there being a single 'correct' reading of the novel, to which the filmmaker is 'faithful' or violates.

· What is Understood by Adaptation

Geoffrey Wagner proposed considering adaptations according to broad categories which, according to MacFarlane, help move us on from the hegemony of fidelity. The first of Wagner's three categories is the transposition which is a near literal transposition-that is, with the 'minimum of apparent interference'. His second is the commentary in which the film maker has a 'different intention' from the novelist. Third is what he calls analogy which is markedly differs from the original text and is, as such, 'a different work of art'.

Other critics have proposed similar ways of c

Some topics in this essay:
Dudley Andrew, Maurice Beja, Adaptation Faithfulness, , Geoffrey Wagner, Peter Ustinov, Adaptation McFarlane, reading novel, adaptation mcfarlane, novel mcfarlane, 'spirit' novel, maurice beja, novel film, reading ie, subject matter, understood considering, films adaptations,