Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation: A Case Study of Shakespearean Films develops a new approach for the study of films adapted from canonical ‘originals’ such as Shakespeare’s plays. The book problematises adaptation studies’ current broad consensus that adaptations are heightened examples of the premise that all texts are in dialogue with other texts, so that all artworks inform and are informed by other artworks. The book instead argues that film adaptations of canonical texts partake in and extend cinema’s inherent manipulation and concealment of its own artifice. These source texts, which may have subtle gradations of artifice and verisimilitude in their ‘original’ forms are, to a greater or lesser extent, adapted into film texts which foreground the constructed, re-performative nature of the adaptation in relation to the source—the film adaptation announces that it has an artifice derived from the author in a manner that is quite different from other (non-adapted) films. As such, these adaptations are reflexive in the sense that the canonically foregrounded fictionality of the ‘original’ marks out the adaptation as another foregrounded fiction—such an adaptation is canonically reflexive. This foregrounding of artifice in relation to the source text can range from having the ‘original’ author’s articulative status dominate the adaptation through widely known and iconic characters, narratives, dialogue and so forth, on the one hand, to more subtle traces of the ‘original’ author present in the name of a contemporary high school or a seemingly insignificant element of the mise-en-scène such as a painting or poster, on the other.
In order to analyse this process, the book moves from a dialogic to a psychoanalytic poststructuralist account of film adaptation. Such a theoretical reorientation requires a detailed discussion about the historical development of different scholarly approaches to film, to literature, and to the adaptations in which film and literature intersect. The first half of the book is devoted to this account of competing academic paradigms, and to the theoretical ‘gap’ that it intends to bridge. Adaptation studies, which was for a long time dominated by a fidelity-based approach that judged adaptations against the perceived ‘spirit’ of the ‘original’, has recently reached a broad consensus which can be characterised as dialogism, a methodology in which adaptations are conceptualised as heightened examples of the ubiquitous intertextual relationships between all artworks. These dialogic relationships have been used to overturn the false binary of valorised ‘original’ and vulgar ‘copy’, which is central to the prior fidelity approach, and to analyse how multiple historical iterations of the same source text demonstrate shifting cultural values which challenge a text’s monolithic status, in an explicitly politicised liberationist manner. The dialogic approach is informed by the writings of Barthes (1995 [1967]) 1 and Bakhtin (1981 [1934–1941]) (amongst others).
This book, however, problematises one element of the consensus, arguing that the dialogic model, while making important insights into how adaptation can challenge the hegemonic status of canonical authors, fundamentally misconstrues the ideological operations of concealed canonical authorship in film adaptation. The solution to this is grounded in a poststructuralist methodology informed by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and by the linguistics of Émile Benveniste (1970) which Christian Metz (1985) applied to the study of film. This approach conceptualises popular films as examples of what Colin MacCabe calls the ‘classic realist text’ (1985, 33), which are ideological artefacts that temporarily foreground and then repeatedly obfuscate all traces of their constructed nature. Distinctions between visual perceptions of the real world and audiences’ visual perceptions of the fictional world of film diegesis are temporarily revealed and subsequently concealed and muddled through the conventionalised status of film grammar in relation to shot composition and editing (and to a lesser extent mise-en-scène).
Each of these cinematic elements partly, and temporarily, demonstrates that the film has been constructed—there is some form of enunciation which makes it apparent that the film is a fiction rather than unfiltered ‘reality’. The enunciation, however, is quickly and repeatedly subsumed into a form of verisimilitude which has some of the features of this unfiltered ‘reality’. Cinema’s manipulation of these different enunciative registers is, according to Stephen Heath (1981), an anamorphic process which continuously oscillates between a reflexive revelation of artifice and a subsumption of that revelation, with the oscillation binding spectators into a film’s narrative world, and into the ideological system that produces the film. This approach has been applied to how filmmakers anamorphically reveal and then obscure visual markers of the film’s constructed nature (Heath 1981, 1985), but not yet to how traces of canonical authorship operate in a similar manner in adaptations.
The book proposes, then, that authorship in realist adaptations is another anamorphic trace analogous and additional to the conventionality of film grammar. Because Heath calls film’s anamorphic manipulation of film grammar the ‘drama of vision’ (1985, 514), I term adaptation’s analogous manipulation of authorship the ‘drama of authorship’.
In order to make this claim, it is necessary to position the rival methodologies of fidelity criticism and dialogism within historically specific sociocultural contexts, because there are particular reasons why a poststructuralist methodology has not already been applied to the study of adaptation, and because existing approaches provide specific rival explanations for the particular forms of analysis I undertake. This historical-discursive context is the book’s starting point, tracing the ways in which the history of adaptation studies’ development, in relation to broader trajectories in the related disciplines of literary, film and cultural studies, inflects scholarly approaches to adaptation.
There is a strong tradition of this kind of historical self-analysis in adaptation studies, because of the field’s relatively recent emergence, and because of its perceived junior status in relation to the more established disciplines out of which it developed. The articulation of a poststructuralist account of anamorphic adaptation along the lines of that proposed in the book was not made, at the time (approximately 1970s to early 1980s) when poststructuralism exerted a significant influence on film and literary studies because adaptation studies was then still somewhat un-institutionalised. By the time that adaptation studies emerged as a more coherent field, poststructuralism in film and literary studies was being displaced by a number of other methodologies which facilitated the shift towards dialogism’s pluralistic understanding of texts. Via this historical and discursive accident, the field of adaptation studies has missed an important methodological approach which offers unique insights into the ontology of adaptation.
The dialogism that currently dominates adaptation studies inadvertently prevents the kind of analysis undertaken in this volume. A central component of dialogism’s liberationist project is the displacement of the knowability and importance of the ‘original’ author’s intentions—no matter that an ‘original’ text might encode certain discriminatory values inherent to a particular historical moment if an adaptation re-encodes these into progressive values more in tune with the cultural sensibilities of the later historical period. The dis-placing of the ‘original’ author, however, also inadvertently mis-places the ‘original’ author, since that author’s enunciative status has an important ideological dimension in relation to cinema’s reality-effect. Unpicking the philosophical differences between the dialogic and the poststructuralist approaches to authorship is therefore integral to the elaboration of realist adaptation’s ‘drama of authorship’. Once these differences have been addressed, in the first half of the book, it is possible to construct an extensive and detailed taxonomy of how authorial anamorphism operates in realist film adaptation, in the second half.
The taxonomy uses Shakespearean film adaptations as a case study. These films offer the kind of comparative qualities that make for a useful and manageable case study for three reasons. 2 Firstly, they provide an extensive number of adaptations, so that there is no shortage of data to analyse. Secondly, my argument relies on the canonical status of the ‘original’ author, and the Anglophone world offers no better example of this than Shakespeare. Thirdly, there is a specific element of Shakespearean (meta-)drama which has the potential to extend adaptation’s anamorphism. My central argument does not require the ‘original’ text to have any specific metadramatic elements in order for the adaptation to operate anamorphically. It is merely sufficient that the ‘original’ be conceptualised by audiences, to a greater or lesser extent, as an existing piece of pre-authored artifice which the adaptation in some sense re-performs. Realist adaptations of these canonical ‘originals’, then, manipulate, temporarily foreground, and subsequently obfuscate those ‘original’ authorial traces. However, the specifics of the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage also include numerous metadramatic elements which can extend realist adaptation’s anamorphism. Thus, for example, filmed soliloquies can oscillate between a direct address to the audience which foregrounds authorial artifice, and the suppression of that artifice through various conventionalising techniques. 3
The taxonomy which comprises the second half of the book has four principal elements covered in four chapters. The first three of these elements constitute three different forms of (and definitions of) adaptation. Chapter 5 addresses the first of these—adaptation’s partial translation from the author’s foregrounded artifice, articulated in this case study through Shakespearean dialogue, into a visual form of narration which displaces that foregrounding. This is realist adaptation’s defining ontological feature. The subsequent taxonomic elements are all optional additions to this ontological form of adaptation that an individual film may or may not exploit.
Chapter 6 explores adaptation from authorially ‘appropriate’ settings into those which juxtapose certain revelations of authorial artifice with ostensibly non-authorially ‘appropriate’ (most frequently contemporary) locations, costumes and characters. In terms of the book’s case study, this means films that shift from an avowedly ‘Shakespearean’ setting into ostensibly ‘non-Shakespearean’ settings. This locational shift relates to general audience perceptions about settings which replace verisimilar expectations about a historical or colloquially ‘Shakespearean’ location (such as a Roman forum or a Medieval castle) with a setting in a contemporary high school or on a distant planet in the future. What is significant here is not the precise relationship between an adaptation and the specific ways in which the Shakespearean stage ...