My task ... is by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel - it is before all, to make you see.
- Joseph Conrad (1897)

The task I'm trying to achieve above all is to make you see.
- D. W. Griffith (1899)

If you asked me to give you the most distinctive quality of good writing, I would give it to you in one word: VISUAL. Reduce the art of writing to its fundamentals, and you come to this single aim: to convey images by means of words. But to convey images. To make the mind see ... That is the definition of good literature ... It is also a definition of the ideal film.
- Herbert Read (1945)

Cinema should by now have attained some measure of cultural respectability. But many literary critics still view film at worst as the illegitimate offspring of theatre and photography, and at best as a vulgar, commercial medium, capable very occasionally of achieving its own aesthetic identity; while film theorists tend to value work that is the sole creation of writer-director auteurs. But both revere the same pantheon of film-makers and disdain film adaptations of novels, especially when those novels are much-loved classics.

Films adapted from novels typically invite unfavourable comparison with literary originals, from film critics, newspaper reviewers and audiences alike. Critics see film adaptations of novels as fundamentally flawed, as they are not original, cinematic conceptions; journalists and audiences react with disappointment at superficial dissimilarities, dismayed by casting decisions, inevitable compression and the loss of favourite characters or incidents. Such films are often judged by the degree to which they adhere to or diverge from their literary source material - the film seen either as 'a remarkably faithful adaptation' or one that 'fails to capture the spirit of the original.' But what is it that they are supposed to be faithful to? If there are potentially as many readings of a text as there are readers, then might not film adaptations be regarded in the same light, as 'readings' of or 'essays' on their source texts?

Cinema began just over 100 years ago with the Lumière Brothers' film of workers leaving a factory. This revelation was rapidly followed by the first fictional mini-narratives. The first proto-genre to emerge, then, was realism. By 1905, Georges Meliès, in Le Voyage dans la Lune, had initiated the cinema's alternative, carnivalesque tradition, using the technical capabilities of the medium to realise dreams and fantasies. At that moment it might have seemed that it was realism which would be the dead end and that the cinema's power to represent the imaginary would give rise to the mainstream. Yet realism has remained the dominant mode: for every Matrix or Mission Impossible, every year hundreds of films are produced which go on reflecting the real world, or recreating real worlds of the past. And it is the realist tradition of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel that has most frequently provided source material for film-makers, particularly in British and European cinema. Film-makers continue to plunder the library for novels that have not yet been adapted, or that might profitably be remade. Realist novels, rich in plot and strong in characterisation, have been the model for a cinema with literary aspirations. Modernist fiction might seem more resistant to adaptation, but few novels are regarded as 'unfilmable' and the tradition persists, with film-makers queuing up to acquire the film rights for the latest best-sellers.

More significant perhaps has been the influence of cinema on prose fiction: from Joyce to Graham Greene to Robert Coover, modernist and post-modernist writers have acknowledged, and sometimes borrowed from, the vocabulary of film, employing literary equivalents of montage, cross-cutting, flashbacks and so on. But remarkably little has been written on the problematic issue of the film adaptation, perhaps because the filmed novel is such an awkwardly hybrid genre.

In adapting a novel, the screenwriter is always faced with difficult choices: what to include/exclude, how to compensate for necessary excisions, how to conflate characters and incidents, how to show what the writer tells. Underlying these decisions are the contrasting circumstances of reading and watching. It is worth reminding ourselves - and our students - that a novel will take many hours to read; that unless we are impelled to stay up all night to finish it, the novel will be read in chunks, over a period of days or weeks; that reading is an intimate experience, usually undertaken in private; and that the reader is always at liberty to re-read, to skip, to jump ahead and generally to control the experience. The experience of watching a film, on the other hand, is concentrated into two or three hours at most; it takes place on a single, uninterrupted occasion in a darkened auditorium in the company of dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of strangers; and the viewer is a captive audience, with no choice but to follow the relentless progress of the action on the screen. Of course, the circumstances of watching a film on video or DVD offer the viewer - and the teacher - a measure of control, but even freeze-frame and rewind facilities can do little to impede the headlong advance of film.

Both narrative fiction and narrative film give their audiences a strong sense of place, making use of recognisable, often actual, locations. As well as places, we like to feel that we recognise characters, and in both novel and film we measure the success of their representation according to the psychological consistency of their behaviour. Both novel and film tell stories: we go on watching, as we go on reading, to find out what happens next, or when we are familiar with the conventions of the genre, to find out how it happens.

Novels, it seems, are adapted for the screen in three ways, which might be described by analogy with modes of literary translation. The first is comparable to literal translation, where the film-maker tries to render the novel as faithfully as possible in a different 'language' (e.g. Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies or Kenneth Branagh's tellingly titled Mary Shelley's Frankenstein). Though viewers familiar with the novels will lament the omission of particular scenes or characters, they will tend to approve of the way in which such films have stayed close to their source material. The second category resembles the kind of translation which seeks to reinterpret, or at least to comment on the original work (e.g. Mike Nichols's Catch-22 or Werner Herzog's Nosferatu). Here the reader attached to the original work is likely to be disappointed, not just by superficial changes, but by the added layers of interpretation. The third kind of adaptation is more like an imitation than a translation, where the novel provides a springboard for a film that may be only very loosely based on it - say, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, inspired by Conrad's Heart of Darkness, or Amy Heckerling's transposition of Jane Austen's Emma to an American high school setting in the movie Clueless.

While all three types of adaptation can be used in different ways to complement students' reading of a novel, it is perhaps the first, the 'faithful translation', which lends itself most readily to exploitation in the classroom, and yet which poses the most problems. The adaptation that 'sticks close to the original' is actually performing a kind of sleight of hand, since the similarities are likely to be quite superficial - 'sticking close to' the story and the setting - while what it seems must be 'lost in translation' is most of what makes reading a novel such a peculiar and peculiarly personal experience - the one-to-one relationship between narrative voice(s) and reader, and all the effects produced through the use of language.

This might seem, discouragingly, to suggest that the film adaptation is bound to suffer from the same kind of aesthetic diminishment as the comic book or the abridged and simplified version. But where I think teachers have an enormous advantage, largely untapped, is in students' familiarity with the semiotics of film. Growing up in a predominantly visual culture, they develop quite a sophisticated, if often unconscious, ability to 'read' film. It seems to me that the teacher of literature who is genuinely interested in using film to enhance his/her students' reading of literature has the opportunity to consider film adaptations as independent texts, adhering to their own conventions and with their own stylistic repertoire; neither inferior nor superior to, but different from, their literary antecedents.

Clearly there are many aspects of the novel that cannot be replicated in the cinema: almost everything that the novel does will be modified by even the most 'faithful' adapter. But to assume that the cinema is therefore automatically inferior and less worthy of study, I believe is misguided. Many students are already highly sophisticated readers of film - as teachers of literature, we should learn how to read it, too.

About the author
Alan Pulverness is the author of All in a Word: literature in language teaching (Bell Educational Trust 1989) and co-author of a number of ELT textbooks. He has edited a schools' edition of Macbeth (Societ¥ Editrice Internazionale 2000) and was editorial adviser for The Literary Labyrinth (Societa Editrice Internazionale 1993) and The World Wide Reader (Oxford University Press and La Nuova Italia 2001). His most recent publications are Right Now 1 & 2 (Oxford University Press 2000; 2001) and Changing Skies: The European coursebook for advanced learners (Swan 2001). An Associate Trainer with the Norwich Institute for Language Education, he is Editor of Folio (the journal of the Materials Development Association) and of IATEFL Conference Selections.