A Theory of Adaptation by Hutcheon Linda

A Theory of Adaptation by Hutcheon Linda

Author:Hutcheon, Linda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis


Modes of Engagement Revisited

As shown in Chapter 2, telling, showing, and interacting with stories differ in the kind and manner of engagement of the reader (spectator, player). Adapters know this; so too do those who market adaptations. The relatively small “graduate” audience who bought most of the 10,000 hardback copies of Malcolm Bradbury’s 1975 ironic campus novel, The History Man, was not the same in size or makeup as the 10 million viewers of the BBC television adaptation a few years later (Bradbury 1994: 99). When television buys the rights for this kind of fiction, it knows it can build upon a “preconstructed and preselected audience” (Elsaesser 1994: 93), but that it must also expand that audience considerably and must use all the available persuasive means at its disposal to do so.

Even within a single mode of engagement, however, there are once again major distinctions to be made, especially with performance media. When director Peter Brook filmed Peter Weiss’ baroquely entitled play Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats, dargestellt durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade (1964) as the more simply named Marat/Sade (1966), he sought a totally cinematic translation of what he had previously done on stage, knowing that spectators of live drama are free to choose at any moment, in any scene, what to look at, whereas with the film he would only be able to show one thing at a time with the camera—what he wanted to show. He attempted to break down this limitation by deploying three or four cameras, using twists, advances, and retreats and “trying to behave like what goes on in a spectator’s head and simulate his experience” (Brook 1987: 189–90). But even this camera work, he realized, would not do what a stage production does: engage the viewer’s imagination in a way that film, because of its realism, cannot. Noting the “excessive importance of an image, which is intrusive and whose details stay in the frame long after their need is over,” Brook finally accepted that the reality of the image is what gives to film “its power and its limitation” (1987: 192). Or, as another critic has put the difference: “In theatre, the conflict of the hard, undeniable presence of actors together with the conventional artifice of scenery and stage required a suspension of disbelief. On the other hand, narrative cinema, with its flow of action, naturalistic acting, and photographic realism, increasingly involved not so much a suspension as a suppression of disbelief” (LeGrice 2002: 230). A young friend recently admitted to me that, although he loves adaptations, he cannot bear going to stage play versions: they seem so “stagey” and unrealistic to him because he is part of a generation raised on film and television, with their conventions of naturalism and immediacy. Curiously, the three-dimensional world of the stage is far less engaging for him than the two-dimensional screen world.

The human-computer interface offers yet another kind of engagement in a feedback loop between



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