Expanding Audience Reach & Revitalizing Literary Classics

Cinema can be seen as a modernizing force. While trudging through a dense classic can be off-putting to many modern audiences, through cinema, this literature can be given a new lease of life; it can be reimagined and reframed, sometimes in a modern context.

Baz Luhrmann’s efforts, both with The Great Gatsby (2013) and Romeo and Juliet (1996) (although the latter isn’t actually a ‘book’, but a play), have garnered much attention in this regard. Both of these projects advanced mainstream conversations about the works themselves and about the recontextualization of classic literature.

Another beloved adaptation which springs to mind is Pride and Prejudice (2005). To this day, director Joe Wright’s interpretation consistently shines through in ‘top Jane Austen adaptation’ lists across the web and is almost universally adored among young period-drama fans.

Influence on Reader Perceptions and Interpretations

Sometimes, adaptations become so culturally ubiquitous that certain elements within them overshadow the original text. Take actors, for instance, who come to inhabit their characters so fully that audiences can hardly see that character any other way (Alan Rickman as Severus Snape, anyone?).

Filmmakers might even deliberately – or, for that matter, unintentionally – alter certain aspects of their source material in such a way that audiences’ perceptions of certain characters and their motivations shift. A Shakespeare adaptation, for instance, may choose to present Hamlet either as a victim of acute mental illness or a wronged innocent.

The Evolution of Adaptation Techniques Across Film History

As the science behind the magic of filmmaking has evolved through its 150-year history, so have adaptation techniques.

In the early days of film, movies were limited in one obvious and crucial way: they were silent. This placed necessary restrictions on the limits of adaptability. To hark back to our earlier mention of Méliès’s Cinderella (1899), this particular adaptation was more a series of brief moving pictures rather than a ‘film’ as we’d understand it.

With the advent of sound and color, filmmakers gained new powers to create more immersive and faithful adaptations – famously, The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939).

Today, it’s a whole new world: advanced special effects make almost anything possible, giving filmmakers ultimate scope to adapt. That’s to say nothing of long-form TV adaptations, which have given filmmakers room to explore their source material more comfortably (The Handmaid’s Tale [2017-present] and Outlander [2014-present]) and is an increasingly popular adaptation format.