From Fidelity to History: Film Adaptations as Cultural Events in the Twentieth Century.

Weiser, Frans

From Fidelity to History: Film Adaptations as Cultural Events in the Twentieth Century

Scholz, Anne-Marie. New York, NY: Bergahn Books, 2013. 230 pages. $90 hardcover.

It has become seemingly obligatory in contemporary analyses of literature-to-film adaptations to decry the persistence of fidelity discourse, in this case the expectation that the cinematic text should faithfully reproduce the literary original. In From Fidelity to History: Film Adaptations as Cultural Events in the Twentieth Century (2013), however, Ann-Marie Scholz takes a refreshing approach to this programmatic practice. She notes that both older approaches based on fidelity and emergent ones highlighting forms of intermediality tend to privilege relations between multiple genres at the expense of accounting for the material, cultural and ideological forces that inscribe the production of these works at different historical moments. Instead of dismissing fidelity discourses, then, Scholz is interested in analyzing why such responses and debates gain currency in the first place, as well as what they can tell historians about adaptation as a process. She thus approaches the network of textual relations as cultural events "in order to highlight how their relationship to their precursor texts, as well as to their transnational and sociocultural contexts, illuminates changing social and cultural circumstances and offer inroads into reading these films in a novel way" (3).

Scholz's strategy is two-fold. First, drawing on the work of Barbara Klinger, she recasts the process of cinematic adaptation as a form of reception studies, which examines the impact of extratextual processes, ranging from marketing to issues of censorship, upon the film's dissemination and interpretation. Within this context, Scholz incorporates three levels of reception: the relation between the literary text and the director who adapts it, that of the audience's reception of the literary text and subsequently the film, and finally Scholz's own contemporary readings of the uneven processes. Scholz's second strategy extends the work of historian Marc Ferro to situate the act of adaptation within a mode of mediation that can "tap into cultural discourses" while simultaneously creating new, unique interpretations (10). History thus has multiple significations for Scholz, for not only does she bring into play its physical and textual traces, but she also seeks to delineate the history that is created when the new text is produced within a distinct genre, even if, as she points out, that historical intervention is often subconscious.

Scholz examines several case studies to consider two discrete "versions" of reception-as-mediation that provide the monograph with its dual structure: West Germany's response to cross-cultural adaptations (1950-1963) and the surge in adaptations of nineteenth century classical novels in the United States during the 1990s. While representing vastly different historical moments and geographical locations, Scholz suggests that together they demonstrate the larger processes of generating cultural meaning in the twentieth century. Part One analyzes the political implications and interpretations of three blockbusters within post-World War II West Germany. Scholz situates both the filmmakers' relations to the original works and to the ensuing critical response via a collage of reviews, press releases, publicity and film stills, print journalism, and marketing posters, and she effectively traces how differences between book and film that were perceived to touch upon issues related to German involvement in the war led to politically charged interpretations. Chapter One, for example, examines the reception of Carol Reed's thriller The Third Man (1949), demonstrating how the film's characters were viewed as metaphorical representations of the opposing political forces in post-war Europe. Chapter Two takes as its subject Sam Spiegel's The Bridge on the River Kwai (1958), which U.S. producers claimed to have transformed into an anti-war story, though it was critiqued by West German reviewers for encouraging militarism through a new form of war film "created to please all sides in the war vs. anti-war debate, thus destabilizing political binaries" (63). Chapter Three revisits Orson Welles' adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial (1962). The director's transformation of the protagonist from victim into a symbol of resistance became contentious in West Germany for the perceived linkage to German fascism.

Part Two radically shifts its focus from post-war Europe to contemporary Hollywood with the aim of exploring why certain canonical books gain currency at specific moments. Here Scholz adopts a postfeminist position, shifting its focus from material conditions of equality to forms of media representation in order to reconcile private and public identities. Scholz argues that when appealing to contemporary audiences these adaptations inevitably transform the fixed understandings of domestic space evident in nineteenth century literary texts, and that these differences are particularly fertile ground for gauging shifting cultural attitudes towards gender issues. Chapter Four examines the "boom" of Jane Austen adaptations, focusing on representations of eroticism and the body in Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995) and Roger Mitchell's Persuasion (1995) and concluding that the latter is more successful at problematizing conventional genre expectations of romance. Chapter Five focuses on Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise (1991) as an extension of the contemporary preoccupation with exploring female character and intelligence, and thereby recasts the Austen boom as a progressive rather than conservative phenomenon. The final chapter comparatively reviews three adaptations of Henry James' novels, Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Agnieszka Holland's Washington Square (1997), and Iaian Softley's The Wings of the Dove (1997). Scholz contends that despite the apparently apolitical tenor of James' writing, the sexual objectification of the male body that the films share has implications for cultural debates about gender identities.

This book is recommended reading not only for scholars involved in the field of adaptation studies, but also those of history, film history, and cultural studies. The first part of Scholz's monograph is particularly compelling, both in terms of its critical framework and the coherence of its three chapters, which chronologically trace an evolving European response to popular film. Her greatest strength lies in the political and historical contextualization of competing Cold War receptions. The historical claims and the incorporation of production materials seem less salient in the latter half of the monograph, which sacrifices some of its depth in order to read multiple films within a single chapter. While part of this difference in scope no doubt stems from the proximity of the 1990s to the present, the two sections ultimately constitute two separate projects--one historico-political and diachronic, the other cultural and synchronic--and there is little transition between them. While Scholz is interested in displaying the potential breadth in range of reception studies when applied to adaptation case studies, her book would benefit from a direct engagement with how the separate studies overlap and inform one another.

Nonetheless, the text successfully makes a convincing case for reconsidering adaptation studies as an inter-disciplinary process residing at the intersection between historiography and reception studies. Perceiving the critical use of case studies to be under attack, Scholz is careful to mediate between differing methodological impulses; thus while she critiques adherents to fidelity for frequently operating within a socio-cultural vacuum, she also points out the tendency in reception studies to overlook the importance of precursor texts. As Scholz explains, "The point is not that contemporary filmmakers inject aspects of the present moment into their 'historical adaptations' but rather to show how their adaptations manifest-both consciously and unconsciously--change over time in the relationship between culture, narrative, and film" (193-4). Such an approach, in addition, supports her claims that cinema opens up a new direction in terms of extending the analysis of historical documents to consider psychological and social experiences through literary artifacts (199). Hence Scholz's multiple interventions are valuable in expanding the vocabulary of both adaptation and film as modes of interpreting history.

Frans Weiser, University of Georgia