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A Conversation with Linda Hutcheon on Film Adaptation

Une conversation avec Linda Hutcheon sur l’adaptation
cinématographique
Marie Pascal

Volume 1, numéro 1, 2022 Résumé de l'article

Linda Hutcheon est une pionnière dans le champ de l’adaptation
L’Adaptation cinématographique - Approches théoriques cinématographique avec son livre Theory of Adaptation (2006), où elle offre la
Film Adaptation - Theoretical approaches vision de l’adaptation comme procédé transmédial plutôt que comme relation
de fidélité qu’un film se devrait d’entretenir avec un texte. Elle a régénéré la
URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1110951ar recherche dans le domaine, dépassé des écueils théoriques sur lesquels la
critique de l’adaptation s’était heurtée et offert des perspectives excitantes sur
DOI : https://doi.org/10.5206/tc.v1i1.15008
la manière de concevoir les relations entre des médiums aussi divers que la
bande-dessinée, le genre romanesque, le théâtre, l’opéra, les jeux vidéo, etc.
Aller au sommaire du numéro Même si sa recherche s’est graduellement tournée vers le genre de l’opéra, elle
a eu la générosité de m’offrir ses réponses pour ce premier dossier de
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Western Libraries, University of Western Ontario

ISSN
2816-8895 (numérique)

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Pascal, M. (2022). A Conversation with Linda Hutcheon on Film Adaptation.
Transcr(é)ation, 1(1), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.5206/tc.v1i1.15008

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 A Conversation with Linda
Hutcheon on Film Adaptation

MARIE PASCAL
King’s University College (Western University)

ABSTRACT
Linda Hutcheon is a pioneer on cinema adaptation, with her book A Theory of
Adaptation (2006), where she envisions adaptation as a transmedial process rather than
as a faithful relationship a film must respect with a book. She has rejuvenated research in
the field, overwhelmed dead-ends encountered by the adaptation critique, and offered
thrilling perspectives on how to conceive such relationships between medias as different as
comics, novels, drama, opera, video games, etc. Although her research interests now shifted
to the operatic genre, she was as kind as to answer my questions for this first dossier of
Transcr(é)ation.

Keywords: adaptation · Linda Hutcheon · opera · media

Pascal, Marie. 2022. « A Conversation with Linda Hutcheon on Film Adaptation. » Transcr(é)ation.
Vol. 1 (Summer 2022) : 1-5. © Marie Pascal, CC BY-NC -ND 4.0.
 MP: I am organizing a workshop on film adaptations in May and I received three
paper proposals on "fidelity". Personally, I am unsure of this concept's relevance to
approach the dialogue text/film but these three proposals made me wonder if there may be
circumstances where a debate on fidelity has some credibility. Do you think it could and
under what conditions/for which types of adaptations?

LH: Ah, fidelity! The Eternal Question of adaptation studies! I've come to
alter my opinion about its relevance over time, to be honest, Marie. When I first
started trying to theorize adaptation, the existing literature on the topic (with the
looming exception of the wonderful work of Robert Stam) was fidelity-centred.
There were dozens and dozens of articles and book chapters presenting case
studies of how ‘X’ film was faithful to X novel (or not). Much of the early theorizing
also began from the question of proximity: how close should the adaptation be to
the adapted text (usually called the source text) to be called an adaptation?

Instead of that kind of question, I thought it might be fruitful to ask different

ones that undid that notion of priority (“source”) and considered texts as equals –
for the audience, at least. It was only because of the late-Romantic and, frankly,
capitalist valuing of the “original” and therefore the denigration of adaptations as
secondary and derivative that the negative evaluations of adaptations vis-à-vis the
“source” dominated discussions.

While it's obviously true that an "adaptation" works with another prior text,
it never reproduces it; it is always a form of repetition without replication. And, in
addition, and this is important, its audience may not know (or know well) that
other “source” text, so an adaptation has to stand on its own as an autonomous
cultural object and be judged accordingly. That said, as soon as something is
identified as an adaptation, comparison is inevitable, right? It’s a double-voiced
text, containing at least two layers of lamination, to change my metaphors.

For me, it's the issue of evaluation that makes fidelity as a criterion
problematic. An adaptation has to be different, but does it have to be better or
worse?

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 MP: I remember discovering your book (A Theory of Adaptation) in 2006, when
I first started my MA on Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptations, and I remember that you
wrote about the pleasure of such kinds of films. Would you care to share your conception
of the pleasure one (public, scholars, readers) can experience with such a medium (that is,
if you still think the same).

LH: The pleasures of adaptations are manifest everywhere. Our human

thirst for stories—new ones, but also old ones – is constant: films, musicals,
television series, plays, novels, operas, ballets, graphic novels and comics,
videogames all adapt familiar and beloved stories. Now, so did Shakespeare, of
course. It isn’t new. Critics as different as T.S. Eliot and Northrop Frye have taught
us that stories are always born from other stories. Or as Walter Benjamin put it:
“storytelling is always the art of repeating stories.” We know that children love to
hear the very same stories told and retold nightly. Adults aren’t that different,
though we do need a bit of variety: enter adaptation. New media and new
channels of mass diffusion have fed the desire/need for stories, so we recycle
narratives. No surprise there.

MP: Do you read the books (or first-hand material) before you watch and/or listen
to (in the case of operas) transcreations? Do you try not to in order to concentrate on the
work itself? Is it important to take into account the dialogue between the two or can they
live their lives autonomously, without concern for the other medium?

LH: I don't consciously “prepare” to see an adaptation unless I'm working

on it for scholarly purposes. Many a time I've seen a film adaptation without
knowing the adapted text – as I did recently with The Power of the Dog film. So,
when I then went on to read the novel by Thomas Savage (from which the film
was adapted), in a way I was reading and experiencing the novel as the adaptation
of the film: for me, it came after.

I inevitably compared it to the film's version in part because I could only see
the characters as Jane Campion had cast and directed them. Comparison is part of
the fun, and part of the pleasure of adaptations. When we know the prior text,
adaptations are stereophonic: they contain the echoes and references to that other
text – whichever text it might be (film adaptation or “source” novel). But I have to
say that in the case of reading the novel after watching the film, the director (with
her/his casting, camera shots, etc.) does take over, indeed “colonize,” my
imagination utterly, so that I can no longer imagine the characters, setting or action
independently of the film’s version. I think I’d therefore prefer to read the novel
first, now that I think of it... More imaginative freedom!

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 MP: I understand your research interests have shifted since the first publication of
A Theory of Adaptation—you are now analyzing operas, whether or not adaptations
(??) I am wondering what you are looking for when coming into contact with an operatic
adaptation? How do you analyze the processes at stake, in a few words?

LH: In a way, opera is the UR-adaptive art form: since its beginnings in late
16th-century Italy, it has always relied on the tried and tested, rather than the new
and original, and for obvious economic reasons. Opera is an expensive art form,
with multiple creators and performers, so creation and reception have always been
inseparable: audience expectations/desires condition what is offered in the theatre.
Therefore, popular novels or plays (or before them classical myths and legends)
have been perfect for operas to condense and shape through operatic conventions
into a libretto. That dramatic text is then set to music in the score (which, in a way,
is a sonic adaptation of the libretto’s print words, dramatic action and stage
world).

Opera is a musico-dramatic hybrid, bringing together into one

simultaneous event the musical, the textual and the theatrical – all of which
influence one another. So, for audiences, there can be intertexts in all the different
media as a dramatic narrative and a visual world are adapted for the operatic
stage.

As with all adaptations, operatic ones produce (in audience members who
are familiar with what is being adapted) a doubled response, as they oscillate
between what is being remembered and the adaptation they are experiencing on
stage: Shakespeare’s Othello exists together with Verdi and Boito’s Otello, making
the operatic performance a kind of palimpsest, with doubled layers of recollection
and experience. This is part of the pleasure of adaptation, both intellectual and
aesthetic. This is why I said earlier that the fidelity debates – if we omit the issue
of evaluation – are not going to go away, nor should they, perhaps: the pleasure
of comparison is real.

Now, if a member of the audience doesn’t know the adapted text, they
would simply experience the performance differently – as they would any other
opera – that is, not as an adaptation. The palimpsestic doubleness will have
disappeared. Maybe that’s the secret of the ubiquity of adaptations: the rich
doubleness is more pleasurable than any singleness?

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Author’s biobibliography
Marie Pascal completed her PhD studying figures of pariah and marginals in
Quebec literature and films (University of Toronto, 2017). She is currently an
Assistant Professor at King’s University College (Western University) where she
teaches francophone literatures, Quebec cinema, and language. Amongst her most
recently published articles are: “L'écrit à l'écran : écriture, texte et lisibilité dans la
transcréation québécoise” (Canadian Journal of Film Studies, vol. 30, n°1, Spring
2021, pp. 25-48) and “La mère abjecte dans la transcréation québécoise” (Journal of
Film Studies, n°29, vol. 1, Printemps 2020, pp. 111-129). She is currently co-directing
a book on Denis Villeneuve (Edinburgh University Press), and a dossier focused
on the aesthetics of abjection in francophone arts (Dalhousie University Press).

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