From Page to Screen / Vom Buch zum Film. Группа авторов
still on, or the scene in the film Tootsie where the protagonist finds out that another character had disappeared from the series they are shooting because he had asked for a raise in his salary.
But in a much more subtle way, and perhaps more invisible, there are other interferences which go unnoticed for the reader who only knows the film version but ignores the literary original. At this point we are talking about the reasons behind the changes in an adaptation which could be motivated by a political, historical, moral, economic or commercial rationale7. Pérez-Bowie summarizes the whole issue in this way:
The territory encompassed by the relationship between cinema and literature is so wide and heterogeneous that is it not limited to the problems derived from the adaptations of literary texts into films. It extends into many other areas. (Pérez-Bowie, 2004: 277. Our translation)
Thus, more specifically in our volume, we do not deal only with general ideological issues, but more particularly with questions that have to do with gender and sexual politics. Because, as Casetti indicates,
the analysis of adaptations should do more than compare the former with the latter text. It should instead focus in what changes in the passage from one to the other; that is, the frame within which they are located. (Casetti, 2004: 83)
However, before anything else, we would also like to underline that our volume is not a contribution to the theory of adaptation. Rather, our purpose is to offer a collection of practical cases. The different aspects of adaptation have already been sufficiently theorized in the so-called Adaptation Studies8. Florian in the introduction to his work says that “Das Phänomen der Literaturverfilmung ist so alt wie der Film selbst” (Florian, 2008: 1). Likewise, we could say that there is already a long theoretical tradition that has been inspired by those adaptations, offering numerous and interesting ways of approaching these transmedial rewritings9.
In our contribution, as said before, we are more interested in presenting practical cases of diverse kinds of adaptations,10 in different modalities and with various sources, although at the same time trying to escape what has been called the “seemingly endless stream of comparative case-studies of print and screen versions of individual texts” (Murray, 2008: 4). Indeed, the individual essays in our volume are linked by a common element, which we intended to be very specific: the representation and/or misrepresentation of women in the course of adaptations from the page to the screen. In this sense, ours is not only a contribution to the analysis of inter- or trans-mediality, but also, from the specific point of view of criticism, it attempts to encompass an area in which, in a transversal fashion, cultural studies, film studies and gender and feminist studies, can find a common ground11.
Indeed, for a long time now women have struggled, under the mantle of the discourse of feminism or otherwise, for the vindication of their rights, for their relevance in the history of humankind and, as résumé of it all, for their visibility. At first sight this struggle may seem, at least in most Western societies, a story of success, maybe not yet complete and equal for all women, but at least one which, in a firm and continued manner, carries with it the promise of, and hope for, equality for all women.
However, a closer look can reveal that in various fields of culture, both elitist and popular, the representation of women, even when it apparently aims at promoting new and greater degrees of visibility, frequently suffers from a manipulation or a mis-representation which makes the image of women lose the strength and intention which it initially attempted. This is particularly true in the case of adaptations of literary texts to visual formats like cinema or television, when the initial literary message is very often changed because of, for example, marketing demands which also finally respond to an ideological stance12. Only in a few instances, and this should also be underlined, do we find the opposite case (normally in the more recent film productions), where the literary originals of some characters, apparently indifferent or emasculated, are turned into guardians and/or apologists of feminine empowerment.
The present volume, thus, in its five different sections that will be glossed in the next pages, focuses precisely on the way in which, more often than we may be aware of, both in the fields of elitist and popular culture, the image of women is degraded, metamorphosed or directly falsified, and, with the exceptions already mentioned, rarely enhanced in films and TV series, when compared with the original literary texts on which those representations are based.
1 Children’s Stories for Adults
The first section in our collection deals with the adaptation of children’s stories. Very often we forget that what we call children’s literature is not written by children but for children, and that the authors are undoubtedly adults who cannot help writing and composing their texts from a certain social, geographical, political, etc., position. That is, a position that is always already predetermined and that we might consider ultimately as inevitably cultural and therefore ideological.
To this we must add the fact that the original children’s story can be manipulated for commercial reasons when we try to turn it into a film that could be enjoyed by not only children but by a larger audience. A case in point is the double reading or viewing that could be made of certain animated cartoons or CGI films based on stories and scripts initially designed to appeal to children but which contain a kind of subtext that is meant for the adults who normally go along with the children to the theatre.
We can clearly see this in the way that at the end of some of these films, when the list of credits is shown, the viewer is also given a sort of “making of” with discarded or alternative scenes which, by their comical effect, seem more intended for the enjoyment of the adult than of the child. The film, as it were, includes an extra layer of meanings which appeals to the adult viewer and satisfies his desire for entertainment as he carries out the noble task of caring parent. In this way, the experience of going to the movies and, most importantly, the film itself, becomes a cultural event to be enjoyed not only by the children but by the whole family.
Lorena Silos uses, as the starting point for her essay, the widely accepted idea that the adaptation of literary texts into films or TV series serves the very important function of reproducing values and ideologies which may be an essential part of the social fabric. This reproduction is not always a mechanical process, since it is often the case that a new version of an old story is used to reassess that story from the perspective of a new social environment and/or a new cultural paradigm. Silos uses as case-study the adaptations of Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, and, after reviewing the long history of adaptations of the literary original, she concentrates on discussing more particularly one of the main characters in the story, Fräulein Rottenmeier. By following the evolution in the way this character has been portrayed in several film adaptations as well as the animated versions, Silos tries to explain the political as well as social implications which account for those changes in the representation of this female figure.
Bruno Echauri also concentrates on the study of a story in which, again, the protagonist is a young girl. The focus is not, however, as in the previous case, an adult that is close to the young protagonist but on the child herself, Mathilda. For Echauri an important element to be considered is the fact that the author frequently, behind what seems to be a literature written simply for entertainment, manages to hide a subtext of profound social criticism of values and circumstances affecting children. The success of the story, as could be expected, caught the attention of Hollywood’s producers which eventually turned the book into a film. Echauri analyzes the changes in characterization in the film version, connecting them with the material aspects of film production, as well as with the commercial component due to the shift in film genre in the Hollywood version of the story, in a move which eliminates the elements of ambivalence in the original text.
Finally, Yiyi López-Gándara begins by acknowledging how an unexpected event such as the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has made us all suddenly but fully aware of the importance of all kinds of learning, which become, as she says a “kind of hybrid education experience”. In this context, more precisely, the relevance of films is highlighted for their educational value. López-Gándara focuses her analysis on the way gender is represented in media texts at large, and how children can be affected by stereotypical approaches to gender issues. By focusing both on film versions of children’s