Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation

This chapter positions contemporary adaptation studies within a historical academic-discursive context derived from the institutional status of its parental disciplines. Throughout most of the twentieth century, literary scholars who looked at adaptations were unconvinced that film was a worthy subject of study, and their analyses of film adaptations favoured a perceived fixed authorial meaning in the ‘original’, against which an adaptation was judged. Methodological developments, such as poststructuralism, which problematised fidelity-dominated adaptation studies, had little direct impact on the study of adaptation because of the field’s then un-institutionalised status. This bias was eventually overcome, but not until various Post-Theoretical approaches had displaced poststructuralism’s temporary dominance in film and literary studies. By this historical accident, adaptation studies replaced fidelity analysis not with poststructuralism, but with a model which dispensed with the poststructuralist focus on the importance of the radical critic in relation to the inevitably ideological text. The dialogic approach to adaptation studies developed a shift from radical critic to radical text, and sought to account for radical filmmaking interpretations within adapted texts. This approach centres on displacing the original’s author as fixed and final source of meaning. However, the chapter concludes by arguing that this authorial displacement has other unintended consequences which undercut this activist stance.

This chapter sets out the psychoanalytic poststructuralist methodology that has been so influential in film studies, but which has not yet been applied to adaptation studies. Three important facets of the broader poststructuralist approach are developed in detail to support the book’s subsequent argument. These facets are: (1) poststructuralism’s fundamentally political project, with a focus on the combined importance of ideology and the unconscious; (2) Jacques Lacan’s concept of the Symbolic Order, which is the realm that creates imagined identities that individuals assent to occupying, but which is incomplete, so that fissures inevitably appear. The foregrounding and concealment of these fissures constitute the anamorphic process which binds individuals into the Symbolic Order; and (3) the application of Lacan’s anamorphism to film theory, with realist film grammar an inevitably incomplete articulation of the Symbolic Order, and with the foregrounding and obfuscation of that incompletion a masochistic process which gives film its ultimate ideological effect. The chapter ends by pointing towards how film anamorphism contrasts with dialogic understandings of the film text, which is developed in detail in the next chapter.

The final chapter in the first half of the book examines the differences between the two approaches discussed in the previous two chapters. It begins by setting out in detail the poststructuralist approach to canonical authorship that informs the book’s analysis of adaptation. Derived from the broad poststructuralist account explored in the previous chapter, this approach is situated in Benveniste’s distinction between two enunciative registers: discours, which reveals the source of its articulation, and histoire, which conceals that source. Christian Metz uses these registers to analyse how film grammar reveals and conceals the filmmakers’ articulative status. The chapter sets out how the registers can be used to analyse how film adaptation reveals and conceals the original author’s articulative status, which I call the ‘drama of authorship’. The detailed elaboration of this process is undertaken in the second half of the book. The focus in this chapter is on setting out the theoretical groundwork for this subsequent taxonomy, and on how the approach differs from, and addresses the unseen consequences of, dialogic approaches to adaptation derived from Barthes and Bakhtin.

This chapter addresses another element of canonical authorship which adaptations may foreground and subsequently obfuscate: audience foreknowledge about narrative events and famous passages of dialogue. It positions this anamorphic process within a reflexive context, derived from the idea of metacinema developed in Chapter 5 and from theoretical approaches to how perception operates in relation to the illusory movement of still images in cinematic projection. Adapted narratives can include visual clues about this foreknowledge, which are signifiers of artifice, but are also simultaneously suppressions of the verbal into the seemingly un-authored visual. The drama of foreknowledge, then, like the dramas of vision and of authorship, is an inherently anamorphic process. The chapter also explores how adaptations can subvert foreknown narrative conclusions and how this process is executed in an anamorphic manner which draws attention to, and subsequently obfuscates, the subversion.

This chapter analyses those films which narrativise the lives of canonical authors. Such films are not adaptations in the strict sense, but they feature the same kind of anamorphic processes outlined in the preceding chapters, and narrativise many of the themes underlying adaptation studies’ competing conceptions of authorship: in these films, the author’s status as either dead or concealed is most clearly explored. These films foreground the artifice of narratives associated with the authors but then include numerous examples of those narratives occurring ‘spontaneously’ in the diegetic authors’ lives. This is the anamorphic process writ large—a signifier of artifice quickly displaced with an obfuscation of that artifice. These films also facilitate heightened examples of dialogic academic criticism. They therefore make a good final study which sums up how competing academic approaches to adaptation can analyse certain important facets of their subject matter, but are incapable of exploring other ideological elements.