Fidelity critics and counter arguments with examples

In today’s world films are one of the most important tools of communication, entertainment and mass media. Motion pictures have had a substantial impact on the arts, technology and politics.
But, when it comes to adaptations, this belief is not considered to be good enough for the fidelity critics when compared to a book or a novel. Sarah Cardwell argues that the comparative study of literary work and screen adaptation leads to fidelity criticism (52). However, McFarlane admits that a study of screen adaptations should not be limited to a narrow comparison of the screen adaptation and single source text, and should take into account other intertextual influences (Novel to Film 21). Fidelity critics ignore reinterpretation of text and do not keep in mind the vision the director has of the text.


Images influence the state of mind of the audience a great deal. It is the art of the filmmakers that they create such an arrangement of images that it touches the viewer. Carl Theodor Dreyer (1991, p.128) said ‘that the film first and foremost is a visual art, first and foremost directs itself to the eye, and that the picture far, far more easily than the spoken word penetrates deeply into the spectator’s consciousness’. Adaptations are no less than its so-called ‘original text’. It has its own way of interacting with the audience. One such example is ‘The Lord of The Rings’. Younger generation never read the novel, until the movies came out. The sale of the novels went up after the release of the films.

There has been estimation that the proportion of American films that are based on novels is 30 per cent. Approximately 80 per cent of the best selling novels each year are turned into film adaptations. More than three quarters of the Academy Awards "best picture" have gone to adaptations.

Iconography of the Red Dress

Images can have great emotional impact on the audiences than literary texts. One such example is the iconography of the Red Dress in the movie Schindler’s List, which is an adaptation of the novel Schindler’s Ark. In the final scenes of Schindler’s List, Ben Kingsley says “One who saves the life, saves thousands”. Viewers come to witness the true story of one man Oskar Schindler, who dashes over 1,100 Jewish souls. His story survives one of the darkest times in history. Director, Steven Spielberg, has given the audience an extremely powerful presentation of the Holocaust. Among the many masterful scenes in the film, one scene in particular is vital to the true meaning behind the character of Oskar Schindler: The destruction of Cracow’s Jewish ghetto, where the viewer’s attention is drawn to a little girl in red coat. This scene reveals the character and theme brought forth through a number of cinematic techniques such as use of color, camera movements and sound. Such a depiction is hard to extract while reading a written text.

adaptations receiving critical acclaim

There might have been adaptations that couldn’t be as successful as the novels but that does not make the Fidelity Critics right in saying that all adaptations are doomed to failure. Virginia Woolf even likened adaptation to rape!

There are many adaptations that have received the critic’s awards. In the year 2009 four adaptations of the books have received five major awards at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, like ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ (based on a book by Roald Dhal with the same title) took the best animated film award. Meryl Streep won the best actress for ‘Julie and Julia’ (based on Julie Powell’s ‘Memoir’), Mo’ Nique won the best supporting actress for ‘Precious’ (based on ‘Push’ by Sapphire) and finally George Clooney won the best actor for ‘Up in the Air’ (based on Walter Kirn’s novel)



Novel by Charles Dickens 'A Christmas Carol' was put on the big screen in 1951 by the same title, directed by Brian Desmond Hurst, starring Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge, is picked up as the best film adaptations of all times by the A.O Scott, New York Times.

Acculturated adaptation

Film Adaptations are of various kinds. One of the many types is Acculturated adaptation. One such example is an Indian movie called ‘Omkara’ (2006) which is based on Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’. According to the Fidelity argument a film is seen inferior to the written text, somehow less worthy, less demanding and not as artistic, but this film has proved that an adaptation, that too set in a different culture with an extremely different social background can make for a great film. ‘Omkara’ is considered to be one of the master pieces in India directed by Vishal Bharadwaj. He not only created a great piece of art but also managed to spread the story of Othello to masses. Here the Fidelity argument can be weakened, for if the Indian audience was to read Othello, more than half would not have been able to get the context right, which is fair, because they come from a different cultural background, but after having seen Omkara the text would be much more clearer to the audience. This proves that sometimes the adaptations can help make the original text understood better. As Deborah Cartmell (1999) says ‘Even when a literary text is the subject of an adaptation it may not be a text that many potential viewers are familiar with: it may be a misremembered children’s story or an obscure work of fiction that only became widely known through the process of realization on screen’.



Omkara (2006)

involvement of creativity

Well, the essence of the book lies in the minute details but when being adapted as a film it needs to capture the mood of the story and keep the basic structure intact. A filmmaker has to be extremely creative and clever at the same time in order to bring the best out of the book and needs to have a high visual sense. Screenplay is another factor, which can either make it or break it. A good screenplay is extremely important for a film. ‘A successful film adaptation would be more of a paraphrase than a translation, since each medium has its own characteristics which militate against a direct translation. What is important is that the writer doing the adaptation retain the key elements from the original and catch the flavor, the “personality” or feeling-tone of the original’ (William Charles Miller, 1980, p. 210).

If the author of the book is involved in filmmaking it makes things better, but only if the director demands for it. If the story needs to be told to the audiences in the way the book was written, its vital to have the involvement of the writer to write the screenplay, there is no such rule though, but some of such examples have proven the adaptations to be a great hit amongst the audiences. Example, The Godfather (novel) was written by Mario Puzo and was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo did the screenplay of the movie. And rest as they say is history.

Fidelity is important to understand how literary text is important. The theory is misguided by comparing the mediums. Whereas post fidelity critics allow us to investigate a film by its own unique qualities and efforts thereby allowing us to explore reinvisionings and authorial creativity.

There are different ways of film adaptations. Lets stress upon the different kinds of film adaptations in the recent past. 'The Lord of The Rings' a famous novel by J. R. R. Tolkien, was taken to the big screen by Peter Jackson, for the first time in the year 2001. It was a literal adaptation of the novel. on the other hand, Tim Burton, did the adaptation of 'Alice in Wonderland' (one of the most famous novels by Lewis Carroll), in his own way. He brought newness to the story by his creativity as an artist, yet he managed to keep the classic nature of the story. The little changes in characters and the twists in the story attracts the attention of the viewers. As mentioned earlier in the blog, Brian McFarlane identifies, although we shouldn't compare these two adaptation sources when presented in different mediums, it is important to recognize the activities of the audience and the pleasures expected thereof.

But again, the success of the adaptation depends on the director. A fine example could be the recent bollywood movie, ‘3 Idiots’, which is based on the novel ‘Five Point Someone’ by Chetan Bhagat, an Indian writer, which did extremely well by earning 41 million GBP (after conversion) within three days of its release and the film had no involvement with the writer. It is a great controversial topic in India these days, as the writer is upset with filmmakers for not giving him the due credit. But the truth is that he has been given credit as per the contract. But after the movie turned out to be a blockbuster he needs more credit for it. The actor Aamir Khan said in a newspaper interview ‘The script of the movie is original’.



In such cases one is compelled to think, who is to be given the credit for the authorship? Authorship largely depends on the viewer or the reader i.e. the receiver. Roland Barthes in his book ‘The Death of The Author’ mentions ‘The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the author’ (1968). It is how the audience interprets a particular work of art. Here, the role of the audience should not be misinterpreted as the destruction of the artistic creation of the filmmaker, but it is to be understood as a mutative process.

There can be a fair argument in case of written biographies. People’s lives are penned down on a paper by the author to create a literary work, which is questionable too, as the idea is not completely original. But it is not questioned, in fact it is appreciated by people and the way in which the story is told. Same stands for a film. Obviously, when two different works of art are kept in the same frame, the tendency of making comparisons are inevitable but that does not make the fidelity critic correct in considering films to be inferior to written texts. Conrad (1945) has famously remarked, ‘My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of written words, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is before all, to make you see’.

Adaptations sometimes give birth to new target texts and hence becoming the source text themselves. Example, Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996) based on the novel of the same name by Irvine Welsh was adapted for cinema, and there were new versions of the source novel that outsold the original. The director, Danny Boyle, did a spectacular job and the screenplay of the movie by John Hodge is a tight adaptation of Welsh’s work.




Adaptations can be an improvement over the original text, if done well. Bringing words and expressions into moving images is like giving life to the story. As Susan Hayward (2006) says, ‘film characterization creates a whole new mythology existing outside of the original text’. Adaptations are in the form of remakes as well. They tend to be regarded as derivative copies of earlier films, which are solely produced for commercial purposes. Many remakes, however, have received critical acclaim- in 2007 Martin Scorsese’s The Departed a remake of 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, won four Academy Awards including one for the best adapted screenplay. The last decade in particular had seen a proliferation of commercially and/or critically successful remakes. Among these are the heist films ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ (2002), cross cultural remakes of Asian horror films like the Ringu series and many more classic horror and science fiction like ‘Dawn of The Dead’ (2004), ‘War of The Worlds’ (2005), ‘The Omen’ (2006), ‘The Invasion’ (2007), ‘I Am Legend’ (2007). These commercial remakes attest to a current cultural trend that has also begun to attract academic attention.





Adaptations like ‘Devil Wears Prada’ (2006) and ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ (2009) have done well on the box office. The storyline is similar to the source text but the filmmaker has been creative enough to change the ending of the story so that there is an element of originality so far as the work is concerned and there is an element of surprise for the audience, who think that they are aware of the story but when they actually watch the movie they are in for a surprise by the change in the ending.




Rather than finding out the answers to which medium is superior, one should understand the importance of both and realize that films and novels should not be viewed as opposite/dialectical forces but as complimentary to each other. If one medium provides words to the reader then the other shows the story being lived by ‘characters’. There is a relation between the films and the novels. Film manuscrips are basically comparable to the literary genres, the synopsis and the treatment for example represent the stages towards the screenplay.

Fidelity argument, in conclusion, is a conservative argument, as it confines itself to the literary written text and criticizes the art of filmmaking when it comes to adaptations. Adaptations are a way of storytelling through a different medium, which is interesting as it is visual and gives the viewer a better picture.