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.