Having recently finished Charlotte
Bronte’s Jane Eyre, I started
browsing the 15 or 20 movie versions for a good one to watch all the way
through. But each time, I came away
disappointed because I couldn’t find a single “faithful” movie. The writers invariably eliminated or twisted
or completely invented major attributes.
That’s when I decided I might be missing the point.
My Norton Critical Edition
(3rd Edition) of Jane Eyre
has some critical essays in the back, including a few which address film adaptations
and… fun fact: While the 1944 film was being written, producer David O.
Selznick conducted a preliminary audience survey. Those who had read Jane Eyre were asked to
identify which scene they most remembered. The vast majority reported “the burning of Thornfield Hall”, a scene which Jane (the
first-person narrator) never even witnessed.
She only heard about it from a minor character well after the fact. Some survey participants even best “remembered” the scene where
Rochester rescues Jane from the fire, which, by the way, never happens.
Turns out film producers
don’t just have to worry about fidelity to the original text, but also current audience expectations, the cinema’s strengths and weaknesses, and
plain old economic limitations. I expect we’ll run into a lot of this as we see more and more poetry adapted to film as well.
On another note, I see a
lot of film adaptations of literature.
But I rarely see literary adaptations of film. I wonder why.
Yea that is weird that things usually follow a literature to film progression. I think literature still thinks it's above film as an art form and doesn't want to bend down and muddy itself by adapting a film to a book haha
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