On a sociology of the filmic adaptation: an essay on method

Abstract

The new approaches in the study of literary adaptation seek to transpose the essentialist comparatism that only points out the differences and similarities between the film and the book (or between cinema and literature as codes of representation) to think about sociology of adaptation. It is not to abandon the categories of comparatist analysis; the methodological leap proposed is to link this comparatism with the different dynamics of production and representation that involve the source-text and the film. Besides, it tries to give attention not only to films made from books, but also to those adapted from television, radio, videogame, graphic novels, comic books, and other cultural products. Although it does not constitute a new phenomenon, adaptation is a permanently present fact in the actual cultural panorama. In this way, to work with the complex hammock of connections and re-creations of the artistic objects to which we are day-by-day exposed, it is pertinent that the study of cinematographic adaptation observe the set of cultural, economic and political interests tied to the production and the reception of the film and its sources.