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My Idea of Adaptation from Written Work o Film

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Critical Reflection At the beginning of the module my understanding of what adaptation meant was that you would take a work and recreate it in a different form. Adaptation, according to the traditional comparatitive model, is the process of adapting one original, culturally defined ‘standard whole’ in another medium,’ (Cardwell, 2002, p19). I believed the definition of adaptation to require a high level of fidelity to the source text. My opinion before the module was based on the adaptations in popular culture, mainly those of books being made into films. With Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, there was definitely an expectation from the audience that the films would be like they imagined the books to be: that the director would be true to Tolkien’s novels. There is a commercial pressure for the director to stay as close to the original as possible, to ensure its success. Cardwell makes the distinction between genetic and cultural adaptation, saying that where genetic adaptation is linear, with each one being linked to the one before, whereas cultural adaptation always comes from the original source (2002). ‘Each subsequent adaptation is understood to hold a direct relationship with the culturally established original, (pg14). As I started to consider the source text I was going to use, several questions buzzed round my head. What did I want to adapt? What form would it take? How would I make it work in my chosen form? How could I please the audience? The Streets

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