Introduction

Abstract

The introductory chapter outlines the scope and content of the book, which develops a new approach for the study of films adapted from canonical ‘originals’ such as Shakespeare’s plays. The book problematises field’s current broad consensus that adaptations are heightened examples of the premise that all texts are in dialogue with other texts, so that all artworks inform and are informed by other artworks. The book instead argues that film adaptations of canonical texts partake in and extend cinema’s inherent manipulation and concealment of its own artifice. These source texts, which may have subtle gradations of artifice and verisimilitude in their ‘original’ forms are, to a greater or lesser extent, adapted into film texts which foreground the constructed, re-performative nature of the adaptation in relation to the source—the film adaptation announces that it has an artifice derived from the author in a manner that is quite different from other (non-adapted) films. In order to analyse this process, the book moves from a dialogic to a psychoanalytic poststructuralist account of film adaptation.