Style, Narrative, Adaptation: The Age of Innocence

Abstract

Since 1980, and Raging Bull, adaptations of various kinds of literature have comprised a significant component of Martin Scorsese ’s directorial output. Before Raging Bull, only Boxcar Bertha was an adaptation; after Raging Bull, itself an adaptation, there have followed, until the early 1990s alone, The Color of Money, The Last Temptation of Christ, ‘Life Lessons’, GoodFellas and Cape Fear. With adaptations regarded a means of potentially mitigating risk, the recourse to literary sources arguably implies another indication of the institutional recuperation of New Hollywood Cinema. That noted, adaptations have formed a considerable percentage of films released by Hollywood and other film industries throughout their histories. It has correspondingly proved a matter of comparatively long-standing concern within Film Studies.¹ Hence some analogous attempts to categorize different types of film adaptation, defined in terms of the angle of incidence between film adaptation and source text. Witness Geoffrey Wagner’s tripartite schema of ‘transposition’, ‘commentary’ and ‘analogy’ (1975: 222–6); Dudley Andrew’s breakdown of ‘fidelity of transformation’, ‘intersection’ and ‘borrowing’ (1980: 10); or Michael Klein’s description of adaptations that display ‘fidelity to the main thrust of the narrative’, are involved in ‘significantly reinterpreting’ or ‘deconstructing’ their sources or use a literary source as ‘raw material’, ‘simply the occasion for an original work’ (1981: 9–10).