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Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film, by Hsiu-Chuang Deppman. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2010. Pp. 256. US$27.00.
Given that so many of the notable contemporary films that have brought international prestige to Chinese cinema are products of adaptation, Hsiu-Chuang Deppman's Adapted for the Screen should interest many in the field of Chinese cinema studies. Her approach mixes auteurist/author study and close intertextual reading. A glance at the table of contents, which pairs seven films with their respective literary source texts, affirms this. With the exception of Chen Guofu's film The Personals, all are canonical works that have won awards at international film festivals and have since become staples on syllabi for Chinese cinema classes in American colleges. Three of the literary texts (Raise the Red Lantern, Red Rose and White Rose, and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress) are now available in English translation. This makes the book useful for students of both Chinese literature and Chinese cinema. Of particular pedagogical value are the detailed, thoughtful, and yet accessible comparative analyses. The author's description of the interactions between the chosen films and their original texts shows fine scholarly learning, impressive critical skill as well as a rare literary sensitivity to textual detail.
Indeed, patience and passion are needed for a task as daunting as the one Deppman has taken on. Areas of convergence and divergence between film and text are vast and various. This is not only because the two distinct art forms of cinema and fiction belong to distinct systems of visual images and words; Chinese literature and Chinese cinema each carry their own cumbersome baggage. One suspects that delving into textual detail and studying film frame by frame is perhaps both a natural choice for a critic as sensitive and observant as Deppman and a strategy to avoid losing one's way amidst voluminous contextual information and intellectual niceties. The author also chooses to give equal attention to film and fiction without privileging the latter. In so doing she joins many other film scholars who, since the 1990s, have rejected the fidelity discourse of adaptation studies. But while the intellectual benefits of being freed from a skewed methodology are...