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From Fidelity to History: Film Adaptations as Cultural Events in the Twentieth Century Scholz, Anne-Marie. New York, NY: Bergahn Books, 2013. 230 pages. $90 hardcover.
It has become seemingly obligatory in contemporary analyses of literature-to-film adaptations to decry the persistence of fidelity discourse, in this case the expectation that the cinematic text should faithfully reproduce the literary original. In From Fidelity to Flistory: Film Adaptations as Cultural Events in the Twentieth Century (2013), however, Ann-Marie Scholz takes a refreshing approach to this programmatic practice. She notes that both older approaches based on fidelity and emergent ones highlighting forms of intermediality tend to privilege relations between multiple genres at the expense of accounting for the material, cultural and ideological forces that inscribe the production of these works at different historical moments. Instead of dismissing fidelity discourses, then, Scholz is interested in analyzing why such responses and debates gain currency in the first place, as well as what they can tell historians about adaptation as a process. She thus approaches the network of textual relations as cultural events "in order to highlight how their relationship to their precursor texts, as well as to their transnational and sociocultural contexts, illuminates changing social and cultural circumstances and offer inroads into reading these films in a novel way" (3).
Scholz's strategy is two-fold. First, drawing on the work of Barbara Klinger, she recasts the process of cinematic adaptation as a form of reception studies, which examines the impact of extratextual processes, ranging from marketing to issues of censorship, upon the film's dissemination and interpretation. Within this context, Scholz incorporates three levels of reception: the relation between the literary text and the director who adapts it, that of the audience's reception of the literary text and subsequently the film, and finally Scholz's own contemporary readings of the uneven processes. Scholz's second strategy extends the work of historian Marc Ferro to situate the...