Chapter One

Introduction

Cinema, a popular medium of communication and entertainment, has acquired

enormous significance these days. Critical theories have sprouted up to support it

and film studies have been recognized as a major discipline. It has influenced the

cultural, sociological and political changes taking place all over the globe. The

role of cinema in filling the void caused by the lack of interaction between cultures

and in imparting ideas and ideals has been acknowledged. The growth of cinema

into a serious medium of artistic expression and the rapid proliferation of theories

about film aesthetics are indeed amazing. Major achievements of the film world

are now granted the same respectability as similar feats in the spheres of literature

and art, and are subjected to critical scrutiny using similar tools of analysis. In

short, the aesthetics of cinema has come to the attention of theoreticians and

critics.

The cinema industry has always been aware of the vast potential of

literature as one of its sources. The continuous interactions between literature and

film have generated substantial amounts of debate and received legitimate

attention. The interconnectedness of the formal narrative properties of film and

literature make the translation from one media to another feasible. The number of

films adapted from literary works has been increasing since a long time. Corrigan

in his book, Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader comments:

One estimate claims that 30 percent of the movies today derive

from novels and that 80 percent of the books classified as best

sellers have been adapted to the cinema. If the connection between

the two practices has persisted so adamantly through the years, it

seems especially pressing now… as an index of why the movies are

important, why literature still matters, and what both have to offer a

cultural period in which boundaries are continually being redrawn

(2).

The above remark astutely sums up major issues concerning film adaptations of

literary works. Many English and/ or media studies departments in universities

offer courses on film adaptations and the Academy Award confers a separate

award for adapted screenplays, distinguishing them from original ones. Such

phenomena tends to be read as an advance of visual culture upon the traditional

culture of literacy.

Though the history of adaptation is as old as films, there has always been a

tendency to privilege the written text over the visual text. However, the increasing

popularity of the visual narratives over the written ones in the present times cannot

be overlooked. This situation calls for a thorough academic study on the

relationship between the two media and the issues involved in the process of

adaptation. Researchers on adaptation have been able to draw attention to the

inter-relationships between them, pointing out the way films used techniques to

assume the narrative structures of fiction and vice versa. Thus attempts were

numerous on the part of the writers to establish correlation between narrative

properties of film and literature.

From the very earlier days of adaptation, ‘fidelity’ to the source text was

considered the yard stick for evaluation. Thomas Leitch in his essay, “Twelve

Fallacies in the Contemporary Adaptation Theory”, writes: “Fidelity to its source

text—whether it is conceived as success in recreating specific textual details or the

effect of the whole—is a hopelessly fallacious measure of a given adaptations’

value because it is unattainable, undesirable, and theoretically possible only in a

trivial sense” (par. 23). Brian McFarlane in his book, Novel to Film claims:

“Discussion of adaptation has been bedevilled by the fidelity issue, no doubt

ascribable in part to novel’s coming first, in part to the ingrained sense of

literature’s greater respectability in traditional critical circles” (8). Another major

concern for evaluation was the ‘originality’ of the adaptation with respect to the

source text. Both these concepts spring from the aforementioned tendency to view

written text as superior to the visual one. However, the structuralist and post

structuralist theoretical developments in 1960s and 1970s subverted many of these

binaries and hierarchies, which brought about a major shift in the study of

adaptations. The later books on adaptation studies welcomed the shift brought

about by post structuralism. Post structuralist critics observe film adaptations as

intertextual works and as critical interpretations of literary texts, which enhance

and expand the reading of the source texts. Thus the process of adaptation is a

practice of intertextuality, where a text depends on other texts to construct its

system of signification.

Leitch further points out an erroneous notion held by the critics that

“adaptations are intertexts and the precursors are simply texts.” He corrects the

notion by pointing out that “the precursors are equally intertexts, because every

text is an intertext that depends for its interpretation on shared assumptions about

language, culture, narrative, and other personal conventions.” (par. 33). This

substantiates Roland Barthes’ view that “any text is an intertext” (Untying the Text

39). Julia Kristeva, who coined the term ‘intertextuality’ from Bakhthin’s

dialogism, also emphasizes the same notion by invoking examples from literature,

art and music in her essay, “The Bounded Text” (1980). For instance, the plays of

Shakespeare are adaptations from sources as diverse as Holinshed’s Chronicles

and Greene’s Pandosto. The originality of Shakespeare actually depends precisely

on his seeing the artistic potential of the source materials. Thus the focus of

evaluation is shifted from fidelity to intertextuality as pointed out by Deborah

Cartmell: “Instead worrying about whether a film is faithful to the original literary

text (founded on the logocentric belief that there is a single meaning), we read

adaptations for their generation of a plurality of meanings. Thus the intertextuality

of adaptation is our primary concern” (28)

The critical and theoretical debate about adaptation was not established in

the academy until the mid-twentieth century. In an article, “A Certain Tendency of

the French Cinema”, originally published in Cahiers Du Cinema in January 1954,

Francois Truffaut had dismissed the film adaptations of French classics as literary

and not cinematic, because of a blind insistance to render fidelity to the source

texts. Instead, he praises the cinema of filmmakers such as Robert Bresson, Alfred

Hitchcock, Jean Cocteau, Jean Renoir, and Jacques Tati, who even when they are

adapting literary material, bring something truly personal and original to it, thus

turning their films into the expresssion of a personal vision. This article led to the

inauguration of what is termed as ‘auteur theory’ where the film maker is regarded

as the ‘author’ of the film. Truffaut’s article was infact influenced by “The Birth

of a New Avante Garde: La Camera Stylo”, an article written by Alexandre

Astruc, in which he emphasized the medium specificity of cinema. Astruc’s essay

went on to compare it with literature—“cinema like literarure is not so much a

particular art as a language” (159)—and the filmmaker with the literary author

expressing himself in his work.

Though the specific character of cinematic medium was acknowledged

before, the first major academic study on film adaptation adhered to the insistence

for fidelity. The influential book was Novels to Film (1957) written by George

Bluestone. The book opened with the statement that “the film in the recent years

has become more and more insisitent on its claim to serious recognition.” (vii).

Bluestone’s attitude was that despite superficial similarities, the movie and the

novel are antithetical forms and that film adaptation will be an inferior work of art

than its source. This resulted in a binary, hierarchical view of the relationship

between literature and film, where the literary work was conceived of and valued

original, while the film adaptation as merely a copy, and where fidelity emerged as

the central category of adaptation studies.

Geoffrey Wagner’s The Novel and the Cinema (1975) was another

influential study on film adaptation appeared in the later years. The assumption

that literature as superior to film still prevailed in the academic circles. Though

Wagner’s assumptions did not explicitly insisted on fidelity, it still focussed on the

literary source/ filmic adaptation binary pair, excluding the intertextual and

contextual factors. In this book Wagner drew the distinction between the famous

three modes of adaptation, which he labels transposition, commentary and

analogy. Though Wagner was trying to defend film adaptations through his book,

his approach foregrounded and unspoken reliance to the centrality of the source

text. Wagner’s classification is still one of the most prevalent methods employed

in the analysis of film adaptations.

Maurice Beja’s Film and Litertature published in 1979 is one of the earliest

attempts to challenge the primacy of literature and of the fidelity criterion. Though

he denounces the use of the fidelity criterion to the detriment of judging

adaptations as independent artistic achievements, he still invokes the foggy

concept of the “spirit of the original work” as that which an adaptation “should be

faithful to” ( 81). Beja’s book returns to the superiority of the canonical literature

when he claims that:

The feeling is that the truly first rate works of literature will be the

most difficult to adapt, since they are the ones in which form and

content have already been perfectly matched, so that any attempted

disjunction between them is bound to produce

problems…Consequently film makers should avoid adaptations of

major works of literature in favor of less imposing—or even

mediocre—ones. ( 80)

The same year marked the publication of Keith Cohen’s Film and Fiction:

Dynamics of Exchange (1979). Starting off from a semiotic perspective—with

Christian Metz as a point of reference—Cohen assumes that “visual and verbal

elements are…component parts of one global system of meaning” (3), and

explores the “exchange of energies from the movies …to the modern novel,

whose major innovations, will be seen as closely patterned after those of cinema”

(2) The dynamics of exchange works in both ways between fiction and film, an

argument which instantly destabilizes claims for the superiority of literature with

regard to cinema.

In 1980, Dudley Andrew in his The Well-Worn Muse: Adaptation in Film,

History and Theory, points out that though cinematic and verbal signs differ so

much, their function is connotation. Andrew led the discussion to focus on the fact

that adaptation can also be considered as a cultural practice. Andrew writing in

1980 recognizes the fact that fidelity is “the most frequent and the most tiresome

discussion of adaptation” (12) In 1984 Christopher Orr, reviewing four recently

published books, notes that the concern for fidelity still dominates the field of

adaptation studies. Orr opens his review essay by providing a critique of the

discourse of fidelity and by pointing to ways in which adaptation studies could

seek to transcend it. Fidelity criticism, Orr argues, “impoverishes the film’s

intertextuality” by reducing it to a “single pre-text”( ie, the literary source) while

ignoring other pretexts and codes (cinematic, cultural) that contribute to making

“filmic text intelligible” (72-73) .

This was the time when film studies experienced the influence of the work

emanating from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural studies at the University of

Birmingham and of French theorists such as Barthes, Michel Fouccalt or Loius

Althusser. Thus, in 1980s Adapatation Studies transformed in the light of post

structuralism and cultural studies, as well as in the context of a firm audio-visual

culture. In 1985 Joy Gould Boyum’s. Double Exposure: Fiction into Film

appeared. A book with a personal touch, it notes the changes adaptation studies

underwent over the decade. Although deriving from a different intellectual

tradition from Barthes’ Post structuralism, reader response theory also empowered

the reader by emphasizing the dialogical character of literary texts. In the words of

Hans Robert Jauss, the main proponent of the aesthetics of reception, literary

works become events when newly appropriated by their readers:

A literary work is not an object that stands by itself and that offers

the same view to each reader in each period. It is not a monument

that monologically reveals its timeless essence.… A literary event

can continue to have an effect only if those who come after it still or

once again respond to it—if there are readers who again appropriate

the past work or authors who want to imitate, outdo, or refute it

(Jauss 21-22).

The 1990s saw a cross fertilization between Adaptation Studies and other

disciplines. Pattrick Catrysse in his article, Film (Adaptation) as Translation:

Some Methadological Proposals (1992), proposed the application of polysystems

theory of translation to the study of film adaptations, in his case by focussing on

American film noir. Translation studies much like adaptation studies were

traditionally source oriented and normative—emphasizing the faithful

reconstruction of the source text—and narrowly formalistic—focussing of the

linguistic comparison of pairs of individual texts, source (original) and target

(translation) to the exclusion of wider (cultural, contextual, intertextual)

mechanisms that may have determined the translation process. Polysysytems

theory focuses on the way the target (translated) text actually functions in its

context, and on how and why shifts of emphasis takes place during translation

process. When applied to the study of adaptation, such an approach opens up some

interesting perspectives that go far beyond the concern with fidelity.

Questions to be asked about the function of a film adaptation in its context

include whether the adaptation presents itself as such and why; what is the

adaptation’s reception by the audience and critics, and how does it vary in time

and space, and above all, the study of the adaptations’ intertextual universe, since

“even film adaptations of famous literary texts generelly do not limit themsleves to

adapting literary source alone” (Cattrysse 61). Ultimately Cattrysse places

adaptation studies in the frame work of studies of intertextuality, whereby “film

adaptation had better be studied as a set of discursive (or communicational or

semiotic) practices, the production of which has been determined by various

previous discursive practices and by its general historic context” (62).

The most important book on adaptation to emerge in 1990s was Brian

Macfarlane’s Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (1996).

Macfarlane’s book was instrumental in unsettling the primacy of fidelity as a

major criterion for judging film adaptations. He rightly points out that “Fidelity

criticism depends on a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the

(intelligent) reader a single, correct ‘meaning’ which the film maker has either

adhered to or in some sense violated or tampered with” ( 8) a notion that has been

thoroughly problematised by post structuralist theory.

Further Macfarlane claims that the focus on fidelity has obscured the

awareness of the issues that are fundamental to the study of adaptation, such as the

need to distinguish between “what may be transferred from novel to film”, which

he labels “transfer”, as distinct from “what will require more complex processes of

adaptation”, which he names “adaptation proper” (10, 23). His proposed

methodology for the study of adaptation privileges questions of narrativity. While

narratology remains an important tool for analysing certain formal aspects of film

adaptations, an exclusively narratological approach simply leaves out crucial

contextual and intertextual factors and does not acknowledge the hybrid nature of

adaptation as an art that bridges the verbal/visual or word/image divide.

In the year 2000, Film Adaptation, an anthology of essays edited by James

Naremore was published. He emphasized the need for adaptation studies to

definitely move away from formalistic concerns in the light of contextual

(economic, cultural political, commercial, industrial, educational) and intertextual

factors. Robert Stam in the same anthology borrows M.M Bakhtin’s concept of

dialogism to propose a highly productive view of adaptation as intertextual

dialogism, where “Film Adaptations are caught up in the on-going whirl of

intertextual reference and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an

endless process of recycling transformation, and transmutation with no clear point

of origin” (Stam, Beyond Fidelity 66). Stam pursues and expands his arguments in

his most recent contributions: Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the

Art of Adaptation (2005) and Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and

Practice of Film Adaptation (2005).

Thus, it can be seen that contemporary adaptation studies has embraced the

theories of post structuralism, cultural studies, and reception studies. The

intertextual elements in the source texts and film texts are uncovered in order to

dismantle the notions of originality of the source text, thereby discarding the

insistence on fidelity. The methodology employed here for analyzing the film

adaptation involves (a) the scrutiny of the source text to uncover the intertexts in it

(b) analyzing the film to uncover the intertexts in the film (c) Mise-en-scene

analysis of selected scenes to discover how the cardinal function or invariant

information in the novel is translated into the movie. The close analysis of the

source text is to prove that it can be composed of various texts. The film text is

subjected to the same analysis to establish that the film’s signification is not only

derived from the source text alone but from multiple texts. Mise-en-scene analysis

of selected scenes is to show the specific character of the medium of film to create

its system of signification. The postmodern emphasis on retrospection and

pastiche in art has also reshaped the process of adaptation. As a work of art where

numerous texts come together and interact, it is possible to view film adaptation as

a pastiche.

Another major concern of the study is to examine how the films transpose

the language, culture and setting into a new context using the characters, plot and

themes of the source text. An adaptation often signals a relationship with an

informing source text by its title or by retaining the character names, or by its plot.

For instance, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet remains as Hamlet though it

is an interpretation of the filmmaker. However, there are certain adaptations that

move away from the source text into a new cultural back ground though it

maintains the theme, plot and characters. Such adaptations where the intertextual

relationship with the source text is embedded in the film are called appropriations.

Akira Kurosowa’s Shakespearean adaptations like Throne of Blood (1957, based

on Macbeth) and Ran (1985, based on King Lear) are particular cases in point of

texts translated from western to eastern cultural context. The study offers an

occasion to compare the cultural contexts of both traditions and attempts to

explore the way the filmmaker creates verbal and visual analogies that

bridge/distance the two cultures. Thus in the screening of the text, the process of

adaptation and appropriation will be the central focus of this study.

Many gifted artists in the medium of cinema have acknowledged their

passion for adapting literary works into films. Directors whose films have been

taken up in this study are Akira Kurosawa, the renowned Japanese film maker and

Francis Ford Coppola, the celebrated Italian-American film maker. Four films

each by Kurosawa and Coppola are taken as primary sources. Among the films of

Kurosawa, The Idiot (1951), The Lower Depths (1957), The Bad Sleep Well (1960)

and Ran (1985) are considered for the study. Among these films The Idiot and The

Lower Depths are based on Russian texts written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and

Maxim Gorky, respectively. The Bad Sleep Well is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s

Hamlet and Ran on King Lear. Kurosawa’s films incorporate the process of

appropriation as they transpose the language, culture and back ground of the

source text to a Japanese context. Among the films of Francis Ford Coppola, The

Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), Apocalypse Now (1979) and

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) are considered for the study. The Godfather films

are adapted from Mario Puzo’s novel of the same name while Apocalypse Now is

inspired from Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899). Bram Stoker’s

Dracula was Coppola’s interpretation of Bram Stoker’s famous gothic novel

(1897).

Though these filmmakers hail from different cultural backgrounds, the

similarities in their visual styles and thematic concerns bring them together. Akira

Kurosawa is a film maker who was heavily influenced by the western filmmakers.

Kurosawa’s admiration for early silent cinema by filmmakers such as D. W.

Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Charles Chaplin, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Luis Bunuel,

Fritz Lang and Josef von Sternberg clearly demonstrates the “richness of the

cinematic culture from which Kurosawa has been nourished” (Sato 32). Many of

the western film makers like Sergio Leone, George Lucas, Coppola and Martin

Scorsese were in turn influenced by the films of Kurosawa too. Francis Ford

Coppola is one of the most prominent among the followers of Kurosawa. Another

reason for bringing together these film makers is that the selected films

incorporate diverse modes of adaptations, appropriation, transposition,

commentary and analogy. Thus analyzing the films of Kurosawa and Coppola

present an opportunity to study various modes of adaptations of different genres

like dramas, novels and novelettes.

Successful adaptors confirm that they regard the source text as a plane from

which their creative vision takes off. Akira Kurosawa and Francis Ford Coppola

belonged to that group of legendary filmmakers like David Lean, Alfred

Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrik, Roman Polanski and others who were fascinated by

the gems of our literature all through their career. They were equally enthusiastic

in adapting literary classics and popular fiction alike. What motivated them was

the cinematic potential of the literary texts. As Alfred Hitchcock comments:

“What I do is read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all

about the book and start to create cinema” (Adair 3). Kurosawa adapted

Shakespeare’s King Lear and Ed Mcbine’s potboiler, The King’s Ransom.

Hitchcock worked on lesser known literary works and made film classics out of

them. Polanski was equally attracted by the potential of Charles Dickens’ Oliver

Twist (1838) and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967). Whatever be the quality of

the source texts, these filmmakers were able to make their work unique with their

craft and vision of life, and they remain open for further interpretations. Though

from diverse cultural backgrounds, Kurosawa and Coppola are brought together to

study their approaches to adaptations. In terms of the cinematic styles, Coppola is

a follower of Kurosowa. As a producer Coppola, along with George Lucas,

collaborated with Kurosawa in his film Kagemusha in 1980.

In his Autobiography Kurosawa’s remark: “Take ‘myself’, subtract

‘movies’ and the result is zero” (xi), illustrates his approach to life and cinema. He

has considered his personal life apart from filmmaking as of negligible

importance. Thus, the story of Kurosawa’s life becomes the history of one of the

most productive periods of Japanese cinema, which marked it firmly in the film

history. Born on 23 March 1910 in Omori, Tokyo, Kurosawa was the youngest of

eight children born to Yutaka and Shima Kurosawa, in a family of direct

descendants from the Samurai, a fact that probably influenced many of his films in

the later years. His father graduated from the imperial army academy, and by the

time of Akira’s birth he worked as a physical education instructor in Tokyo.

Yukata Kurosawa was a man who embraced western culture. He introduced

western styles in the athletic programs that he directed and took his family to

cinema, which influenced young Akira in developing a taste for movies. He

considered films as a positive educational experience. In taking his position in the

gymnastics academy, Yukata Kurosawa developed facilities for the Japanese

martial arts like Judo and sword fighting. He was also a pioneer in the introduction

of Western sports like swimming and baseball. Akira’s first two years of primary

education was spent at a school where European customs and dress were the norm,

and then he was transferred to a school structured according to purely Japanese

traditions. His father’s western affinities and taste for movies, along with the close

interaction with the Japanese culture influenced Kurosawa as a film maker.

Kurosawa’s mother, Shima was a woman of perseverance who spent her

life for the welfare of her husband and children in the true samurai fashion. In

Something like an Autobiography, Kurosawa remembers her as a gentle soul

“impossibly heroic” in her sacrifices for the family (21). Contrary to the

conventionalized gender traits in Japan, Kurosawa observed his mother as a realist

and his father as a sentimentalist, which influenced the characterization of

marriage pairs in his films. This rendered his treatment of gender issues far-

reaching and complex.

In spite of the samurai spirit of the household, Kurosawa remained a

sensitive lad whose childhood nicknames were “cry baby” and gumdrop”

(Goodwin 30). After his elder brother Heigo’s failure in the school entrance

examinations, his father’s attention was turned on to Kurosawa, and when he was

eight, he began training in martial arts and fine-arts. During the summer he spent

in his father’s family in Akita prefecture, he became fully aware of his samurai

heritage and led the life of a mountain samurai. Irrespective of his heritage, he

failed in compulsory military instruction in middle school. During this time he

developed an interest for movies largely due to his father’s enthusiasm for foreign

films. He often took the entire family to the American and European motion

pictures exhibited in Tokyo. A great admirer of calligraphy, Yukata sent his sons

to a master for training. He also encouraged Kurosawa’s interest in western

landscape painting. Heigo’s affinities with Western literature drew Kurosawa to

the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Gogol and Edgar Allen Poe, whose

influence were evident in his films later. Among the Japanese writers, one who

attracted him most was Ryunosuke Akutagawa, whose stories were adapted for his

most celebrated film Rashomon (1950).

On September 1, 1923 a devastating earth quake hit the Kanto region,

where they lived, taking an estimated 70,000 lives in Tokyo alone. This event

made an indelible impression on Kurosawa’s mind which lasted all through his life

and art. Separated from the rest of his family whom he thought to be dead, but

shocked to find them unharmed and seemingly unperturbed. The morning of the

earth quake, a wind rose with such suddenness and violence as to register indelibly

in Kurosawa’s consciousness. Later in his career, it can be seen that wind became

a powerful motif of premonition in his writings and films. In his autobiography, he

describes his brother’s childhood accident and the death of his sixteen year old

beloved sister in the outset of strong wind. In his films, wind is an accoustic and a

visual signal of impending conflict or denouement. The climactic battle in

Sanshiro Sugata (1943), set on reed covered slopes buffeted by storm gales is an

instance.

Kurosawa had a love-hate relationship with his brother Heigo, whose

influence persisted all through his life. In the autobiography Kurosawa treats their

relationship as “the prefiguration of an intense curiosity over destructive

personalities and psychological doubles, restimulated by the fiction of

Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Poe and Akutagawa.” (Goodwin 32). For a period they were

in primary school together, Heigo was a harsh but protective mentor, assailing

Kurosawa with insults yet defending him on the schoolyard from the taunts of

other children. Kurosawa also recollects a moment when Heigo allowed him to

drown during the swimming excursion and saving him only in the last moment.

Heigo was deeply “addicted” to foreign movies and literature. (Kurosawa 72)

Together on family outings, they watched imported action serials, slapstick

comedies and adventure films of the day. Their father also took them frequently to

the story teller halls where masters of impersonation and pantomime were

performed. Such influences led Heigo later to write commentaries for film

programs and to become a film narrator or benshi. Heigo recommended the latest

releases to his younger brother, who conscientiously saw as many as he could. For

a ten year period starting at age nine, the autobiography listed about one hundred

foreign films Kurosawa had seen for the first time. These included the work of

directors like Griffith, DeMille, Stroheim, Chaplin, Ford, Renoir, Bunuel, Murnau,

Lang, Lubitsch, von Sternberg, Eisenstein and Pudovkin.

Like others in Japan’s young and unemployed urban intelligentsia at the

time, Kurosawa was receptive to the communist promise and joined the

Proletarian Artists’ League in 1928. Though Kurosawa was initially sympathetic

with the League’s social vision and artistic goals, he soon discovered that he had

no avocation for Marxist Theory and ideological debate. After quitting the League

in 1932 he moved to a tenement in Kagurazaka where his brother Heigo lived.

This urban district had retained its working class identity since the Edo era. The

neighbourhood was home to men who held menial jobs in the city’s story teller

halls and movie houses. For a minor sum Kurosawa used their courtesy passes to

see all the popular entertainments of Tokyo. The experience of living in this place

was reflected in the creation of the later films like Lower Depths(1957), Drunken

Angel (1948) and Dodeskaden (1970). During his stay there, he slowly awakened

to a paradox that would persist in his imagination, as he claimed: “the bright,

cheerful humor of tenement life I enjoyed so much harbored in its shadows of

reality” ( Kurosawa 82)

Once separated from the Proletarian Artist’s League and its tenets of social

realism, Kurosawa embarked on a search for an entirely personal style as a painter.

He consciously aspired to achieve “the intensity of realism” he admired in Courbet

and the independence of vision in Cezanne and Van Gogh (Kurosawa 77). To pay

for painting supplies, he free-lanced as a commercial artist, turning out magazine

illustrations and cartoons. In 1935, Kurosawa chanced upon a classified

advertisement for assistant-director trainees at PCL (Photo Chemical

Laboratories), a young company formed to produce sound films that soon evolved

into the major studio Toho. Unaware that out of more than 500 applicants only

five would be hired, Kurosawa completed the first phase in the application

process—an essay evaluating the quality of Japanese cinema—in a half mocking

tone written from his perspective of an enthusiast of foreign films. In 1936 he

began his career in film industry and was hired to the production unit of Kajiro

Yamamoto, who became in the coming years turned out to be his mentor. Under

Yamamoto's guidance, Kurosawa was soon writing entire scripts for films under

the PCL banner, and by 1937 he moved up the ladder as Chief Assistant Director.

In Something Like an Autobiography (1982) Kurosawa wrote: “Yama-san said: ‘If

you want to become a film director, first write scripts.’ I felt he was right, so I

applied myself wholeheartedly to script-writing” (28).

Continuing to work under Yamamoto till 1943, Kurosawa's maiden venture

Sanshiro Sugata was released in Japan on 25 March of the same year. A martial

arts masterpiece, the film was widely acclaimed by the audience, and Kurosawa

was in the reckoning as a fresh director with a bright future. After his directorial

debut with Sanshiro Sugata (1943), his next few films were made under the

watchful eye of the wartime Japanese government and sometimes contained

nationalistic themes. For instance, The Most Beautiful (1944) is a propaganda film

about Japanese women working in a military optics factory. While making the

film, Kurosawa met Yoko Yaguchi, an actress, whom he married in 1945. His next

film, The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (1945) was banned by the American

Occupation Forces due to its alleged ‘pro-Feudalism’. Judo Saga 2 (1945) portrays

Japanese judo as superior to western boxing.

His first post-war film No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), by contrast, is

critical of the old Japanese regime and is about the wife of a left-wing dissident

who is arrested for his political leanings. Kurosawa made several more films

dealing with contemporary Japan, most notably Drunken Angel (1948) and Stray

Dog (1949). Kurosawa gained international fame with his great series of films in

the 1950s and 1960s, which mixed eastern and western styles and established him

as one of the world's leading film makers. In 1951, Kurosawa's Rashomon,

adapted from two stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, won Golden Lion at the

Venice Film Festival and a Best Foreign film Oscar, and opened up Japanese

cinema to acclaim in the west. Starting from Rashomon, later films like Ikiru

(1952), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1958) and Lower Depths (1958)

established the reputation of Kurosawa as a master craftsman and story teller. Ikiru

was awarded the Silver Bear at the fourth Berlin International Film Festival. The

story depicts a minor bureaucrat, Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), who tries to

find meaning for his existence during the last months in his life, while Throne of

Blood was an adaptation of Macbeth.

The Hidden Fortress (1958) was a great commercial success and won the

International Film Critics Prize and the Silver Bear at the ninth Berlin

International Film Festival. Dersu Uzala won the Academy Award as Best Foreign

Language Film of 1975. Kagemusha (1980) shared the Golden Palm at the Cannes

Festival. With these and earlier achievements—and for his famous perfectionism

– Kurosawa was addressed by his colleagues at Toho Studios as ‘Tenno’ meaning

‘emperor’. Seven Samurai (1954) marked the beginning of Kurosawa's samurai

series, and became the most popular of all Kurosawa’s films in the West.

With Kagemusha (1980) Kurosawa turned to the large-scale historical epic,

which continued in Ran (1985), a version of Shakespeare's King Lear. Although

Kurosawa was the most famous Japanese director in the West, he had troubles in

getting finance from his own country. Ran was made possible by the support of

Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. Kurosawa made three more films during

the 1990s which were more personal than his earlier works. His 1990 film,

Dreams is a series of vignettes based on his own dreams, while Rhapsody in

August (1991) is about memories of the Nagasaki atomic bomb and his final film,

Madadayo (1993) is about a retired teacher and his former students. Kurosawa

died of a stroke in Setagaya, Tokyo, at the age of 88.

A notable feature of Kurosawa's films is the breadth of his artistic

influences. Some of his plots are based on William Shakespeare's works: Ran is

based on King Lear; Throne of Blood is based on Macbeth, while The Bad Sleep

Well (1960) parallels Hamlet. Kurosawa also directed film adaptations of Russian

literary works, including The Idiot (1951) by Dostoevsky and The Lower Depths

(1957), from the play by Maxim Gorky. Ikiru was inspired by Leo Tolstoy's The

Death of Ivan Ilyich and Dersu Uzala (1975) was based on the 1923 memoir of the

same title by Russian explorer Vladimir Arsenyev. Story lines in Red Beard

(1965) can be found in The Insulted and Humiliated by Dostoevsky. A crime

thriller, High and Low (1963) was based on King's Ransom by American popular

writer, Ed McBain. Dashiell Hammet’s novel, Red Harvest and several American

Westerns inspired Yojimbo. Kurosawa was very fond of Georges Simenon and

Stray Dog was a product of Kurosawa's desire to make a film in Simenon's

manner. Cinematic influences include Frank Capra, William Wyler, Howard

Hawks, his mentor Kajiro Yamamoto, and his favorite director John Ford. In his

autobiography, Kurosawa explains how he felt that as he grows older he would

like to resemble the American director, and compares himself to Ford. When

asked how he became what he is, he responded: “influences, I guess. From the

very beginning I respected John Ford. I have always paid close attention to his

films and they’ve influenced me” (Richie, Films of Akira 242). The similarities

between Kurosawa and Ford could well be a by-product of this influence, Stephen

Prince writes how “both men were attracted to stories of masculine adventure”and

also finds a parallel in the reliance on a “stock company of trusted performers”

(15) Kurosawa was deeply influenced by Japanese culture as well, such as the Noh

theatres and the Jidaigeki (period drama) genre of Japanese cinema.

In terms of form, content and artistic vision Kurosawa has been regarded as

the most western of Japanese film makers. From an early age he keenly observed

the work of some of the most celebrated writers from across the world, as he

claimed: “As I was growing up, my education – as that of most people of my

generation –compared to younger people today, covered a broader span:

Shakespeare, Balzac, Russian literature. It’s quite natural that my education would

manifest itself later in my work (Prince 21). Kurosawa has most regularly

expressed his affinity for the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. “I was very fond

of him, and have remained so to this day. He was a great influence” (Richie, Films

of Akira 11). Kurosawa’s appreciation for Dostoevsky did lead to the

manifestation of the Russian’s influence within his films, not only with his

adaptation of The Idiot, but throughout his entire body of work. Richie talks about

the considerable influence Dostoevsky had on Kurosawa in terms of “thought and

style” and states how Kurosawa “talked about reading The Idiot and Crime and

Punishment over and over again” (199).

Akira Kurosawa’s approach to adaptation was absolutely different from

methods adopted by others. Kurosawa approached the source text for the plot and

themes and transferred it to the Japanese scenario and made it essentially

Japanese. Apart from being an adaptation, these films were able to stand alone

with out being tied to the source texts. Moreover, the films offered an opportunity

to compare the cultural contexts of both the source text and film, the way the film

maker creates verbal and visual analogies that bridge/distance the two cultures.

Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) re-imagines Shakespeare’s Macbeth in feudal

Japan and is regarded as one of Kurosawa's best films, and by many critics as one

of the best film adaptations of Macbeth. Similarly, Ran (1985), conceived as a

Jidaigeki (Japanese Period drama), depicting the downfall of Hidetora Ichimonji,

an aging Sengoku-era warlord, who decides to abdicate as ruler in favour of his

three sons, is based on the Shakespearean tragedy King Lear. The Bad Sleep Well

(1960) is also an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet into contemporary Japan.

Francis Ford Coppola, the veteran Hollywood film maker was particularly

interested in the adaptation of novels into film. His Godfather is a film version of

Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel and Apocalypse Now is a reworking of Joseph

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. These films established Coppola’s fame as one of the

master craftsmen of the celluloid. The public image of Coppola the artist tends,

probably, more than other film directors, to converge around the personality of the

man himself. Coppola’s career is often read like Orson Welles’– as an emblem of

conflict between an independent genius and the powerful and ultimately repressive

force of the industry. The second son of Carmine and Italia Coppola, Francis

Coppola was born in Detroit in 1939. Carmine Coppola was a professional

musician, a concert flautist, composer, and conductor, who played under Toscanini

in the NBC Symphony. Francis, stricken by polio at the age of nine and confined

to bed for a year, grew up in the New York City suburbs. He attended Hofstra

University where he was an active and indeed much celebrated figure in Campus

Theatre, and he graduated in 1959. His aptitude as a playwright gained him a

scholarship to Hofstra University. He graduated from Hofstra with a BA in

Theater Arts in 1959 but still had no desire to be a director. It is said that his

attitude changed quickly when he saw Sergei Eisenstein's Ten Days That Shook

the World (1927). He later said of the film, “On Monday I was in the theater, and

on Tuesday I wanted to be a film-maker” (Bergan 16). He enrolled at the UCLA

Film School where he won writing awards, and met many of his friends and

collaborators. His apprenticeship at twenty-three began with Roger Corman, who

financed his first commercial feature, Dementia 13 (1963). While working for

Warner–Seven Arts he started to write, and in 1970 received an Academy award

for, the script of Patton. The film was a tremendous success for Coppola. Three

films later (two small, independent-minded films and a Hollywood musical), in

1970, at the age of thirty-one he was offered The Godfather. The film marked the

beginning of Coppola's rise to prominence in the year 1972. When Mario Puzo’s

best selling novel about the Italian crime family was selected for adaptation by

Paramount, they chose Coppola to direct the film because he was the only Italian

director in Hollywood. The film (and its sequels in the trilogy) tells the saga of the

Corleone family over many years and was originally titled Mafia. The film offers a

character study of Don Vito Corleone, the head of the family and of his son

Michael, and the history of other members of the Corleone family over the years.

Coppola agreed to write and direct the movie on condition that it would not be a

gangster movie but a family chronicle. Major stars like Marlon Brando and Al

Pacino collaborated with him and with Mario Puzo on the script and the film

bagged three Academy awards in 1972, marking for Coppola his place on the map

of Hollywood.

In 1969 while on the road in Nebraska shooting The Rain People from his

original script, Coppola searched for a way to give institutional form to his idea of

independent film making. From 1969 to the mid-1990s, Zoetrope was the public

face and form of Coppola’s attempt to merge personal, auteurist film making with

an ensemble cast with a new type of studio film and associated distribution. The

principal drama of Coppola’s artistic life has been the effort to make this vision a

functioning reality. With money from Warner Brothers, Coppola set up a small,

highly equipped studio in San Francisco in 1969. On seeing George Lucas’s THX-

1138 and the scripts for Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, Warner asked for

money back. However, the Zoetrope concept of the return of artistic control of

film making to film makers and the real efforts he made in that direction was the

basis of his reputation as the godfather of the New Hollywood. In 1970s Coppola

reached international stature and acclaim by directing four films that became

highly successful: The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) (both at

Paramount); The Conversation (1974), an art film about electronic bugging; and

his Vietnam film, Apocalypse Now (1979), done with United Artists. The film,

loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness (1899) was of epic

proportions and the setting was changed from Congo in the novel to war-torn

Vietnam in the film. Apocalypse Now was nominated for eight Academy Awards

and won awards for Best Cinematography and Best Sound. Coppola entered it in

the Cannes Film Festival of 1979 and it was awarded the Golden Palm. At Cannes,

Coppola commented about his film, “My movie is not about Vietnam... my movie

is Vietnam” (Bergan 17).

The two Godfather films raised Coppola to great heights in the industry,

becoming among the most profitable and acclaimed films of the era. Both films

won Best Picture award. Godfather Part II earned Coppola Best Director in 1974.

In the same year, The Conversation earned the Best Picture award at the Cannes

Film Festival, and a few years later Apocalypse Now was nominated for eight

Academy Awards. In 1979 Coppola was at the peak of his reputation. His record

of financial and artistic success became a legend. He was seen as a flamboyant,

even reckless, risk taker, an innovative technological visionary, a devotee of film

as an international art, and the patriarch of the Auteur Renaissance in Hollywood.

With his purchase of Hollywood General Studios in 1980, Coppola’s

entrepreneurial ambitions became embroiled in a financial morass that led

eventually at the end of the decade to personal bankruptcy and artistic decline. At

the start, the Zoetrope spirit and its believers were ensconced at the Hollywood

studio. Coppola distributed in magnificent style a number of foreign classics,

including Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927). He distributed new work by leading

European and Japanese directors and assisted and supported new productions by

old friends. The business concept behind Zoetrope was to gain greater control over

the film-making process by financing development of new projects with loans

secured by future revenues. He was committed to pay for new projects and

maintain the staff with his own money. In taking on One from the Heart (1980),

Coppola, an enthusiast of the coming communications ‘revolution’ was betting

that the new technologies, in particular video, would profoundly alter the

technological basis of film production. Innovations proved to be expensive. On

release, the film recouped only a small fraction of its high cost. Development of

key projects faltered or collapsed, and when Coppola became producer and sought

additional loans, costs grew. The large debts incurred for setting up the studio and

the development of expensive creative projects was only half-satisfied by the bank

ordered sale of the studio in 1984. The Zoetrope experiment of institutionalizing

his pioneering new way had collapsed.

In the second half of the 1980s, Coppola moved again in the two directions

that had defined his artistic personality toward small experimental works in

locations distant from Hollywood (the black-and-white Rumble Fish (1983), for

example) and works as a director-for-hire at established studios. Peggy Sue Got

Married (1986), a story set in 1960, was his biggest hit of the decade. Tucker: The

Man and His Dream (1988), the story of a startup, independent automobile

manufacturer of the 1950s who contended with Detroit was generally understood

as a personal allegory of creativity and survival. In 1990 he completed The God-

father Part III and subsequently turned to directing and producing faithful

adaptations of works of classic horror. In 1992, he was declared bankrupt but the

considerable profits from Bram Stoker’s Dracula allowed him to clear his debts

and move on. His two most recent films are Jack (1996), The Rainmaker (1997)

adapted from John Grisham's novel, and Youth Without Youth (2000). Coppola has

had an unusual but prodigious film career over the last four decades, having made

films over a broad range of content and genre.

Among the writers whose works Akira Kurosawa and Francis Ford

Coppola adapted include writers as diverse as William Shakespeare, Fyodor

Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Joseph Conrad, Bram Stoker, Mario

Puzo and S. E.Hinton. This list shows that these film makers approached literary

giants and popular writers alike. However, there is a challenge in adapting famous

works and lesser known works. A well known work will be familiar with the

audience and the weight of expectation will be more on such works. Often, the

film maker will be comparatively free in his approach to a lesser known work.

However, Kurosawa and Coppola were able to live up to the expectations of critics

and audience as well.

The Chapter, ‘Adaptation and Appropriation’ discusses the main postulates

of adaptation theory and traces the history of adaptation criticism and various

approaches and trends. The thesis employs translation theory wherein

intersemiotic translation incorporating adaptation theory to trace the relations

between the two media and to study how the transfer is made possible. Concepts

of film theory are used to illustrate the nuances of mise-en-scene. For analyzing

the films, narratological theories of Gerard Genette and Brian McFarlane are

employed. Two separate chapters analyze select films by Kurosawa and Coppola.

In order to interrogate the claims of originality, the intertextual elements of source

texts and filmic texts are traced and uncovered, thereby ruling out the insistence

for fidelity. The source texts and filmic texts are compared and contrasted in order

to uncover the similarities and dissimilarities between them. Appropriation of the

culture of the source text into the filmic text is one of the major concerns in these

chapters. Theories of comparative literature are also brought in to compare the

films of Akira Kurosawa and Francis Ford Coppola.

One of the important objectives of this thesis is to prove the fact that

fidelity criterion is a fallacious method to evaluate a film adaptation. Even after

post structuralism introduced the concept of intertextuality, the academic circles

were still observed to be obsessed with the notions about the superiority of the

source text. The study gains significance as it is an attempt to highlight the

paradigm shift that has taken place in the field of adaptations. The works of Akira

Kurosawa and Francis Ford Coppola are viewed as critical interpretations which

enhance and expand the reading of the source texts.