Adaptation
Related: copy - original - new media - technique - translation - version
By medium: film adaptation
Essays: The Technoludic Film: Images of Video Games in Movies (1973 - 2001) - Matteo Bittanti - remakes in literature - film and literature: The case of crime fiction
Films on film adaptation: Adaptation (2002) - Spike Jonze
On film adaptation: Sergei Eisenstein noted that the novels of Charles Dickens were filmed more often than any material except the Bible, and he explained this by Dickens's style. According to Eisenstein, a good source novel contains a great deal of action and extensive physical description. Novels that feature internal struggles and intellectual debate are difficult to film, but novels that offer descriptions of scenery and which posit their debates in plotting are easy to film. [Apr 2006]
Definitions
A composition that has been recast into a new form: The play is an adaptation of a short novel. --American Heritage Dictionary
Any alteration of an original to fit or serve the same or a different purpose. An adaptation should add something to the content of the original, otherwise it is a copy.
An adaptation is work whose theme, story, or structure is based on another work, sometimes transformed for the medium. For example, the works of William Shakespeare have been the source for several adaptations.
The May 2004 Wikipedia article on which this entry is based is now split into film adaptation and literary adaptation. [Dec 2006]
Hoffmann's work was so influential that it has been adapted into oblivion
Below is an extremely interesting quote (from the ever reliable tabula-rasa site) on oblivion and intertextuality. Some authors are apparently so popular that their work does not survive with the name of the author attached to it, but rather through an osmotic process which dissolves the works in public consciousness. Another example of this process in the history of European literature may have been Eugène Sue in France.
"Hoffmann is one of those artists whose works were so influential in their own day that they have been adapted into oblivion. Certainly it is fair to say that more people have read Freud's essay or the numerous commentaries on that than Der Sandmann, or seen Tchaikowsky's Nutcracker Suite than read Nussknacker und Mausekonig, or Wagner's Die Meistersingers von Nuremburg than Meister Martin Der Kupfner und Sine Gesellen. Of course, we all know the stories and generally yes, would consider them to have just that touch of something uncanny." --http://www.tabula-rasa.info/DarkAges/Hoffmann.html [Dec 2006]
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