Additions And Omissions In Putting Novels On Screen The English Patient

Cuprins lucrare:

I. Introduction (10 pg)
II. Chapter I – Adaptation ( 10 pg)
III. Chapter II – The English Patient – the book (10-15 pg)
IV. Chapter III – The English Patient – the movie (10-15 pg)
(additions and omissions between the book and the movie)
V. Conclusions (4-5 pg)

Bibliografie: Robert Stam, Alexandra Raengo – \'\'Literature and film\'\', Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005, pages 208-232 – Defusing the English Patient – For the First chapter, based on adaptation

For the other chapters – gigapedia.com or any other sources;

INTRODUCTION

After a century of cinema, movies have changed substantially, both technologically and stylistically, but after a hundred years, mainstream cinema isstill telling and retelling stories, and most of those stories are still being (orhave been) appropriated from literary or dramatic sources, as much as 85 percent by some calculations and accounts. Adaptation has always been central to the process of filmmaking since almost the beginning and could well maintain its dominance into the cinema’s second century.

Stories are an essential part of every human culture; they help us to make meaning and to understand ourselves, each other, and our place in the world.  The means by which these stories are told – whether they are written, spoken, or acted on stage or screen – influences the way we approach and interpret them.  Film, while it may be influenced by written work, should always be considered an entirely unique piece of art for the purposes of critique and analysis. This study explores the complex interplay between film and literature. Selected novels, short stories and plays are analyzed in relation to film versions of the same works in order to gain an understanding of the possibilities—and problems—involved in the transposition to film.  We will also investigate films that do not have written work as their inspiration to discover the ways in which these stories work in terms of our understanding of the nature of literature and the role it plays in our live.

One problem with cinema criticism and theory is that it has all too often involved a hermetic and limited society of scholars writing in codes for their mutual but limited enlightenment. LFQ has always reached out for a larger and more general audience. The fact that the journal has survived for more than thirty-five years is perhaps an indication that this goal has been achieved. The most basic and banal focus in evaluating adaptations is the issue of “fidelity,” usually leading to the notion that “the book was better.” This limited and “literal” approach is represented by bibliophiles and is the guiding principle of Robin H. Smiley’s Books into Film: The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of (2003), a book that was totally ignored by the cinema studies establishment. At the opposite extreme is Brian McFarlane, author of Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (1996). Brian’s plenary address, quizzically entitled “It Wasn’t Like That in the Book . . .” and given at the University of Bath Millennium Film Conference in 1999, insists on film’s creative possibilities .

Certainly, fidelity hovers in the background of many of the essays included here, but the anthology also presents film as having a separate identity and separate aesthetic principles, as suggested by Professor McFarlane and others. In other chapters (see e.g., Thomas M. Leitch and Walter C. Metz), intertextuality is presented as a possible alternative to fidelity criticism. One “new” focus here is the attention paid to the problem of adapting historical conflicts (such as the battle of the Alamo and the war with Mexico for Texican independence: see Frank Thompson’s chapter) and the problems of adapting the lives of famous people in the genre of the biopic (see Joan Driscoll Lynch on the sculptress Camille Claudel and John C. Tibbetts on the biopic of

the American composer W. C. Handy).

Let’s begin with the notion that everything is adaptable, that whatever exists in one medium might be adapted or translated into another, given the right imaginative initiative. Some may protest, of course, that the medium of film has its limitations, that it is epidermal, even superficial, that it cannot probe the depths of psychology or emotional consciousness. Countering these charges are the achievements of Ingmar Bergman in Sweden, of Michelangelo Antonioni in Italy, and of Yasujiro Ozu or Akira Kurosawa in Japan. Quite apart from human psychology, however, there are narrative and novelistic techniques that could be considered “unfilmable.” Shades of nuance in “voice” and tone, for example, could prove problematic. The experimental

prose and drama of such writers as Samuel Beckett and James Joyce would seem to pose insurmountable problems, and yet the inner monologues of Ulysses were filmed by director/producer Joseph Strick in 1967, and the same filmmaker adapted the interminable musings of Stephen Daedalus (as represented by Irish actor Bosco Hogan) in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, released in 1977. Beckett himself wrote an exercise on the nature of perception in a film entitled, appropriately enough, Film (1965) and starring, appropriately enough, Buster Keaton. So much for conventional wisdom.

Take the example of Laurence Sterne’s comic novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767), adapted to the screen as Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story by writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce and director Michael Winterbottom in 2005. The book is a famously whimsical romp that turns narrative conventions upside down and delights in playing with unconventional structure. Charles McGrath describes the plot of this “unfilmable” novel as a series of “endless digressions, false starts and wheels-within-wheels. The protagonist, who is also the narrator, isn’t even born until Volume III, and by the end of the book he still hasn’t progressed beyond childhood, much less become an opinionated gentleman” (2006, 13). So

how did Michael Winterbottom solve this problem? According to Variety, he did it by “cheating flagrantly” (Felperin, 2005, 63). He transformed the whimsical spirit of the novel by imagining his film as a movie being made of a movie of a book about a book. Winterbottom recognized that this “insanely digressive” novel was about 200 years ahead of its time. As one of the actors

remarks, Tristram Shandy was a “postmodern classic which was written before there was any modernism to be ‘post’ about” (McGrath, 2006, 13). So was Sterne’s novel “unfilmable”? Yes, certainly, in a way and to a degree. Could it be transformed in an agreeable way so as to make it seem “filmable”? Absolutely. Much of the adaptation is improvised by the actors Steve Coogan, who plays Tristram Shandy and Walter Shandy and an actor named Steve Coogan, and Rob Brydon, who plays Uncle Toby and an actor named Rob Brydon. Asked at a press conference whether either of them had ever read the book, Coogan said “I’ve read of it,” and Brydon said “Not in the traditional sense. You know, where you go from beginning to end” (McGrath,

2006, 28). So here is an “adaptation” partly created by actors impressionistically riffing on material they have not read or encountered directly. Go figure, and ponder the future of adaptation and what the process might mean nowadays.

“In general, I’m not a fan of literary adaptations,” Michael Winterbottom told Sight and Sound (Spencer, 2006, 14). “Usually if you’re making the film of the book it’s because you like the book, but that gives you all sorts of problems in trying to produce a version of it. So there’s always something a bit restrictive, a bit secondhand about them. What was great here [in the case of Tristram Shandy] is that the book is about not telling the story you’re supposed to be telling, so it’s the perfect excuse for doing whatever you want.”

The last few years have seen an upsurge in films and literary texts in which translators or the act of translating have a central role. One reason for this development may be that translators serve as a perfect screen for the projection of social and cultural anxieties associated with various aspects of globalization, i.e. migration, cultural hybridity, mobility, multilingualism, etc. The topic of translation has reached all literary and film genres – from dramatic works and novels to (auto)biographies, from motion pictures to documentary films – and can be found in all fields: in historical novels and films, as well as in science fiction, experimental literature and films, crime stories and comedies. In their works, writers and film directors seem to make the most of the social and political dimensions of translating practice. Up to now, academic studies focusing on fictional translators in literature and films have been relatively few. One aim of this conference is to promote a more systematic approach by bringing together scholars from different disciplines with various research backgrounds and methodologies, such as translation studies, cultural, studies, sociology, literary studies, film studies, hermeneutics, philosophy, etc. This pioneering conference aims to be a meeting point for all those interested in the subject, to become a discussion forum where scholars with different academic backgrounds can meet so as to stimulate interdisciplinary research in this area.

Given the appetite that Hollywood and other film industries have shown and continue to show for novels, plays, biographies, histories, and other published stories, it is perhaps not surprising that the untouchable and “unfilmable” classics have been regularly touched and filmed, sometimes with good results. Consider, for example, the sprawling novels of Henry Fielding (director Tony Richardson captured the spirit of Tom Jones in 1963, followed by Joseph Andrews in 1977), William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair and even Barry Lyndon have been essayed), and Thomas Hardy (John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd in 1967, Roman Polanski’s Tess in 1979, and Michael Winterbottom’s Jude in 1996 are interesting celluloid versions). Most of the novels of Jane Austen have been filmed and refilmed, with varying degrees of success. Indeed, the Austen adaptations have become a reliably commercial enterprise, with the recent version of Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightley holding its own with the Christmas blockbusters of 2005. We might add that Austen is a special case, appealing, on the one hand, to an academic audience for her splendid wit and irony and, on the

other, to a far wider readership drawn to Austen for reasons having to do with romance, courtship, and “heritage” nostalgia.

Of course, in the case of massive novels, length will almost certainly be a problem. One solution here is the “Masterpiece Theatre” television miniseries approach, applied, reasonably enough, in 2005 to the Dickens classic, Bleak House, originally written in twenty installments that appeared serially between 1852 and 1853 and adapted by screenwriter Andrew Davies to eight massive hours of programming. The screenwriter’s credentials included the successful and popular epic 1995 miniseries treatment of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Arguably, television might be the best medium for assuring the “persistence of fidelity” in adapting “classic” novels. Every facial tic and verbal nuance could be captured, lovingly, in an eight-hour adaptation, every gasp, every sigh, every wink of the eye. But what about a feature film that has

to be captured in less than three hours?

Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist, filmed in 2004 and released in 2005, may serve as a convenient demonstration here. This adaptation was not a popular success, despite Polanski’s credentials and obvious talent. Even though Oliver Twist followed upon the tremendous success of The Pianist in 2002, and even though Polanski was working with much the same crew, including red, lovingly, in an eight-hour adaptation, every gasp, every sigh, every wink of the eye. But what about a feature film that has

to be captured in less than three hours?

Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist, filmed in 2004 and released in 2005, may serve as a convenient demonstration here. This adaptation was not a popular success, despite Polanski’s credentials and obvious talent. Even though Oliver Twist followed upon the tremendous success of The Pianist in 2002, and even though Polanski was working with much the same crew, including the playwright Ronald Harwood as screenwriter.

Published in 1837 and 1838, Oliver Twist was the first success of young Charles Dickens, and is second only to Great Expectations in terms of popularity. Oliver Twist (played by Barney Clark) is the name given to an orphan of unknown parentage, born and raised in a miserable workhouse, where he is mistreated by the parish beadle, Mr. Bumble (Jeremy Swift plays Polanski’s Bumble-beadle). Oliver’s story has been considerably simplified for Polanski’s film, which begins with Oliver at age nine. Oliver runs away to London, where he falls in with bad company—a juvenile gang of thieves trained by Fagin (Sir Ben Kingsley), a caricatured Jewish villain—to work as a pick- pocket with his more experienced colleagues, the “Artful Dodger” (Harry Eden), and Charley Bates (Lewis Chase). More dangerous than Fagin (who is somewhat humanized by Polanski’s treatment though still a Dickensian caricature), however, is the ruthless burglar Bill Sikes (Jamie Foreman), a psychopath who brutalizes both his companion, Nancy (Leanne Rowe), and Oliver. The spirit of the novel is retained and the adaptation is well directed,

well acted, and entirely agreeable.

According to Harwood, the “phenomenal variety of characters” found in the world of this Dickens novel had to be condensed, as well as the far-fetched complications of the subplots, particularly Oliver’s relationship to the benevolent Mr. Brownlow, who rescues the boy from a life of crime.

Harwood described this simplified version as follows: “It’s about a boy, a lit- tle boy, who takes charge of his own life, escapes from terrible trials and dangers, and emerges triumphant.” Dickens purists should not have been fended, given the atmospheric beauty of the visualization and the integrity of the reimagined characterizations. The multilayered Dickens narrative is sim-

plified to a story of survival in a grim and uncaring world.

One particular challenge in this example, beyond the obvious narrative sprawl that needs to be contained, is how to adapt the character of the Jewish villain in a way that may not be utterly offensive. The David Lean adap-tation was so controversial for its characterization of Fagin that, according to Variety, “its U.S. release was delayed for three years” (McCarthy, 2005, 62). Sir Ben Kingsley took the challenge for the Polanski adaptation and was certainly capable of doing justice to the role. Without question, Kingsley’s Fagin would be familiar to anyone who had read the Dickens description: “a very shriveled old Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face

was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair” (quoted by Brownlow, 1996, 230).

Even so, Polanski’s approach to Fagin was intended to be the opposite of the Lean/Guinness treatment, according to Todd McCarthy’s evaluation for Variety: “Kingsley and Polanski appear most interested in attempting to humanize him, to argue that, even though he takes advantage of his boys and makes them break the law, this might be preferable to their fates if they were

left to their own devices on the streets” (2005, 62). As a consequence, Kingsley’s Fagin exudes “a certain feebleness and insecurity that makes him more pathetic than hateful” (McCarthy, 2005, 62). Moreover, the film ends with Oliver visiting Fagin on an errand of mercy and forgiveness before that “wretched” man’s execution. Though it is certainly a challenge to rethink

such a stereotyped character, this film presents Fagin as a “lovable” villain, a sorcerer whose wards are also apprentices; indeed, Kingsley saw this character as a magician.

Polanski himself, born in 1933 and about Oliver’s age at the time of the Nazi invasions, could personally contextualize the Dickens story of survival. Polanski’s previous film The Pianist was also a story of survival, though involving a much older protagonist. Polanski’s Oliver Twist was praised by New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott as a “wonderful new adaptation” of Dickens

(2005, B6). In his New Yorker review, however, Anthony Lane was offended by the anti-Semitic nastiness attached to the Dickens descriptions of Fagin, a “hideous old man [who] seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal” (2005, 107).

At first, early in the eighteenth century, English novels were considered inferior to works of history and biography, even immoral, in an era when sermons were commonly published and read for enlightenment. Readers expected honesty and truth; novelists therefore disguised their fictions as fact. Samuel Richardson pretended he had found a cache of letters written by Pamela Andrews to her poor but honest parents, for example; these fabrications were embraced as truth, as was Daniel Defoe’s shipwreck of a novel, Robinson Crusoe. Early novel readers had to be weaned away from their taste for accuracy and fidelity to the facts. Aristotle believed that art should imitate life, which is the mantra of The Poetics, his analysis of tragic drama. In English literature, the lines between art and life, between the fictional at the factual, began to blur first in fiction, then in theatre, as plays became increasingly realistic during the nineteenth century. The invention first of photography, then of cinematography, suggested that Aristotle’s injunction

might be even more demanding and that art might even duplicate life. But if life is merely reflected through the lens, is it art? And what of the marriage between cinematography and theatre that enabled the cinematic illusion merely to extend the theatrical illusion?

By the turn of the twentieth century, movies were “imitating” or “replicating” historical events in documentary-styled “actualities,” then dramatizing stories from the Bible (e.g., Judith of Bethulia) or great scenes from Shakespeare or remarkable moments in literature. All of a sudden, everything was adaptable, apparently, and naïve audiences expected fidelity (in the case of literary or dramatic approaches) or authenticity (in the case of historical events, such as the Battle of the Somme during World War I). Perhaps it is pointless to demand historical, biographical, or even fictive “truths” or to worry much about the issue of “fidelity” when historical events or personages or fictional narratives are adapted to the screen. On the other hand, should not one question the accuracy of such stories or histories? Can there be—or should there be—any more central issue in the field of adaptation studies? Even for nonbelievers and infidels?

Some might claim that cinema inherently involves manipulation and illusion and is not really about “truth” or “reality.” Others might prefer to believe that the possibility of truth in the abstract could still exist and that fidelity is not only desirable but admirable. In general, however, theorists cannot stand to be limited by “literal” constraints and would not therefore readily admit to being impressed by a merely “literal” adaptation.

The problem will effectively be framed in an auteur context, perhaps, if we consider the example of the Daphne du Maurier novel Rebecca, adapted for the screen by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison. Significantly, Rebecca was the first film Alfred Hitchcock directed in America for producer David O. Selznick. Du Maurier, the true “auteur,” was not at all pleased with the

project because she did not believe Hitchcock, the developing movie “auteur,” had been properly respectful in filming her first novel, Jamaica Inn (1939), adapted by Joan Harrison and Sidney Gilliat, with additional dialogue provided by novelist J. B. Priestley. She expected better treatment with Rebecca, and Selznick was determined to protect her future interests and integrity. Selznick assigned the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Robert Sherwood as the lead screenwriter over Hitchcock regular Joan Harrison; no doubt Sherwood’s contribution (and prestige) helped to earn Selznick the Academy Award nomination.

David O. Selznick sided with the novelist and was determined to harness Hitchcock’s tendency to manipulate the source novel, as he had done with Jamaica Inn. Selznick clearly stated his intentions in a memo dated 12 June 1939: “We bought Rebecca, and we intend to make Rebecca.” Thus the battle was joined, with both Hitchcock and Selznick seeking “auteur” status. According to Tom Leitch in his Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock, the producer and the director each had his own notion about how to proceed with this adaptation: “Selznick’s allegiance [was] to an American tradition of quality based on fidelity to acknowledged literary classics and popular successes, Hitchcock’s to the generic formulas that subordinated character to situation

and the flair for witty visual exposition that had served him so well in England” (2002, 271). Although Selznick won this battle (in fact, the film was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won the Best Picture Oscar), Alfred Hitchcock ultimately won the war, when the auteur theory emerged in France in the late 1950s and in America a few years later. An in- dustry dominated by Hollywood studios was clearly in transition, as the studio era, defined by all-powerful producers like Selznick and Irving Thalberg, was drawing to a close.

Hitchcock the auteur director was not especially worried about absolute fidelity to his sources. This will be obvious if one considers the changes he made to Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent as he transformed that story into Sabotage (1936), a film that would teach him the consequences of sacrificing an endearing character in order to maintain suspense. British writer-director Christopher Hampton would remake the Conrad story in the 1990s and be far more respectful of the source decades later in an adaptation carefully guided by notions of fidelity, but this admittedly more “faithful” treatment hardly replaces the Hitchcock classic.

Hitchcock was not destined to become famous for his adaptations, however; usually he did not assail the work of writers of the magnitude of Joseph Conrad, or the popularity of Dame Daphne du Maurier. Even so, Hitchcock did adapt all sorts of material to the screen, drama as well as fiction. His technologically daring film Rope (1948), for example, was adapted for Hitchcock by Hume Cronyn and Arthur Laurents from the play by Patrick Hamilton.

Although not exactly a box-office success, this cult film became famous for its dramatic irony, its twisted style, and its technique (most notably for its in- ventive long takes).

If traditional Hollywood cared about issues of fidelity, it was not especially out of respect for literature or for those who created it but in order to avoid disappointing readers who knew what they wanted and expected, as demonstrated by the uninspired literalness of the first Harry Potter movies, for example. By contrast, Selznick’s own Gone with the Wind might serve as an apt example of inspired literalness. As critic-reviewer Stanley Kauffmann might suggest, the more purely “literary” the achievement of the source novel, the less likely it is to be effectively or “faithfully” adapted to the screen.

Such flawed film adaptations are interesting because they at least play for high stakes. Levinson’s The Natural has been voted the most popular sports film ever made but only because it thoroughly dismissed any notion of fidelity and turned Roy Hobbes into a Romanticized “hero.” In the case of Fitzgerald’s perfectly crafted story of failed Romantic optimism and aspiration brought down to earth, Gatsby was crippled by its misplaced fidelity to the original, but it was more a betrayal of tone than of narrative structure and development. “More important than such faithfulness,” however, as André Bazin wrote, “is knowing whether the cinema can integrate the powers of the novel (let’s be cautious: at least a novel of the classical kind), and whether it can, beyond the spectacle, interest us less through the representation of events than through our comprehension of them” (2002, 7).

For those who worry about the problems and the process of cinematic adaptation, Bazin’s statement still resonates and questions of fidelity still linger because any adaptation will necessarily demonstrate what the medium of film can or cannot achieve in relation to literary sources (whether reaching for the elegance of a Marcel Proust or the vulgarity of a Mickey Spillane), depending upon the imagination of the director and screenwriter.

Of course, what we have outlined here does not exactly represent a consensus, and even the contributors to this volume may not agree with such notions concerning fidelity and accuracy. The great majority of these contributors to this project would surely agree that the relationship between film and literary (or historical) sources is the basis of the field, but they have different and varied notions about the importance of fidelity. No doubt some, such as Frank Thompson or David Kranz, would argue for “fidelity, accuracy, and truth” as being essential components for evaluating adaptations (though Professor Kranz prefers the phrase comparative criticism to fidelity criticism). Others are more interested in evaluating the relationship between films and their sources in different terms, giving more consideration, for example, to cinematic form (Brian McFarlane), intertextuality (Thomas Leitch), or intellectual history (Donald Whaley) or positing that a film may surpass its source (in the case of Peter Lev’s approach). Additionally, and finally, we have a few contributors such as Walter Metz and Sarah Cardwell—not coincidentally, they are among the younger authors in this volume—who work in adaptation studies but have little interest in the conventional relationship between films and their sources. Professor Cardwell advocates a “noncomparative” adaptation studies that analyzes British television adaptations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels primarily as a genre and not as televisual versions of literary works.

After you’ve invested time and attention to a book, especially if you’ve enjoyed it, you feel a part of it. Often you hate to finish it because the characters are now a part of your life and you anticipate a letdown at the end. When you really love a book, its lyrical sentences, its redeeming characters, its powerful imagery, its exciting or profound story, you are inside it, either for the discovery that the end will bring, or for the sense of time and place that allows you to escape your humdrum life, or for the hope that love or justice will conquer all, or to come away with another viewpoint in many of life’s mysterious ways, or to identify with the setting, protagonist’s dilemma.
So when a movie is made from one of your books, you either want to see it right away, or you can’t imagine that a film will do justice to the book at all, so you are puzzled and suspicious. Who could possibly play the part of let’s say, Robert Langdon in “The DaVinci Code”? How can they possibly get 30 years of this history condensed into 2 plus hours and make sense of it, portray the emotion and intensity of it?  Well, sometimes it works; sometimes they never should have tried.

Our very first book club book was Whitney Otto’s “How to Make an American Quilt”, a charming story of a group of women of different ages who gather together monthly to make quilts. The book translated very well into the movie directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse in 1995. It starred a bevy of talent: Ellen Burstyn, Anne Bancroft, Winona Ryder, Kate Nelligan, Alfre Woodard, Claire Danes, Rip Torn, Richard Jenkins and many more, it followed fairly closely to the books’ story. It was a “light” book; it was a “light” film, but we were pleased that the author’s story came across on film as a true adaptation.

Next, we read “The Shipping News” before the movie was made in (2001) and I had my doubts about turning this quirky, beautiful tale of a man’s world shattering when his wife dumps him and his daughter, into a film. His transformation in a new setting where he learns to live and care again is as moving and powerful a rendition as the book version. Nevertheless; when I saw the film, I was disappointed with most aspects of it. The characters were too good-looking. For God’s sake, the setting was Newfoundland, it’s harsh, cold, and very small; you’re not likely to run into Julianne Moore up there, but she sure was in the movie!

There wasn’t the connection between filmgoer and reader of the main character’s emotions, his terrors, and his ultimate acceptance of the new beginning of his life. Quoyle, played well by Kevin Spacey, first of all did not fit the character’s description in the book. This adaptation to screen did not work because one misses out on Quoyle’s inner thoughts and turmoil. It did not convey the atmosphere of the setting which was so important a theme in the book, but when half of that atmosphere in is your head, it’s tough to see another one on screen.

A Perfect Story…”Lost in the casting translation” – A Perfect Story…”Lost in the casting translation” The next great disappointment was “A Civil Action” directed by Steven Zaillian and starring John Travolta. The book was fascinating; a true story about a group of families with alarming rates of cancer in their community who retain Jan Schlichtman, a successful attorney to sue large corporations for fouling their ground and water with toxic waste which has caused these cancers. A perfect story, a David and Goliath. It was an intensely scripted book by Jonathan Harr that was suspenseful, emotionally packed as the facts become discovered, and while reading you are hopeful these people will get redemption. I forgot exactly how many years Mr. Schlichtman worked on the case, but you can imagine that these large corporations with tons of money stalled and appealed and delayed trials for months. The movie could not begin to convey this rise and fall of emotions and the toll it took on the community or Jan Schlichtman. The worst sin was casting John Travolta as Schlichtman, I like Travolta, but he’s not really that great of an actor, he is John Travolta playing a character, he cannot become that character.

“Seabiscuit” was another fantastic book that was made into a film in 2003, and it was a decent depiction of the crooked-legged short horse that became the most talked about legend in the 1930’s. I’m not a racing fan, I’ve only been to two or three horse races in my life, and I’d grown up knowing the name of Seabiscuit from the cartoons, but had no idea how this horse became more famous in 1938 than Roosevelt, Hitler or any other person during those years. He galvanized the country during a most tumultuous time, and the story of the man who bought him against all advice, the trainer who knew the horse had what it took when no one else did, and the jockey who was half-blind but gritty and determined is amazing. Together these three men led Seabiscuit to become one of the most loved and winning horses of all times.

The movie could not depict all the historical facts, however; but I would think that seeing the film would make someone want to read the book. That Lauren Hillenbrand, the author, overcame a debilitating disease to write it also lends much interest to this great American story.  

Usually, I have to read the book before I see the movie, but recently the tables turned me around on that. I saw “No Country for Old Men” last year, the Cohen brother’s remarkably suspenseful film. Although graphically violent, the story between the two protagonists is fraught with tension, and we see the story through a Hitchcockian lens, we know “who done it” and are paralyzed to help the good guy, and we are sitting on the edge of our seats with terror and hope. This screen adaptation was almost exactly like the book, written by Cormac McCarthy, which I read sometime later, but the movie gives more intense action, and nervous reaction than the book. McCarthy is a writer who uses sparse descriptions, short dialogue, clipped sentences, that your imagination must be used to the fullest. In the film adaptation, the excellent cast (Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones and Kelly MacDonald) are perfect in their roles and helped bring real life into the words. The setting (Texas in the summer; wide open spaces, lots of John Ford skies) adds to the tight storyline.

A spectacular transfer of story to screen is Annie Proulx’s thirty seven page short story, “Brokeback Mountain”. Wow, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana’s beautifully written script gave director Ang Lee a wonderful vehicle for this complex tale of a secret sexual relationship between two cowboys. The cinematography was gorgeous; an awesome background for the authors to portray their characters in their entirety. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal perfected the joys and tragedies of their situation throughout their twenty year affair with such realness, and gave outstanding performances. This movie melded a script built from only 37 pages of a story, which became a full emotional story and Ang Lee was able to bring powerful direction to the screen…Great book to unforgettable filmmaking. It’s often difficult to fuse together two different products, a book, and a movie. A good screenplay is essential to the successful transition. We’ve all seen a movie that looked great in a preview and should have been a good film because of the story or the actors that have been cast, but often the result is a mess due to a bad screenplay. Perhaps the writer tried to do too much, cover too much of the subject, or just wrote a bad script. Too, it is often distracting when actors are cast that don’t fit the character’s persona in a book. You can get over that though, if the story comes across as powerfully as the book’s.

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The recent trend of Comic/Comix/graphic novels to screen adaptations presents its own somewhat unique complications. The two mediums seem tailor made for each other ; both character heavy, visually dependent, relying on dialogue to convey and advance a story. It seems so simple there’s no need for story boards, the book itself is a story board. When the property is well known (Superman, Batman, Spiderman etc 😉 the transition is smooth (drawing criticism from only die-hard fans) and disbelief in fantastical events and situations are willingly suspended. The success of these more familiar properties makes possible the adaptation of those lesser known creating a dilemma for screen writers.

The Comix medium is popular ground for writers and artists to collaborate on subject’s not necessarily common place in popular culture. Take for example; a sixty foot blue atomic man having an identity crisis because he has lost connection to humanity (Dr. Manhattan of Watchmen). There is a lot of information to convey to an audience who has not read the Graphic Novel. Delving too deeply into explication at the expense of the full story however; alienates fans of the novel. A happy balance must be struck to satiate both groups. With so much emphasis on appeasing the potential customer the essence of the story tends to get short shifted. The focus of the adaptation often becomes the more crowd pleasing combo of action sequences and gratuitous love plots. Instead of character development there is often character condensing; as with many of the colorful side characters in From Hell as well as Watchmen.

Although they are often tragic to watch for fans of the “book’, adaptations do have one positive element totally outside the realm of cinema. They increase book sales and readership of content that might otherwise never be explored by the culture at large. Due to the mere controversy they cause, adaptations create dialogue between people and force deeper thought and exploration into the heart and mind, which creates a savvier consumer and that’s always a good thing. In the rarest of cases, sometimes “they” get it right and it is for those cases that I keep buying tickets!

II. ADAPTATION

Adaptation is in essence taking the language of one medium and translating into the language of another medium. Although this may seem straight forward regardless of whether the translation is from one dialect to another, or from page to screen, something is bound to be lost in the translation. Limitless are the ways to get this subtle art wrong. There is only one way to get it right. When translating a book to screen(play) the only thing that matters is maintaining the central plot and theme, or the heart and soul if you will, for the original.

This is also a long-standing justification both for making adaptations of "literary classics" and for showing such films and programs to students as either a supplement to or an outright replacement for reading the works in question, but it has never made sense to me. It's based on the assumption that "literary classics" (specifically works of fiction) are stories about characters and that, since these visual media are able to tell stories about characters, if you faithfully tell the stories and present all the characters you've adequately reproduced the book. (Or even if you haven't, it's not a big deal because viewers will still get "acquainted" with it.) While it's true that some "literary classics," especially those written in the 18th and 19th centuries, have stories and characters, surely it isn't the case that they are conveyed to us in the same way from "classic" to "classic." What gets lost in the adaptation is narrative voice, fluctuations in point of view, subtleties in characterization, shades of description. Most importantly, what gets lost is the encounter with language. And this is unavoidably true even in adaptations that are not "vulgar and simplistic."

To believe that adaptations are acceptable substitutes for the works adapted is to believe that the experience of watching a film or television show, even the most intelligent and well-wrought shows, and reading a novel are essentially the same. Or at least the differences are negligible enough that the "essence" of the work is still getting through. It seems to me an implicit devaluation of what is actually the distinguishing feature of fiction–its status a patterned prose, as writing–to maintain that it can be translated into visually realized images without sacrificing its essence. A given adaptation of The Master and Margarita may work on its own, visual, terms. It may even be more successful than another adaptation at capturing something recognizably "Bulgakovian" in the treatment. But it still isn't The Master and Margarita, and viewers of the film who don't become readers of the novel still don't really know what it's all about.

A good television or film adaptation can certainly provide pleasures of its own, but they are the pleasures available in that medium. A good film requires careful attention, just as does a good novel, but the kind of attention being paid is not the kind required by fiction. It can provoke us into immersing ourselves into the mise-en-scene (in a way perhaps analogous to painting but not continuous with it, since the image moves) or force us to keep track of the information conveyed through editing, but this is ultimately the work of the eye and ear keeping pace with appearances. We have to look and listen. Fiction requires a kind of looking, but even our visual registering of word, phrase and sentence, and the way these elements arrange themselves in a "style" distinctive to the author we're reading, is more an internally-oriented mental process than an externally-oriented process of sorting sights and sounds (although a kind of "listening" is also certainly involved, as language manifests itself to our mental "ear"). Our imaginations then have to finish the job the writer has started. We have to mentally transform the words, phrases, and sentences into the "actions" or "thoughts" or "emotions" of the "characters" we agree are being brought to a kind of life. (Films, of course, do this work for us.) And we have to keep straight the way in which the characters and their actions are being presented to us in a particular sort of formal arrangement, an arrangement that is again mostly a phenomenon of our mental engagement with the text. Sometimes–as in some modernist and postmodernist fiction–this formal arrangement overrides our immediate connection to the characters and the actions and has to be processed before we can even comprehend the characters and actions.

In adaptation there is a tightrope to be walked; recreating scene’s exactly as they occur in the text and providing enough key plot point clearly illustrated in the allotted time to convey a coherent story. The former is a requirement to maintain the built-in fan base of the original text, the latter to capitalize on a new audience. When done well the result is brilliance, melding mental images with visuals until it becomes difficult to remember which is from the movie and which from the book. The debate on cinematic adaptations of literary works was for many years dominated by the questions of fidelity to the source and by the tendencies to prioritize the literary originals over their film versions. Adaptations were seen by most critics as inferior to the adapted texts, as “minor”, “subsidiary”, “derivative” or “secondary” products, lacking the symbolic richness of the books and missing their “spirit”. Critics could not forgive what was seen as the major fault of adaptations: the impoverishment of the book’s content due to necessary omissions in the plot and the inability of the filmmakers to read out and represent the deeper meanings of the text.

Another point of criticism concerned the perception problems related to the visuality of the filmic medium. It was an obvious fact that each act of visualization narrowed down the open ended characters, objects or landscapes, created by the book and reconstructed in the reader´s imagination, to concrete and definite images. The verbally transmitted characteristics of the heroes, places and the spatial relations between them, open to various decoding possibilities in the process of imagining, were in the grip of flattening pictures. Visualization was therefore regarded as destroying many of the subtleties with which the printed word could shape the internal world of a literary work only in the interaction with the reader’s response.

In order to be seen as a good adaptation, a film had to come to terms with what was considered as the “spirit” of the book and to take into account all layers of the book’s complexity. But who could garantee that the image of the work that a particular reader had created in his or her mind was better than somebody else’s? Who could define exactly the elements of the literary work that formed its “spirit” and were indispensable to its recognition in another medium? Who could prove that only a literary approach was capable to reveal finite and ultimative truths about a book’s identity and provide us with exact models of understanding it? Seeing adaptations from the perspective of fidelity revealed itself as too limiting. More and more critics started to believe that literature as art did not desire closure, that it did not satisfy itself with one approach only and did not take refuge behind a virtually constructed order of well-established interpretative procedures. Literature, like other arts, suggested a vast area of communicative possibilities through which it could speak to the audience. According to the theories of an open work of art and to some conclusions of the reader-response criticism, meanings could be seen as events that took place in the reader’s time and imagination. It was therefore necessary to place the emphasis differently, not on the source, but on the way its meanings were reconstructed in the process of reception. Filmmakers had to be seen as readers with their own rights, and each adaptation – as a result of individual reading processes.

In the last decade of research there has been a significant shift toward this dehierarchizing

attitude. The discussions “have moved from a moralistic discourse of fidelity and betrayal to a less judgemental discourse of intertextuality”. Adaptations are now being analysed as products of artistic creativity “caught up in the ongoing whirl of intertextual transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation, with no clear point of origin”. When an adaptation is compared with the literary work it is based on, the stress is on the ways the film creators move within the field of intertextual connections and how they employ the means of expression offered by the filmic art to convey meanings. An adaptation is seen as interpretation, as a specific and original vision of a literary text, and even if it remains fragmentary, it is worthwhile because it embeds the book in a network of creative

activities and interpersonal communication.

An adaptation as interpretation does not have to capture all the nuances of the book’s complexity, but it has to remain a work of art, an independent, coherent and convincing creation with its own subtleties of meanings. In other words, it has to remain faithful to the internal logic created by the new vision of the adapted work. Even if the filmmakers’ reading of a given literary text clushes with our reading, we are willing to forgive all the alterations when they spring from a well thought-out scheme and can lend a persuasive new sense to the text.

Interpreting is as a basic communicative tool for communicators who do not share the same language and culture. In both international and international situations, the availability of accurate, expressive, and timely interpreting helps progress, understanding, and the exchange of ideas among cultures. The effect of communication is thus directly dependent on the quality of the interpreting service provided. Characterized by live and immediate transmission, consecutive interpreting can be thought of as a process in which adequate information is orally presented and transferred into another linguistic and cultural system. Consecutive interpreting, therefore, requires both accurate comprehension of the source discourse and clear delivery in the target language by the interpreter. Interpreting activities have come to nourish with the international communication which increases day by day. Successive studies of interpreting have been conducted on the subjects such as consecutive, teaching interpreting, the interpreter’s ‘Efforts models’ and ‘coping tactics’, and cognitive processes, etc. (e.g., Altman 1987: Gile 1995a: Katan 2004: Liu 2005). But there is still little primary material that is publicly accessible (with Dollerup and Ceelen 1996 as a notable exception (but conected to European languages).

Actually, the adaptive model of translation, adaptive theory of translation acts on a joint of translation editing, translation itself and communicative theory. The latter considers the problems of utterance adaptation within one culture, thus adaptation belongs to translational studies. However, for translational studies adaptation is also a borderline case, for it mostly suggests elimination that leads to the total alteration of the text, which is not accepted as a variant of translation by the majority of scientists.

Although, translational adaptation possesses its own attractiveness because the adaptive models

of pragmatic texts explicate the necessity of the usage of definite transformations that results in

linking communicative theory, pragmatic linguistics and theory of translation. Adaptive translational models are called upon for disclosing the reasons of the text changes in the process of transition from one discourse to another, from one type of the text to another, from one ideology to another. These models disclose the transformational changes while trans-coding from one language to another, from one culture to another.

Adaptation as one of the linguistic types of mediation is regarded by the majority of researchers

as the extreme degree of transformations admissible in translation . Thus, translational adaptation does not contradict reproductive translation being an associative strategy, the main purpose of adaptive strategies lies in both the transference of pragmatic potential of discourse / text and orientation to the linguistic and cultural stereotypes of the recipient in translation.

Such attitude seems to be possible only when we are able to develop a distanced relationship with a literary text. Things look different in the case of adaptations that are based on the books we love and have interiorized so intimately that they have become an integral part of our imagination. Our favourite books possess the ability to plunge us into a magic realm, into an atmosphere that embraces all our senses. By watching an adaptation we want to prolong this magic, but the strong wish to revisit the beloved world of the book through film produces a feeling of hopeful expectation mixed with anxiety because the film is going to interfere with a world that is treasured and cherished in our hearts. An adaptation which does not respond to our personal vision of the book is immediately seen as an attack on our integrity.

In spite of the fact that in the case of best-sellers the audience will inevitably declare against all the details of the films that betray the cherished original, adaptations have not lost their appeal for the film industry. Filmmakers know perfectly well that their films are going to be scrutinized for any signs of unfaithfulness to the source. Nevertheless, they expose themselves freely to severe and unfavourable judgments and bring the audience’s favourites onto screen.

The repetition must be accompanied by creation, by a reinvention of the familiar world and shaping it into something new. According to Hutcheon, the real comfort lies in the experience of tensions between old and new, “in the simple act of almost but not quite repeating, in the revisiting of a theme with variations”. Watching the film that resonates with echoes of a well known world, that emerges from a confluence of pleasurable memories and new ideas, is like prolonging the myth that lies at the origins of our being and does not cease to intrigue us and give us force. The appeal of adaptations is therefore rooted in the desire to witness a rebirth of this myth. The different filmic versions of one single book are all manifestations of the same wish to revisit “an old friend”. The power which attracts the filmmakers is the desire to recreate and add some freshness to the familiar world. The power which draws the audience to an adaptation is the possibility offered by the film to see and hear what they imagined and learned to love in their own imagination, the wish to enter in a more sensual way into the beloved world created by the book.

The following lines will explore some other reasons for the enormous attraction of making and watching adaptations. One of them lies in the urge to create. Being fascinated by a writer’s creation, filmmakers may find pleasure in sharing the aesthetic experience by completing the literary work and stilling their insatiable curiousity to find out how this “unwholesome” work can be transformed to the filmic medium. Cinematic adaptations blur the boundaries between different media, they force the filmmakers to penetrate the surface of a written text, to read out what lies beneath this surface and recreate it in the visual and aural medium.

Adaptation is not a new phenomenon at all. Intertextual studies show that stories always seem to derive from other stories. Even the ancient Greek playwrights, like Sophocles and Euripides, based their plays in most cases on myths and stories that had already been told. The British scholar Christopher Booker recently published a very thorough piece of research in which he showed, and in fact proved, that most stories of the world – from myths and fairy-tales, novels and plays to Hollywood films and TV soap operas can structurally and thematically be reduced to “seven basic plots” – which is also the title of his study (Booker, 2004).

But the adaptation proper, when a specific work of literature is retold in a multimodal medium – a film, or perhaps a video game – is a relatively modern feature. My studies of film adaptations in Norway show that between 40 and 50 percent of all full length fiction films have direct literary sources – the number depending on whether to include an already performative and multimodal genre as the theatre play, or to concentrate on literary epic sources, like novels and short-stories. The hunt for literary narratives to base a film on seems to increase for each year. In Norway, as in most other film producing countries of the Western world, film makers race to buy options of any new novel that seems to have adaptation possibilities.

The complexity of a literary work represents a great challenge to every reader because the world it evokes is an open-ended world that is left to be completed in the process of reading. The readers create their own private ideas about this world by piecing together fragmentary visions of both the directly articulated and indirectly suggested parts. An adaptation invites the viewers to discuss not only the film itself but also their private readings of the adapted text, for it gives them an opportunity to see how the cinematicly active readers have responded to the book. When we watch the film, our private form of filling in the gaps is revitalized by the confrontation with the way another creative mind has filled in the same gaps. We become part of an interpersonal artistic communication which is very rewarding because it allows us to get insight into an artist’s creative mind and through this creative mind to the literary work. This combines the pleasure in exploring the literary text through the lenses of an artist with the pleasure in participating in the inner world of that artist. We are interested in the way the authors of the film respond to the significant parts of the literary work, how they transform the relations between the characters, structures and objects, how they mold the characters, how they add richness to their portrait, how they reconstruct the latent subtexts and how they shape visually and aurally all that lies beneath the surface of the aspect of financial gain, made possible by joining in the stream of great popularity that a best-seller can generate, is left aside. Hutcheon discusses this issue together with some legal problems that may arise by undertaking an adaptation .

The way the filmmakers link the details of the meanings into new meanings tells us a lot about how they see the world.

Another source of pleasure lies in observing the unity of the artistic communication across media. Films contextualize books in a visible and audible atmosphere and invite us to discover the unsuspected ways of seeing and hearing things. A specific combination of images and sounds can provide insights into the nature of the deepseated meanings that do not lend themselves easily to verbal exploration. The ideas mystified in symbols and the veiled references to different aspects of life that we once decoded in a particular way speak to us from a new perspective and we learn to appreciate a literary text on a different level, we begin to notice that many of its elements gain a new life when interpreted in the context of the new medium’s specificity. This oscillation between the different media is of great importance to our perception of the world, for it locates works of art in the energetic field between different modes of communication and beyond the limits of a particular medium.

Some theorists argue that it is a great mistake “to make absolute, unreconcilable distinctions between visual and verbal texts” and that in a certain way all works of art offer multilayered modes of communication that break through the virtually established barriers between the different media. Each work lays the groundwork for many possible adaptations because each art can play with elements of other arts. Artistic devices such as metaphors or symbols are not just literary means of conveying significance, symbolic structures exist in all forms of artistic activity, in all fields of human creation, and using some of the devices that are characteristic of other media cannot be seen as borrowing from other arts, but as choosing from the broad range of mediatic possibilities offered by the nature of the world and deriving from the desires of the humans to communicate and to address all human senses. Works of art are made for people seen as a unity of body and soul, where the mental perception of the world is possible through the unity of senses, therefore they cannot be seen in isolation and with the focus on a small range of

sensual possibilities offered by a specific medium. A literary work speaks to us not only through its words printed on paper, it can be also read to us, so that we get to know it by listening to a human voice. A painting is not only an image but also the temperature of the colours, their texture and the story the patterns and the colours tell us. These faculties of all forms of artistic expression prove their transitional and mediating nature and invite to translations and neverending decoding and encoding transformations. A filmic adaptation is particularly pleasurable because it combines the conceptual world of a literary text with images and sounds and brings literature back to its original unity of spoken word underscored by music and accompanied by the physical presence of the performing artist.

A joke attributed to Alfred Hitchcock, who was renowned for turning mediocre novels into film master pieces, tells about two donkeys eating scrapped film reels in the backyard of a Hollywood film production company. “Is it any good?” one donkey asks the other, who is in the process of eating a film. “Yes”, the gobbling donkey answers, “but the book was much better!” The deeper meaning of this joke is probably that only a donkey would claim an adaptation’s loyalty to its literary source in such a way.

In some academic circles, though, one can still observe, after more than a 100 years of film art, an attitude to the film medium as being inferior in itself to the written word. This involves a notion, perhaps derived from the inevitably physical nature of the film, that it is unable to transform the telling modus of the book successfully into the showing modus of the moving pictures, that the thoughts and the conceptual nature of the novel is simply not transformable into film action and dialogue.

Most certainly there exists also still a certain kind of social class distinction associated with the book and the film respectively, the first having as it were a certain bouquet of good wine associated with it, the second, however, a rather distinct smell of popcorn.

But the main reason for scepticism is perhaps that the film is still the younger medium, and although it has been the dominant narrative medium for the past decades, it is still suffering from an inferior complex towards the book, the dominant narrative medium of centuries before. One is reminded of Socrates and his scepticism and fear facing the new medium of his life and times – the written word. What would happen to people’s heads and their ability to memorize, Socrates asked, when thoughts from now on could be expressed and preserved in writing? He had a

point, of course. On the other hand the written word and the book as a medium certainly soon compensated for the reduction it imposed on oral culture. Perhaps we can look at the relationship between book and film in much the same way: the written word is certainly unbeatable in many respects, but the film undoubtedly has its means of compensating. Thus, we should treat them not as rivals or each other’s parasites, but as forms of expression that may complement each other, for example in the case of literary film adaptation.

This bodily presence of a human being seems to appeal most forcefully to our senses and is the starting point of another sort of pleasure – the fascination with the performers.

Comparing various adaptations of a book we refer most of the time to the actors that shape the adaptations in the most visible way, we often go to the cinema or buy a DVD because of some ingenious interpretation of a particular role. The actors are what we most deeply remember of a film and what we most love or hate about it. When we do not get to love the actor who is playing the role of our favourite character, this will spoil the whole film even if all other aspects of it are brilliant.

When we love the actors and their performance, we begin to gain new access to the well-known characters because of the great impact of the actors’ corporality on our emotions. Feelings shaped previously into verbal language now continue to mediate between visually present people and the viewers. The characters, previously imagined vaguely within the world of the text, now expand to the world of really existing people.

Our attitude towards the characters is marked by the performers’ acting skills, it can be even fully changed in comparison with our first contact with the adapted text, for the actors have the most direct power to suggest new subtexts to the story and play a crucial role in establishing a new relationship to the book. The brilliant performance of a supporting actor can even reorganize the hierarchy of the characters we have in mind by letting a character who appears in the book on the margin of the main story emerge from his shadowy existence.

Laura Mulvey stresses another aspect of the fascination with the actors. She argues that the magic of the greatest films emerges from their ability to manipulate visual pleasure by encoding eroticism into the film language. A character’s erotic charm is developed on two levels – for the characters within the film story and for the viewers within the auditorium – and the pleasure in looking takes the film for a short but intensive moment “into a no-man’s-land outside its own time and space” in which it becomes an energetic field of projections of the viewer’s dreams and desires. Films often cast actors who do not look like the correspondig characters in the book in order to make the protagonists a better matrix for projections from the audience. It does not mean tha the actresses and actors have to be particularly beautiful or handsome, on the contrary, the more hidden and indirect their attractiveness is, the more likely they are to have an erotic impact on the audience, for a film can be a catalyst of projections only if it plays with this potential in an indirect and subtle way.

The pleasure in experiencing moments of great erotic intensity can have a significant influence on our attitude towards the fidelity issue. The spectators will forgive any lack of fidelity if only their desire to experience visual pleasure and their wish to “correct” the book are satisfied.

No viewer will, for example, complain about the lack of fidelity to the source in the BBC Pride and Prejudice (1995) when they see the famous moment in which Colin Firth (Mr Darcy) emerges from a lake and comes across Jennifer Ehle (Miss Elizabeth Bennet). They will even be disappointed trying to find a similar scene in the original text and finding out that it never existed. The filmic addition is so ingeniously designed and performed that it seems to be an integral part of Janes Austen’s world, and the absence of this scene in the book reverses the source-adaptation hierarchy: the audience’s preference is, in this particular case, clearly for the film.

In the process of adaptation, apart from being translated into a sequence of visible images, the written words of a book are transformed to an oral/aural text, spoken by the actors or an off-screen narrator and received by the audience through hearing. There is no doubt that the human voice has the power to move people’s feelings and that this ability can be used by the filmmakers to manipulate the audience’s response to a film. It is, however, very difficult to explain why a person can get so much pleasure out of listening to a particular voice. The functions of the qualities that form the nature of a voice and are responsible for its individual colour are one of the most enigmatic aspects of interpersonal communication. We can only assume that the magic of a voice derives from those of its attributes that can be instinctively associated with some positive experiences in our lives and with people we are attracted to. Our fascination with the voice through which a literary text communicates with us can prolong this pleasurable experience and add some new force to the text itself.

The sensual force of the spoken word is undoubtedly intensified by the music used in the film. The audience can derive a lot of pleasure not only from listening to melodies and rhythms that create moods and heighten emotions provoked by the story, but also from analysing the ways the music reinforces the symbolic richness of the literary work, establishes new relationships between its elements, sheds a new light on its meanings and multiplies its interpretative perspectives.

The undeniable pleasure in analysing the film language concerns all aspects of the filmic adaptation and can be regarded as a response to the human wish to evaluate. We simply adore judging works of art. We cannot help giving opinions about the artistic value of the means of expression employed in a film and about the selections undertaken by the filmmakers and the impact they have on the reception of the story. Judging a film and its authors gives us pleasure even if we give a negative opinion about some aspects of the film because it produces a feeling of satisfaction with our own reading skills due to the sensation of being better than the filmmakers at decoding the multifaceted literary text.

III. The English Patient is a work of historical fiction set in the hills of Tuscany during World War II. It intersperses the factual and the imaginary into a tale of tragedy and passion. Structurally, the novel resists chronological order, alternating between present action in the Italian villa and flashbacks to memories of a mysterious desert romance that is gradually revealed. The imagery is characterized by Ondaatje's "preoccupation with romantic exoticism and multiculturalism." Rather than offer a narrator telling a straightforward story, Ondaatje turns the romance into an unlikely mystery, revealing hidden facets of character and identity as the novel progresses. Ondaatje explores his characters by placing them in blank, secluded settings. Both the barren desert and the isolated Tuscan villa are insular and remote, enabling the author to study his characters intensely.

Innovative in narrative structure and complicated by numerous points of view, The English Patient resists easy classification into any particular literary genre. Yet Ondaatje uses the novel to renew themes that have been explored throughout the ages: national identity, the connection between body and mind, and love that transcends place and time. Perhaps most significant is the fact that Ondaatje blends the forms of prose and poetry, evoking images and emotions with highly lyrical language. His words translate "real experience into symbolic experience" by appealing to memories that involve all of the reader's senses. As Ondaatje once said in a radio interview, he uses his prose to "create a tactile landscape for his choreography." In The English Patient such a landscape augments the poetry and lyricism of the novel.

In The English Patient, the past and the present are continually intertwined. The narrative structure intersperses descriptions of present action with thoughts and conversations that offer glimpses of past events and occurrences. Though there is no single narrator, the story is alternatively seen from the point of view of each of the main characters.

The novel opens with Hana, a young nurse, gardening outside a villa in Italy in 1945. The European theater of the war has just ended with the Germans retreating up the Italian countryside. As the Germans retreated, they left hidden bombs and mines everywhere, so the landscape is particularly dangerous. Although the other nurses and patients have left the villa to escape to a safer place, Hana decides to stay in the villa with her patient.

Hana does not know much about the man for whom she cares. Found in the wreckage of a plane crash, he been burned beyond recognition, his whole body black and even the slightest touch painful to him. He talks about the Bedouin tribe who found him in the wreckage, cared for his wounds, and eventually returned him to a British camp in 1944. He does not know who they were, but he feels grateful to them nonetheless. To pass the time, Hana reads to the English patient—she assumes he is English by his manner and speech—and also gardens, fixes up the villa, and plays hopscotch. Sometimes she picks up the patient's notebook, a copy of Herodotus's The Histories marked throughout with his own notes, figures, and observations, and reads to him or to herself.

One day, a man with bandaged hands named Caravaggio arrives at the villa. He is an old family friend of Hana's father, Patrick, and had heard about her location while he was recovering in a hospital a few miles away. In Canada, where Caravaggio knew Hana years ago, he was a thief. He tells her how his skills were legitimized in the war and how he put them to use working for British Intelligence in North Africa. He tells her that the Germans caught him after an attempt to steal a camera from a woman's room. They tortured him and cut off his thumbs, leaving his hands mutilated and nearly useless. Although he has recovered somewhat, he is still addicted to morphine. In the villa, he reminisces with Hana and mourns with her over the death of her father in the war.

As Hana plays the piano in the library, two soldiers come in and stand alongside while she plays. One of them is Kip, an Indian Sikh trained as a sapper, or bomb-defuser, in the British army. After hearing the piano, Kip has come to clear the villa of bombs, knowing that the Germans frequently booby-trapped musical instruments. Kip and the English patient get along very well, as they are both experts in guns and bombs and enjoy talking to each other and sharing stories. Kip makes camp in the garden of the villa and becomes a part of the "family" that now exists there. He goes off into town every day to clear more bombs from the area and to bury fellow sappers who have died. Kip's job is extremely dangerous. He feels a strong attraction to Hana, and soon they become lovers.

Asked about his past, the English patient begins to tell the others his story. His real name is Almasy, though this is not definitively confirmed until Chapter IX. He spent the years from 1930 to the start of World War II exploring the North African desert. His job was to make observations, draw maps, and search for ancient oases in the sands. Along with his fellow European counterparts, Almasy knew every inch of the desert and made many trips across it. In 1936, a young man from Oxford, Geoffrey Clifton, and his new wife Katharine, joined their party. Geoffrey owned a plane, which the party found especially useful in helping to map the desert. The explorers, Almasy, and the Cliftons got along very well. One night, after hearing Katharine read a passage from his book of Herodotus, Almasy realized he was in love with her. They soon began a torrid and tumultuous affair. Everywhere they stole glances and moments, and they were obsessed with each other. Finally, in 1938, Katharine broke off their affair, telling Almasy that Geoffrey would go mad if he ever found out. Although their affair was over, Almasy remained haunted by her, and he tried to punish her for hurting him by being particularly mean to her in public. At some point, Geoffrey somehow found out about the affair.

World War II broke out in 1939, and Almasy decided to close up their camp and arranged for Geoffrey to pick him up in the desert. Geoffrey arrived in his plane with Katharine. Geoffrey attempted to kill all three of them by crashing the plane into Almasy, who was standing on the ground. The plane missed Almasy, but the crash killed Geoffrey, left Katharine severely injured, and left them with no way to escape the desert. Almasy placed Katharine in a nearby cave, covering her with a parachute for warmth, and promised to come back for her. He walked across the desert for four days until he reached the nearest town, but when he got there, the English army would not help him get back to Katharine. Because Almasy had a foreign-sounding name, the British were suspicious and locked him up as a spy, prevented him from saving Katharine.

Almasy was eventually released, but he knew it was too late to save her. He worked for the Germans, helping their spies make their way across the desert into Cairo. After he left Cairo, his truck broke down in the desert. Without transportation, he walked to the cave to get Katharine. He took her dead body and placed it in a plane that had been buried beneath the sand. The plane malfunctioned during their flight and caught fire. Almasy parachuted down from the plane, his body covered in flames. That was the point at which the Bedouins found him and cared for his burns.

Little by little, the English patient tells this whole story. Caravaggio, who has suspected the English patient was not really English, has his suspicions confirmed. He fills in gaps for the Almasy, telling him that Geoffrey Clifton was really an agent of British Intelligence and that Intelligence had known about Almasy and Katharine's affair the whole time. They knew Almasy had started helping the Germans and planned to kill him in the desert. They lost him between Cairo and the plane crash, and now, of course, he is unrecognizable.

The focus of the novel shifts to Kip, and we are told his entire story. Although Kip's brother always distrusted the west, Kip went willingly to serve in the British army. He was trained as a bomb defuser under Lord Suffolk, a true English gentleman, and was then virtually welcomed into an English family. Kip soon grew quite skillful at his job, able to figure out both the "joke" and the "character" of each bomb he tackled. Lord Suffolk and his group were blown up defusing a bomb, and Kip decided to leave England and become a sapper in Italy.

Kip has felt emotionally removed from everyone in his job as a sapper. When he meets Hana, he uses her to once again connect to humanity. All the residents of the villa celebrate Hana's twenty-first birthday, and Kip grows comfortable as her lover. When August comes, however, Kip hears on the radio of the atomic bomb that the United States has dropped on Japan. He becomes enraged, knowing that a western country would never commit such an atrocity against another white country. He takes his gun and threatens to kill the English patient, whom he sees as a symbol of the West. Kip does not kill Almasy, but takes off on his motorcycle, leaving the villa forever. Years later, he is a doctor in India with a family of his own. Though he is happy and fulfilled in his new life, he often wonders about Hana.

Nationality and identity are interconnected in The English Patient, functioning together to create a web of inescapable structures that tie the characters to certain places and times despite their best efforts to evade such confinement. Almásy desperately tries to elude the force of nationality, living in the desert where he creates for himself an alternate identity, one in which family and nation are irrelevant. Almásy forges this identity through his character, his work, and his interactions with others. Importantly, he chooses this identity rather than inheriting it. Certain environments in the novel lend credence to the idea that national identity can be erased. The desert and the isolated Italian villa function as such places where national identity is unimportant to one's connection with others. Kip, who becomes enmeshed in the idea of Western society and the welcoming community of the villa's inhabitants, even dismisses his hyperawareness of his own racial identity for a time.

Ultimately, however, the characters cannot escape from the outside reality that, in wartime, national identity is prized above all else. This reality invades Almásy's life in the desert and Kip's life in the Italian villa. Desperate for help, Almásy is locked up merely because his name sounds foreign. His identity follows him even after he is burned beyond recognition, as Caravaggio realizes that the "English" patient is not even English. For Kip, news of the atomic bomb reminds him that, outside the isolated world of the villa, western aggression still exists, crushing Asian people as Kip's brother had warned. National identity is, then, an inescapable part of each of the characters, a larger force over which they have no control.

One theme that emerges in the novel is that love, if it is truly heartfelt, transcends place and time. Hana feels love and connection to her father even though he has died alone, far from her in another theater of war. Almásy desperately maintains his love for Katharine even though he is unable to see her or reach her in the cave. Likewise, Kip, despite leaving Italy to marry in India, never loses his connection to Hana, whom he imagines thirteen years later and halfway across the world. Such love transcends even death, as the characters hold onto their emotions even past the grave. This idea implies a larger message—that time and place themselves are irrelevant to human connection. We see this especially in Almásy's connection to Herodotus, whose writings he follows across time through the desert. Maps and geography become details, mere artificial lines that man imposes on the landscape. It is only the truth in the soul, which transcends time, that matters in the novel.

The frequent recurrence of descriptions of bodies in the novel informs and develops its themes of healing, changing, and renewal. The text is replete with body images: Almásy's burned body, Kip's dark and lithe body, Katharine's willowy figure, and so on. Each description provides not only a window into that character's existence; more importantly, it provides a map of that person's history. Almásy remembers the vaccination scar on Katharine's arm and immediately knows her as a child getting a shot in a school gymnasium. Caravaggio looks at Hana's serious face and knows that she looks that way because of the experiences that have shaped her. Understanding the bodies of the different characters is a way to draw maps, to get closer to the experiences which have shaped and been shaped by identity. Bodies thus function as a means of physical connections between characters, tying them to a certain times and places

The characters in the novel frequently mention the idea of "dying in a holy place." Katharine dies in a cave, a holy place to ancient people. Patrick, Hana's father, also dies in a holy place, a dove-cot, a ledge above a building where doves can be safe from predatory rats. Madox dies in a holy place by taking his life in a church in England. This idea recurs throughout the nvoel, but the meaning of "holy place" is complex. It does not signify a place that is 'holy' to individual people: Katharine hates the desert, Patrick hates to be alone, and Madox loses his faith in the holiness of the church. None of these characters, then, die in a location that is special to them. But the figurative idea of a 'holy place' touches on the connection between actual places and states of emotion in the novel. Emotionally, each of these characters died in a "holy place" by remaining in the hearts of people who love them. In The English Patient, geography is transcendent; it is the sacredness of love that endures.

Reading is recurs throughout the novel in various forms and capacities: Hana reads to Almásy to connect with him and try to make him interested in the present life, Katharine reads voraciously to learn all she can about Cairo and the desert, and Almásy consistently reads The Histories by Herodotus to guide him in his geographical searches. In each of these instances of reading, the characters use books to inform their own lives and to connect to another place or time. Reading thus becomes a metaphor for reaching beyond oneself to connect with others. Indeed, it is Katharine's reading of the story in Herodotus that makes Almásy fall in love with her. Books are used to pass secret codes, as in the German spy's copy of Rebecca. In their interactions with books, the characters overlay the stories of their own lives onto the tales of the books, constructing multi-dimensional interactions between persons and objects.

The atomic bomb the United States drops on Japan symbolizes the worst fears of western aggression. The characters in the novel try to escape the war and all its horrors by remaining with the English patient in a small Italian villa in the hills. Staying close to the patient, they can immerse themselves in his world of the past rather than face the problems of the present. The atomic bombs rip through this silence of isolation, reawakening the characters, especially Kip, to the reality of the outside world pressing in upon them. The bomb reminds them of the foolishness and power of nation-states and reminds them of the violability of their enclosed environment.

In Chapter II, Hana reflects to herself that "there seemed little demarcation between house and landscape." Such an organic depiction of the villa is symbolically important to the novel. Straddling the line between house and landscape, building and earth, the villa represents both death and rebirth. War has destroyed the villa, making huge holes in walls and ceilings. But nature has returned to fill these holes, replacing the void with new life. Such an image mirrors the spiritual death and rebirth of the villa's inhabitants, the way they learn to live again after the emotional destruction of war. One of the more complex themes in The English Patient involves the extraordinary emotional baggage that the main characters bring to the start of the novel. When each character arrives at the Italian villa, it seems they are physically and/or emotionally wounded: Hana lost her father in an accident, Caravaggio lost his thumbs at the hands of the German army, Kip lost his mother and his surrogate father, and the English patient lost both the love of his life and his own body. Each character is given the chance to remember his or her story or speak it aloud, and it is the process of shedding light on the dark corners of their respective souls that seems to bring healing to each one of them. However, denial is a constantly threatening force: Hana refuses to admit the villa is unsafe, Kip has yet to come to terms with his race, and the English patient cannot even acknowledge his own name, because of its entanglement with a separate, politicized identity. The question of how much each character heals and how much each character denies is central to the novel.

In this novel, the union and disunion of characters is often based in their ability to communicate, and their inherent tendencies towards passion or frigidity. Almasy is exceedingly rational and cerebral, and seems completely immune to matters of the heart. Instead, he is concerned with knowledge, with learning in the textbook sense. In Katharine, however, he encounters the opposite – a true firebrand who lives moment to moment wrapped in the flames of passion. Indeed, the two learn from each other: Almasy learns to love, and Katharine begins to become more curious. Their differences, however, are what ultimately undo them: Katharine cannot stand Almasy's coldness, his ability to so clinically separate himself from her in public. The irony, of course, is that it is the passion – the raging furious passion – of her husband Geoffrey that ultimately leads to her death, long after the affair with Almasy has ended. As he recounts the story, Almasy is surprised at how all-consuming passion can be – he can no longer remember all the details of his own politicized role in the world, because all he cares to remember is Katharine and the way she changed him. Hana and Kip struggle with similar issues, in that both have built strong defenses against getting to know people, perhaps because of the deaths of their respective parents. Hana reconnects with life by the end, but we're not quite sure whether Kip does – we know only that he escapes and begins anew.

One of the subtler aspects of The English Patient is revealed in the progression of character arcs – in the ability of our protagonists to either reconnect to life and find reasons to live or to embrace death. The English patient, for instance, hangs on to life at the outset, the glimmers of his romance with Katharine so deep in his memory, so fresh on his lips – but by the end of the novel, after recounting the story, he seems ready to die. Indeed, when Kip confronts him with a gun, he asks Kip to shoot him. Hana, meanwhile, begins the novel moving firmly towards death – she is obsessed with it, even, to the point of wanting to stay in the unsafe villa simply to be with her patient. But as she begins to see what waits for her once she gives up her guilt and leaves him, Hana begins to drift back into the world. The patient, after all, is a substitute for her father – a man who died after being burned. Hana cannot forgive herself for having been so far away when her father died, and thus clings to the patient who represents him. As she learns to forgive herself, she loses her attachment to death and renews her engagement in life.

The desert is an inextricable aspect of Ondaatje's novel in that it provides so many dualities for imagery, theme, metaphor – the heat of the day, the cold of the night; the seeming serenity and then the suddenness of storms; the quiet pierced by the racket of war. Remembering his experiences in the desert, it seems like Almasy cannot bring up his memories chronologically. Instead, the desert seems to refract memory. And everywhere is the image of fire – the Bedouin boy dancing in the moonlight, the plane falling out of the sky, the man on fire before he becomes the English patient. It seems almost tamable, but his experiences there suggest the reverse: the volatile desert, able to consume and ravage at will, is always in control.

All of the characters come to the villa without attachment. Hana has nothing in the world but her patient, Kip soon loses his sapper partner, Caravaggio is on the run, Almasy has lost his love. It is crucial, then, to notice how alone these characters are – how they could die in the villa without anyone noticing. Upon reaching the villa, they seem happy in their isolation, but soon enough they begin to connect and to see the threads that they have in common. By the end, even Hana has stopped using the library as a refuge, and instead uses it as a place to playfully prank Caravaggio and Kip.

The characters in The English Patient cling to surrogate parents in order to relive and heal from their childhood traumas. Hana lost her father in a terrible accident in which he was burned to death. She was across the world from him and has never forgiven herself for being so far away, and so she chains herself to the similarly burned English patient to make sure that he is given the chance to end his life in peace. The English patient is clearly a substitute for her father, and the desert a symbol for the physical and emotional vastness between Hana and her dead parent. Kip, meanwhile, has lost his mother, and we see that in Hana's arms, he finds the comfort of a surrogate mother. There is love and lust at first with Hana, but soon it becomes clear that all he needs is the embrace of a woman who he can project as his mother. And just as Almasy made love to Katharine's dead body, now he has Hana revering his dying body, allowing him to die having achieved peace.

Our protagonists repeatedly seem concerned with what they "owe" others. After Hana stays to help Kip demine the bomb, Kip is resentful that Hana might now expect something from him – that he owes her for her remaining with him under such dangerous circumstances. On the other hand, Hana feels as if she owes everything to the English patient, and cannot survive elsewhere because she is in debt to him. Kip meanwhile believes Almasy owes him a debt for all the lives that were ruined by Indian subservience to the British. Indeed, Kip believes that Almasy, as a representative of the West, owes him something considerable, and nearly takes his life over it.

The English Patient tracks the convocation of four people at an Italian villa – a nurse, a Sikhsapper, a thief, and a badly burned Englishman – who come to forge an unlikely family, andtogether discover the secrets of their respective pasts, and the emotional wounds they share.Hana tends to the burned English patient in a room of their Italian villa. The nurse asks him howhe was wounded, and he replies that he "fell burning into the desert" from a plane. His planecrashed in the Sand Sea, and nomadic Bedouins saw him stand up naked from the burning plane,on fire. They saved him, but he had no memory of who he is: after the accident, he knew onlythat he was English. At night the patient rarely sleeps, so the nurse reads to him from whatever  book she finds in the library. Books are Hana's only refuge in the Villa San Girolamo, whichused to be an army hospital.

The villa was abandoned after the Allied victory, but there are still buried mines all over the property.Hana is only 20 years and won't leave the English patient even though he is destined to die andthe villa is unsafe. Soon, a new character emerges: a man with bandaged hands namedCaravaggio, who Hana used to know. He comes to the villa and begs Hana to leave because shecannot stay with all the bombs still left underground, undefused. Hana refuses to leave theEnglish patient.Caravaggio and Hana go for a walk in the garden. Caravaggio allows her to loosen the bandagesand change them, and Hana sees that someone removed both of his thumbs. He tells her aGerman nurse was called in to do it and would have removed his whole hands if the torturershadn't suddenly heard the Allies coming. Hana says they must have heard the bombing fromoutside signaling that the Germans were fleeing the city.Outside it is raining, and Hannah plays the piano in the library. She looks up, in a flash of lightning, and sees that there are two men in the room.

Two soldiers – a Sikh and another man, both holding wet guns. She continues to play until she stops, nods towards them. WhenCaravaggio returns, he finds Hannah and the two soldiers in the kitchen making sandwiches. Oneof the soldiers, an Indian Sikh, sets up a tent in the garden. This is Kip, who has come to the villato demine the property. Hana watches him bathe in the garden, and it's clear she's attracted tohim.Kip finds a large mine in a field north of the villa, and defuses the bomb with Hana's help.However, he is shaken by the experience and resents Hana because now he feels like she feelsthat he owes her; that he is somehow responsible for her. These feelings bring him closer to her,and soon they become lovers.Hana sits by the English patient in his room, and he tells her that he was part of an expedition in1930 that went searching for the lost oasis of Zerzura. There he met Katharine Clifton, wife of British aristocratGeoffrey Clifton. Katharine was a firebrand, full of passion and moxie, and theEnglish patient, despite his resistance to adultery, fell in love with her. Katharine somehowwanted Geoffrey to find out about the affair, but couldn't bear to tell him. Torn, frustrated,Katharine began physically assaulting her lover – leaving bruises on him from blows, cuts from flung plates and forks. He made up excuses for his wounds, and yet continued the affair, feelingdisassembled by her.Finally, Katharine told him they could never see each other again. She couldn't risk her husbandfinding out about them.

Eventually, however, he did – long after the affair ended. When GeoffreyClifton found out, he arranged a murder-suicide on a plane trip and crashed the plane, killinghimself, mortally wounding his wife, and yet ironically leaving the English patient injury-free.Hearing all this, Caravaggio tells Hana that he suspects that the English patient is actuallyAlmasy, a Hungarian spy. Hana says the war is over and says it doesn't matter. Caravaggioinjects the patient with more morphine and alcohol and begins to ask him questions. The patient tells Caravaggio that after crashing in the desert, he took Katharine's body to the Cave of Swimmers, where he made love to her dead body, wrapped her in parachute material, and promised to return for her. But he was arrested in El Taj by British Intelligence, and didn't returnto the cave for three years. He dug up the buried plane and put Katharine inside it. He put fuelinto the tank, and they began to fly in the rotted plane. Soon, however, the oil leaked onto him,the plane began to schism, and it fell from the sky in flames.Kip flashes back to his youth. He was supposed to be a doctor, but the arrival of war meant hewould join the army as an engineer – a bomb defuser.

The life expectancy in his unit was only tenweeks. Kip's leader was a man namedLord Suffolk who Kip adored, but Lord Suffolk died whiledismantling a large bomb. Kip left the army when he found out that people expected him toreplace Lord Suffolk in position and in vision.Hana and Kip's affair begins to cool – from lust it turns to celibacy, and soon Kip begins to justhold Hana like his mother held him. She clearly is a surrogate for his deceased mother.Caravaggio asks the English patient if he murdered Katharine Clifton. He says Geoffrey Cliftonwas with British Intelligence – and Caravaggio says British Intelligence knew about Almasy'saffair with Katharine even when Geoffrey didn't. When Geoffrey died, British Intelligence wentto capture the English patient and finally did at El Taj. Caravaggio tells Almasy that he workedfor the British as a thief and that Almasy was considered a dangerous spy – all of BritishIntelligence had been looking for him. The English patient knows nothing of all of this and canonly attest to his love for Katharine.

One day, Hana sees Kip listening to the radio on his headphones in the garden. He hearssomething awful, runs into the tent, grabs his rifle, and runs into the villa, into the English patient's room. He tells Almasy that the Allies have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, andwants to kill Almasy for he is a representative of the West – the West that would create suchdestruction. The English patient begs Kip to kill him, but Kip doesn't. Kip leaves the villa.

At the end of the novel, Hana writes a letter to her stepmother and finally explains how her father died. He was burned, and left deserted by his men. She could have saved him, but she was too far away. The novel ends with Kip, who years later is a doctor with a wife and two children. Hethinks often of Hana, who used to send him letters. Because he never replied, she finally stopped.

IV. Director Anthony Minghella shows how a supremely literary novel, Lankan author Michael Ondaatje's 'The English Patient, can be turned into an elegant yet dynamic film. The 12 Oscar nomination's that his film has won perhaps answers the question: Is there any novel that can't be filmed? Indeed, there are now several films based on books that seem perilous to adapt.

Sri Lankan writer Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient is rich with poetic language, its narratives-within-narratives mirroring the layers of identity the book explores.

How can a film maker recapture such lyrical prose on screen? The smartest decision that screenwriter and director Anthony Minghella made was not to try. Minghella's English Patient is a brilliant example of how a supremely literary novel can be turned into an elegant yet dynamic film.

Just as the finest translators of poetry are artists, too, with the licence to create an equivalent but not exact version of a poem, film makers must translate novels into a different but equally resonant language. It is amazing how often that obvious idea – turning words on the page into images and dialogue that can live on screen – gets lost. Usually it happens because the screenwriter and the director are asking the wrong question, wondering, ''How can I be faithful to this book?" when they should be asking ''How can I make this novel my own?"

The English Patient proves that any novel can be successfully filmed, though it isn't easy. Much of the novel focuses on Hana, whose father has been killed in the war, and her relationship with Kip, a Sikh member of the British Army who has arrived to clear the area of German mines.

An epic of life, death, betrayal and lust, The English Patient paints a beautiful and intriguing portrait of the desert during wartime. Somewhere in the Sahara Desert, in 1943, a biplane flies low over the curvaceous dunes. Spotting the British colours, a German anti-aircraft emplacement brings it down in a ball of fire. The pilot, Count Laszlo Almasy (Ralph Fiennes), fails to die despite his terrible burns, and is instead rescued by passing Bedouin. Turned over to the Allied authorities a little while later, he is unable to recall anything of his past (except that he's not German). With so little to go on, he is named the "English Patient" and winds up in the care of a Canadian medical unit stationed in Italy. One of the nurses, Hana (Juliette Binoche), takes special care of him and an attachment forms. Realising that her charge hasn't long to live, Hana manages to persuade her superiors to let her hole up with the Count in an abandoned villa, alone until he succumbs to the inevitable.

Dosed up with morphine and lulled by Hana's out loud readings, the Count drifts between lucidity and memories of the past. The hint of romance that Hana exudes brings to mind pre-war times, when the Count was a desert-based archaeologist. A characteristically reticent individual of Hungarian descent, Laszlo liked nothing better than to explore and chart the emptiness of the shifting sands. At one point, a fellow adventurer and member of the Royal Geographical Society, Geoffrey Clifton (Colin Firth), flies out from Cairo to join the team, accompanied by his beautiful wife Katharine (Kristin Scott Thomas). Laszlo reacts badly to the unwanted female company but manages to tolerate her by retreating even further into himself and moaning to his friend Madox (Julian Wadham). Gradually Laszlo thaws though, as Katharine proves herself the equal of anyone else, even if her desert common-sense skills leave a lot to be desired (such as gazing placidly towards an oncoming sandstorm).

In the Italian villa, Hana is grateful for the time to reflect and come to terms with the recent deaths of both her boyfriend and a close friend (in separate incidents). Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), a strange, elusive individual turns up out of the blue. Seemingly a good Samaritan, due to his gift of precious eggs, Caravaggio seems fascinated by Hana's hideously scarred patient and stays a while. Various troops pass by, such as mine-clearers Kip (Naveen Andrews) and Sgt. Hardy (Kevin Whately), but mostly it's just Hana and Laszlo. Made mysterious by virtue of revealing nothing, Hana is content to find out what she can while Laszlo paddles on the shores of remembrance. Caravaggio does exactly the same yet his questions are slightly more pointed, almost as if he knows something special about the Count. Perhaps he can shed light upon who the Count really is (or was)?

Based upon the fine novel of Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient gave every impression of being unfilmable. However, Anthony Minghella has managed to fashion a lush, romantic, sweeping tragedy from the given text, admirably converting its lyricism into visual poetry. Hence the most striking aspect of The English Patient is its photography, superb on both the endless scale of the desert and on the intimacy of the human face. It's impossible to make the Sahara look bad, yet the film goes a step further by making the passion that Laszlo feels for it palpable. Nearly as impressive are the editing and score; the former delights in its fades between the past and present, suggesting contacts across time, while the latter soars and howls with vigour, perfect accompaniment to the pain that squats in the hearts of every major character. Maybe that's the problem. Everyone is broken inside, a victim of fate, yet without the contrast of normality, how can you tell when anything's wrong?

The level of acting within The English Patient is uniformly high, from the central characters to the smallest walk-on roles. Confronted with dialogue that rolls off of the tongue, the cast take up the challenge and put what they can into interpretation and nuance (such as conveying their real emotions through the eyes). Unfortunately this doesn't, frustratingly, equate to excellent performances, for two reasons. Laszlo is the bridge between the parallel storylines yet while the pieces of his story are interesting, they aren't involving. Fiennes plays the Count at a distance, which then rubs off on those around him, such as Scott Thomas and Binoche (though at least they get given strong characters). Passion bubbles away throughout the film but it's only at the end, with the scenes of closure, that it erupts. In addition, the characters that interact only in Italy fail to develop the depth or resonance of those in the desert. They're the poor relations, starved of dimension yet given enough screen time to promise a great deal more. There are moments of joy for sure but The English Patient ultimately short-changes its cast.

A maze of flashback and inference, The English Patient is at its best as it pastes together the fragments of a life destroyed by desperation and love. Echoing the last gasps of the British Empire at play, before being brought down to Earth by WWII, betrayal is a key factor in this enveloping destruction. Laszlo betrays himself by refusing to yield to his desires (then swinging too far the other way), Katharine betrays herself and her husband by giving in to the inevitable, British troops betray both Laszlo and Katharine through sheer xenophobia, leading to the betrayal of Caravaggio and so on. The circle closes and everyone loses out. In the end, what drives The English Patient is a need to know how Laszlo came to be in Hana's care, why he's burned beyond recognition and who he is. This is pure mechanics though. The heart of the film lies in the sorrow of discovering what you've lost when it's already gone, for this is where the pain lies. Unfortunately, this only emerges as the film reaches what it had been building up to throughout and by then it's too late for all concerned.

The unnamed patient's memory takes him back to his grand romance with a colleague's wife, Katharine Clifton, and eventually reveals the link between his plane crash and that adulterous affair. This love story is buried deeply in the novel; Katharine doesn't even turn up until almost 100 pages into the 300-page book. The romance must be dug out like a treasure. Also, Ondaatje evokes unsettling questions about nationality and loyalty. The patient's adulterous relationship echoes the way nationalism, like marriage, has its limits.

The film smartly turns the novel inside out, making the patient's love story central.

On screen, The English Patient sets its tone with an enticing opening image of romance, danger and adventure: the patient and Katharine are in a plane, flying over the desert, her head back in repose and a long white scarf billowing in the wind. It doesn't hurt that the patient and Katharine are played by Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas, who may be the two most beautiful people in movies. So what if the patient was 15 years older than Katharine in the book, ordinary-looking and deeply cynical? Handsome young men can be cynical, too. From the start, this film evokes the romance of Out of Africa and the scope of Lawrence of Arabia.

One thingis for sure, both the film and the novel share the most important element of Ondaatje's work: a deeply emotional story about how life-giving passion exists in the midst of war. And some of Ondaatje's images are beautifully visual, and among the film's most stunning.

On screen, as in the book, Hana peels a plum from the garden with her teeth, sensuously feeding the pulp to the patient. And when the patient is carried across the desert by Bedouins who rescue him after the crash, this exquisite scene is recreated on screen.

Anthony Minghella states that one of the things that struck him most about the novel was its"deceptive appearance of being completely cinematic. Brilliant images are scattered across its pages in a mosaic of fractured narratives, as if somebody had already seenafilmandwas in a hurry trying to remember all the best bits" (Minghella 1997a: xiii). He says he was so enthused that he phoned producer Saul Zaentzthe following day to suggest he read the book, which he did, and loved it (ibid.). The first draft Minghellawrote alone, having spent sometime researching the narrative'shistoricaland geographical background. It was over two hundred pages long, which is twice the length ofaconventional screenplay. Saul Zaentzstatesthat the first draft he received from Minghellastill had 185 pages and"many practical problems: it had too many countries, too many characters" (Zaentz 1997: xi).

In addition, Ondaatje's publication of his conversations with editor Walter Murchon the art of editing (2002) includes further informative references to the making of differ greatly from those of writing a novel. As Ondaatjesays himself: "Anovel allows you longer arms, a deeper breath" (Ondaatje 1997: viii). Subsequently, it was altered in several successive drafts that, as Minghella states, were"subject to the ruthless, exasperating, egoless, pedantic, and rigorous scrutiny of Michael and Saul" (1997a: xiv). He names numerous other people who were throughout the process involved in shaping the script and the released version of the film. This list of people underlines the crucial difference between literature and film, that the latter is, as Ondaatjeputsit, "acommunalstory, made by many hands" (1997: ix). As aresultofthis complex cooperation and the often unpredictable process of filming, the published screenplay is a revised version created when the film was nearly finished and differs greatly from the script Minghellabegan shooting with (cf. Minghella 1997a: xv). The film'sproductionfaced severe problems of financing when Twentieth Century Foxpulled out as filming was set to begin, since the project was thought too risky with its high budget of$31 million and the casting of two leading actors (Ralph Fiennesand Kristin Scott Thomas) who were neither stars nor even American. However, the filmmakers refused to abandon their plan and the project was at last 'rescued'by Miramax (cf. Sadashige 252). Jacqui Sadashigepoints out that comments by Minghella, Zaentz, and the popular press turned the film into"asymbol of artistic integrity and personal conviction" (ibid. 252). A central aspect inevitably involved in the adaptation of a novel for the screen is the need for omission and abbreviation. Thus Ondaatjeexplains that for instance the scenes of Kip in England that Minghellahadin fact included in the first draft had to be left out because"[t]imespentonthat flashback would have diverted the audience from the main plot for too long" (Ondaatje 1997: viii). This and other omissionsOndaatje calls"understandable choices"that"also made the film better" (ibid.). Ondaatjedisplaysa great understanding of the process of filmmaking anda strong approval of Minghella'sworkinhis foreword. This obviously makes sense in this context, but the fact that he seems to have shown a high degree of cooperation with the filmmakers suggests that there is indeed some conviction behind his words. As was mentioned earlier in his biographical overview, Ondaatjehasbeen very interested in film fora longtime and even directed two films himself. Strikingly, he takes a similar standpoint as André Bazinand Robert Stam (cf. pp. 26f. of this paper) in saying that the novel and film constitute"two stories, one with the intimate pace and detail of a three -hundred-page novel, and one that is the length of a vivid and subtle film. Each has its own organic structure. There are obvious differences and values but somehow each version deepens the other" (Ondaatje 1997: viii-ix). Ondaatje'sstronginterest in the project is further underlined by the fact that he came to the shooting locations in Italy and the Sahara, contributing several ideas of his own, and continued to support the film'screationduring the editing process (cf. Zaentzxi). The full extent and nature of his contributions, however, remains unclear. With regard to post -production, one has to note once again that a film is never solely the work of the director. This last stage is in fact, as Walter Murchpointsout, inmost cases primarily the work of the editor: "The editor is the only one who has time to deal with the whole jigsaw. The director simplydoesn't. To actually look at all the film the director has shot, and review it and sort through it, to rebalance all of that and make very specific notes about tiny details that are sometimes extremely significant, this falls to the editor" (Murchin Ondaatje 2002: 28f.). For The English Patient , too, the process continued in post -production of compressing or eliminating scenes, and the director states that, in particular, the structure of the film with its transitions between the two narrative levels was radically revised (Minghellaxv). This is due to the structural complexity of the underlying novel: "In editing, the order of scenes often changes from what it was in the script. […]But in terms of its entanglements, Ithink The English Patient was the most changed. In The English Patient , there'sadouble variability -you're going backwards and forwards into several different time frames, and the point of view is not fixed" (ibid. 156f.). Minghella'sconcluding comments sum up the essence of the nature and effects of the adaptation process, especially of a novel as "oblique"and"abstract"as Ondaatje's The English Patient : "[I]was obliged to make transparent what was delicately oblique in the prose. It seemed tome that the process of adaptation required me to join the dots and make a figurative work from a pointillist and abstract one. Any number of versions were possible and I'mcertainthatthe stories I chose to elaborate say as much about my own interests and reading as they do about the book" (xv). Especially the notions of film's"figurative"nature as opposed to literature and of the infinite number of possible readings-and, as a result, cinematic versions-need to be kept in mind when comparing the original novel and the film adaptation of The English Patient .

In order to compare the film version with the novel effectively, it is necessary to first give an overview of what makes film in general different from a novel, of what aspects constitute its style. Whereas narrative is the common denominator of the two media, the most obvious difference is film'saudiovisuality. It normally involves real people acting in areal setting. Thus it has much in common with theatre. Accordingly, some of the terms used in film studies are taken from the theatre. Descriptions are mainly based on David Bordwelland Kristin Thompson'sinfluential handbook, Film Art: An Introduction (2008), additions from other authors are indicated as such.

.With regard to film, too, it refers to the director's'staging'of events for the camera, and involves aspects that overlap with theatre, such as setting, lighting, costumes, and the behaviour of the actors (cf. Bordwell&Thompson 112). Setting As Bordwelland Thompson point out, setting plays a great role in the effect of a film, and"playsamoreactive role in cinema than it usually does in the theater" (115). This is due to the facts that films can show real outside places, larger ones and a greater variety than a theatre stage. Also, the camera need not be fixed to one spot like the spectator of a play, and cutting makes switches between different settings easy. All these aspects enable films to be visually more dynamic. Thus, "Cinema setting can come to the forefront; it need not be only a container for human events but can dynamically enter the narrative action" (ibid.). To create the setting, the director can use already existing locales and/or shoot in a studio. The first may result ina more natural effect, whereas the second option gives the director more control over the setting. The question of whereto shoot a film, what to construct in a studio, and how, depends -besides practical considerations -on the intentions of the director regarding atmosphere, aesthetics and authenticity/historical accuracy. Part of the setting of a film is the colours that appear, the props that are used, and how they are placed in the locale. The various elements of the setting can shape how we understand the story action, serve to create a certain atmosphere, and even function as symbols and motifs in order to transport meaning or establish parallels between scenes. Often specific settings are used to describe the mental or emotional state of a character, e.g. rain for sadness or small rooms to indicate confinement of mind (cf. Hickethier 70). With regard to nature in film, Hickethierpoints out that, besides symbolising the inner state of a character, it also often belongs to the"Bedeutungsfeld des Ursprünglichen, Urtümlichen, auchdes Mythischen", and points to the boundaries of human existence (ibid. 71).

Costume and Makeup In a film with a historical setting like The English Patient , costumes obviously play an important role in making the time in which the story takes place come alive. But as Bordwelland Thompson point out, they can also"play important motivic and causal roles in narratives" (122). Thus, they may serve to characterizea person, show their status, profession, and state of mind. Hair and makeup also serve this function. Makeup can, in addition, be used to'mould'an actor'sfacewithregard to, for instance, age and physical condition, or to underline facial expressions. Costume is often coordinated with the setting with regard to colour, shape, and pattern. For example, the background maybe more or less neutral, so that, with the help of costume, the characters are emphasised. Lighting The manipulation of lighting forms an important contribution to the impact of an image. It helps create a certain atmosphere, articulates textures and shapes, and highlights objects by creating highlights and shadows. Bordwelland Thompson distinguish four major features of film lighting, namely its quality, direction, source, and colour (cf. ibid. 126-29). Quality refers to the light'sintensityona scale from soft to hard. It canthus create anything between a diffused illumination on the one end of the scale, and sharp edges and clearly defined shadows on the other. Regarding the direction , one can distinguish among frontal lighting, sidelighting, backlighting, underlighting, and top lighting. These serve different effects. Sidelighting, for example, can be used to sculpt a character'sfeatures, whereas backlighting tends to create silhouettes.

The source of lighting inmost fictional films is manipulated by the director and cinematographer. Most work according to the assumption that normally any subject requires two sources of light: a key light, which is the primary source, and a fill light, which is less intense and used to soften or eliminate shadows cast by the key light. The use of three-point lighting, developed in classical Hollywood, is still widely used. It includesa backlight from behind and above the figure in addition toa key light coming diagonally from the front and a fill light from a position close to the camera. One distinguishes in this practice between high-key lighting, which is often soft and uses back -and fill lighting to create low contrasts, and low-key lighting, which is often hard, makes little or no use of fill light and thus creates stronger contrasts. Actors and Performance As far as the actors and their performance go, Bordwelland Thompson (136) suggest analysing performance along two dimensions: It can be more or less individualised (i.e., How complex and distinctive is the character?) and more or less stylised (i.e. on a scale from muted to exaggerated). But not only the nuances of an actor or actress's performance are part of the mise-en-scène. He or she is"alwaysa graphic element in the film" (138f.). Thus, the way they move in or are placed within the frame lets them interact with the setting in creating a scene'soveralleffect. The crucial difference between stage acting and film acting is that at the theatre, the audience is at a considerable and fixed distance from the actors, whereas in film distance changes and the camera can move us quite close to them (as to any objector element of the setting). Putting all these elements together, we can look at a given shot like a painting or photograph. Thus, "mise-en-scèneoffersmanycuesforguidingourattentionand emphasizing elements in the frame" (Bordwell&Thompson 142). By balancing (or unbalancing) a shot, i. e. by distributing elements in the frame in a certain way, the director can, for instance, emphasize the protagonist, underline the relationship between characters, prepare anew event by having anew character approach in the background, and soon. In contrast to painting, movement constitutes another element of a film'smise-en-scène, so that it (or its absence) can be used to guide attention.

The Dimensions of Space and Time The dimensions of space and time playa great role in how a director controls the mise-en-scène (cf. Bordwell&Thompson 145-51). Two -dimensional as the movie screen maybe, so-called depth cues in the image can create the impression that a space has both volume and several distinct planes. Volume is suggested by shape, shading, and movement. Several planes automatically exist if there is at least an object and a background. The most basic cue to create distinct planes is overlap of elements in the frame. The use of colours can create this effect too. Aerial perspective is also very effective in suggesting depth, so is the blurring of distant planes, and size diminution of figures and objects on distant planes. Depending on how extensively these means are used, we can talk about shallow-space and deep-space composition. A composition making use of depth can be very useful for the narrative of the action, as action in the background can serve as preparation for what is going to happen after the foreground action. The dimension of time also plays a great role in the director's shaping of the mise -en-scène. He or she for instance shapes the speed and direction of movement within the shot, thus creating a certain rhythm and sense of time for the scene. As we have seen, a film'smise-en-scèneisaverycomplexaspectconsisting of several elements that need to betaken into consideration when comparing a movie with the novel it is based on. Mise -en-scèneisacentralpartofafilm's'language', and carries much of the narrative, atmospheric and aesthetic function fora film that language has fora novel.

Cinematography Having had a look at a film'smise-en-scène, which shows its relation to theatre, the genuinely filmic technique of cinematography deserves some consideration. Among special effects that can be used in cinematography, one especially relevant here is superimposition. Separately filmed sequences are combined on the same strip of film, either by double exposure or in laboratory printing. Among other uses, superimpositions"frequently provide away of conveying dreams, visions, or memories" (Bordwell&Thompson 174). They can also serve to establish connections between different places, people, and objects, or to accelerate narrative pace (cf. Korte 27f.), as shall be seen in the analytic section of this paper. Cinematography further involves the choice of framing, of what is to be seen in the frame and what is not. The distribution ofonscreenand offscreen space can create certain effects, such as surprise when anew figure suddenly enters from one of the offscreen zones. Also of great relevance are the angle , level , height , and distance of framing (cf. Bordwell&Thompson 190f.). With regard to camera angle, three categories are usually distinguished: straight-on angle, high angle (looking down on the material within the frame) and low angle (looking up). High and low angle are usually motivated by the action (cf. Hickethier 59). The frame is also either level, i.e. parallel to the horizon -which is normally the case-, or canted. The category of height refers to the height of the camera position in relation to the settings and figures. With regard to camera distance, one distinguishes (from long to short distance) between: extreme longshot, longshot, medium longshot, medium .

Even though film scholars disagree on whether something like a "subjective camera"exists, the point-of-view shot is certainly the cinematic technique that comes closest to representing the 'counterpart'ofapersonal narrator, which gives it some importance with regard to novel-film comparison. Other narrative functions of framing may include the use of certain framings as a motif, or the sudden change of framing to indicate a turning point. With film, mobile framing, or camera movement , is also possible (B&T 195f., 201). The most common forms are the panorama movement (pan), which rotates the camera on a vertical axis; the tilt movement, which rotates it ona horizontal axis; the tracking or dolly shot, where the camera as a whole travels along the ground; and the crane shot, where it moves aboveground level. Camera movement affects our perception of space, including, for instance, a sense of continuity of space for pan and tilt movement and a more three -dimensional appearance of objects when the camera arcs around them. One of the most common functions of camera movement is reframing , e.g. ina following shot that follows the movement of a character. The duration (e.g. long take) and velocity of camera movement also affect our sense of time in the sequence, its rhythm. Camera position and movement are also important as far as the relation between the axis of action and the axis of (the spectator's) view is concerned. If action passes parallel before the audience'seyes, it happens at a steady distance from them. If it crosses the axis of view, however, moving towards or away from the spectators, they become more involved as distance increases or decreases, maybe even to the point of 'threatening'the audience (cf. Hickethier 62f.).

The term editing refers to the joining of individual shots. This can be done by fade-in, fade-out, dissolve (abrief superimposition) or, most commonly, by a cut. Bordwelland Thompson (220-27) differentiate four basic areas of choice and control: graphic, rhythmic, spatial, and temporal relations between shots A and B. Editing according to graphic similarities or differences between two shots can serve to contrast two scenes or to make a transition smoother by making agraphic match. The rhythmic potential of editing is used when the length of shots in relation to one another is adjusted. Thus, patterns, dynamics, and tempo can be created and controlled. A filmmaker may also by editing imply a certain spatial relation between two shots, for instance by cutting from a shot of an object as a whole to one of a detail of it. Spatial editing can also be used to construct a space out of several components, or to give usa more complete sense of what a place looks like. Since the spectator does not seethe'actual'space filmed but constructs it from what is shown in the shots, the result is a diegetic, narrative space (cf. Hickethier 80), which Braniganalso refers to as"story space" (qtd. in Hickethier 80). Parallel editing between different places is called crosscutting (cf. B&T 228f.). Editing also usually contributes to the plot'smanipulationof story time. Editing can for instance change the order of events as they take place in the story. The most common manipulation of this kind, which is also an important technique in The English Patient , is the flashback, traditionally used as a means of mimetic representation of memory, dreams, or confessions (cf. Turim 6). The opposite, flashforwards,   is also possible but much less frequent. Editing can stretch or contract time.

In the film, the Patient is not black, probably because this would seem too gruesome or unrealistic (his healed skin would not look black). Still, due to the visual nature of film, it suffices that he looks very different from his remembered self Almásyto evoke the notion of two distinct characters. He clearly does not look like a'normal' person but rather resemblesa creature from a horror movie (cf. Ty 14). Thus, the film clearly follows the novel in establishing the Patient as an Other, who is-due to his own desire to map and possess-marked by the nations struggling for power. As we have seen, cartography and mapping feature in the film adaptation ina notable way. Although the complexity of the motif is diminished -necessarily so since verbal descriptions and commentary (like those quoted in footnote 48) suggest themselves for omission when adapting fora visual medium-the filmmakers created a few visual references to the novel'smotifthatdouble as carriers of intertextuality

When comparing the two narrative strands of the film and their respective landscapes, the difference in colour and light inevitably catches the eye. To Eleanor Ty, the contrasting background colours"highlight the contrast between the relatively stark and threadbare existence of the present and the sumptuous gaiety of the past. Greys dominate the rooms of the villa while the pastis lit by the oranges, yellows, and reds of the desert, the campfire, and the elegant upper-class world in which the Cliftonsmove" (Ty 13). This cinematic rendit ion reflects the novel'sdescription since there also, the villa and its surroundings represent the (post-) war situation characterisedby devastation, danger, and hardship. The darker and more natural quality of the Tuscany narrative'sfilmfootage, however, also underlines its green tones and thus its association with enduring fertility and hope.

In the film, the openness of the villa is presented visually in some instances. When Hanafindsthe piano in the remains of the library, the gaps in the walls are made strikingly apparent when a pan of the room imitates Hana'sgaze, and are further emphasised when Kip climbs in over the rubble that used to be a wall. In another example, the reflection of the landscape outside is clearly visible on the pane of the open window in the Patient'sroom, thus being transported into the room itself, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside. Confined, however, to the square of the windowpane, this glimpse of nature also reminds the viewer of a painting- perhapsa reference to the garden painted on the walls of the room in the novel. At the same time, the shot creates a contrast between the whitewashed bareness of the Patient'sroom (atombforthis living corpse) and the lush green scenery outside, thus highlighting his withdrawal from the world. Since for his film, Minghellachoseto replace the novel's'garden room'with the chapel-away of visually includinga replacement for the abundance of religious references and imagery of the novel, especially the Patient'sassociationwitha saint-the room becomes a "holyplac[e]" (260), and in contrast with the fertile landscape outside, a tomb, thus mirroring the Cave of Swimmersinthe Sahara. The religious connotation also underpins the garden'sassociationwith Eden. It is visually presented as a fruitful place when Hana is shown gardening, and her flower dress further underlines this notion and her role as a healer and nurturer. In the novel, the fountain outside the villa is a strong image that drawsa parallel to the oasis Zerzuraofthe Egypt narrative and connotes its grounds with Eden. Even though any mention of Zerzuraismissing in the film, the filmmakers obviously recognised the significance of the water motif56 and included two bathing scenes in this narrative strand as well: Hanabathingina bathtub outside (cf. her bath in the novel, p. 92) and Kip washing his hair, outside as well (cf. 217 in the novel). The large round water basin in the garden also figures as a fertility symbol, and is emphasised inahighangleshot when (inasequence invented by Minghella) Hana, Kip, Hardy, and Carvaggiocarry the Patient around it in the rain, in a joyous parade reminiscent ofaritualrain dance. It also refers back to an earlier example of the water motif in the film that Douglas Stenbergpoints out: "Almásyliesincavewater as the Bedouin doctor applies balm to his charred face" (256). In both cases, he is exposed to water as a healing element by those who care for him

In both novel and film, the desert plays an important role. For the novel, Whetter (446) even attests it one comparable to that of an additional character (cf. the chapter "Anthropomorphism/Geomorphology"). Jasper notes that Sahara means"the brown void"or"nothingness"in Arabic (153), and the desert indeed serves the function of anon -delineated space in the novel, as quotes like the following underline: "In the desert it is easy to lose a sense of demarcation" (18); "Herein the desert, which had been an old sea where nothing was strapped down or permanent, everything drifted" (22); and"it was apiece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names" (138).59 To the Egyptians, death was the desert'sstrongest connotation (Kjellsmoen 110), which is reflected in the novel'sportrayalofits barrenness (e.g. "In the desert you celebrate nothing but water"[23]) and destructive force (cf. sandstorms[137]).60 What is most striking about the film'srepresentation of landscape is the breathtaking photography of the desert. It not only serves as a background to the narrative but is also setoff in all its beauty and diversity innumerous shots that emphasise it as a central motif. By combining various long to extreme long shots, including aerial shots, taken from different perspectives and indifferent areas of the desert, the photography succeeds in mediating a sense of vast, borderless, empty and barren space. But the desert also strongly figures as an image of (erotic) love in Minghella'sfilm. The most obvious and significant alteration in this respect is having an actual sandstorm take place. In the novel, the actual occurrence of a sandstorm is only briefly mentioned (137), but Hanareadsa passage about different kinds of winds inserted in the Patient'scopyof Herodotus (16-17), which is in part turned into Almásy'sand Katharine'sdialogueinthe film (SP 68-69). As Gerald E. Forshey points out, by"transposing it to the sandstorm, Ming hellamakesit erotic" (94). In the novel, the passage is loosely connected to the Patient'snarrationofhis time with the Bedouin tribe that saved him. Before, he has sofar told Hanathathe crashed down burning into the desert, was found by nomadic Bedouins, and anointed by the mysterious healer. When Hanahasfinished reading the passage on winds, he begins again to talk about the Bedouin, describing what he knows about their culture from several books, maps, and rock engravings he has seen himself (18-19), continuing with the narration of his time with them, identifying guns, travelling, witnessing their customs (19-23). Placed in this context, the passage is not onlya description of natural phenomena, but at the same time serves to illustrate the Bed ouin'sworldof experience, interwoven as it is with myth and tradition

Thus, as the representation of Arab culture is generally reduced in the film, in this scene too, the primary centre of interest is love, and it shows"how readily even the non-narrative can be made into love stories" (Sadashige 251). However, having once chosen love fora central theme, using the idea of sandstorms as an image of passion, a natural force that ignores the limitations of society and nations, by incorporating an actual sandstorm into the narrative isadexterousway of preserving anon-dialogue passage from the book. The filmmakers use cinematic techniques to underline the sandstorm's force and dramatic and narrative significance. At the beginning of the sequence, a medium shot shows Katharine sitting on a dune at night, smoking and looking at the stars. The cigarette smoke and the flapping of the tarpaulin in the background foreshadow the approaching storm but seem innocent as yet. The tracks of Madox's car, stretching into the distance, suggest the remaining team members'isolated location faraway from civilisation. When Almásy climbs up and warns her ("Inafew minutes there will be no stars. The air is filling with sand"), apoint-of-view longshot shows an ominous cloud on the distant dunes, beginning to cover the stars. This building-up of tension is followed by the sudden blow of the storm'sfullforceasa cut shows the team hurrying around against the wind, the air filled with sand and noise. Once Almásyand Katharine are virtually trapped inside the cabin of the car, the sudden diminishing of the storm'snoiseandthe obstruction of the view by the sand swirling outside the windows make the world disappear around them, and the natural timeless force of the storm-and the storms from the realm of history and mythAlmásy speaks about -mirrors the passion they feel for each other. It isa passion that blurs all sense of orientation -just as the sandstorm blots out the stars and obstructs the view from the car.

In the novel, Almásyand Katharine'saffairis described as very passionate: "Theywerebentover like animals" (149); "She always had the desire to slap him, and she realized even that was sexual" (150). In the film, the lovemaking scene at the Christmas party isagoodexampleof how cinematic techniques can be used to stage passion. Walter Murchinformsus that Minghellagave very detailed instructions to the actors, so that they could concentrate on the acting, not having to inventor compose the movements themselves (cf. Ondaatje 2002: 306). The juxtaposition of shots of the noisy party in bright sunlight in the courtyard and the dim interior space where nonetheless the sounds from outside are still audible establishes the location of their encounter asasemi-public place.

One of the film'saesthetic tableaux that stay in mind is the sequence that showsAlmásycarrying Katharine from the plane to the cave (cf. also Thomas 198). Underlined by dramatic orchestral music, the camera shows the couple in mostly medium long shots from different angles, setting off the white parachute Katharine is wrapped in against the ochres of the rock. The white cloth, blowing behind in the wind and later covering her in the cave, is both bridal dress and shroud, and the long walk on the ledge of the rock massif, Almásycarryinghisloverinhisarms, simultaneously invokes a walk down the aisle and a funeral train. Thus, the cave becomes both church and tomb, and prefigures an eternal union in death that is later suggested in the concluding flight sequence over the desert at the moment of the Patient'sdeath. The scene recalls the novel'spassage, "Icarried Katharine Clifton into the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds" (261).

The filmmakers, in many instances besides the ones examined here, provea high level of proficiency ineffectively utilising the technical means of film to emotionally engage their audience through the effects of visual and musical aesthetics and dynamics.

V. Conclusion

If one is adapting a novel characterised by a highly poetic language into a medium in which language is primarily restricted to dialogue, it goes without saying that the applicability of the'fidelity principle'is very limited. In the theory section we have gained an overview of what can only in inverted commas be described as film's'language'. And the filmmakers of The English Patient clearly tried to exploit the range of visual and auditory possibilities of film to a large extent in order to create nota 'literary'film with excessive use of dialogue and voice-over but a truly cinematic one. In this context, the comparison with the novel has revealed that many of the changes made in the process of scriptwriting, production, and editing resulted from the necessities of the medium, and specifically the genre of melodrama that was chosen. Central problematic fields in film adaptation in general and the adaptation of Ondaatje'snovelin particular have become apparent. The aspects of structure and perspective, connected to thethematisation of the nature of memory, the process of remembering, and the relationship between past and present are prominent features in this particular novel, and accordingly the issue of how and to what effect they are reflected in the film was examined closely. With regard to framing, the film'semphasisonthe Almásy -Katharine loves tory becomes obvious in the very first sequence, which, as opposed to the novel, shows the couple flying over a sensuous desert landscape, and is repeated at the end of the film. It is arguable whether emotional involvement is more important in film than in literature

94 and if so whether this is due toits higher immediacy or to viewing conventions. In the case of the film The English Patient , at any rate, much effort was put into drawing the audience into the love story emotionally, and doing so from the very beginning and throughout the film by using the memory/flashback structure to create a sense of nostalgia and by employing the effects of visual and musical aesthetics. It was to be expected that the unusual formal features of Ondaatje'snovel would not go unscathed in the process of screen adaptation. The different mode of reception makes anon-linear narrative structure more problematic in film, so that the fragmentation caused by the flashback structure, alternating between two narrative strands, is probably as much complexity as a mainstream audience can be exposed to without risking box office failure, especially if the film is nota low-budget production. There are, after all, still more than forty time transitions in the film (cf. Ondaatje 2002: 129) . To makeup in part for smoothening out the narrative structure, however, specifically cinematic techniques were employed. A prominent instance are the meticulously worked transitions between events in Egypt and Italy, using dissolves, graphic matches, and sound bridges. In the novel, hints as to what triggers a specific memory are usually not given, which adds to the text'sfragmentary nature and invites the reader to discover connections and parallels on the levels of content and imagery themselves. The filmmakers, on the other hand, acknowledging the reduced room for reflection given a cinema audience, chose instead to imitate the process of conjuring up memories and draw direct connections between the'present' and'past'of the film'snarrative. The use of imagery and sound is also noteworthy in that respect. Visual and auditory motifs were employedanaleptically or proleptically to blend the boundaries between past and present, producing a sense of continuity that we also observed in the novel, or across the twodiegetic levels to establish links between them. While Caravaggio'smissingthumbs explicitly figure as enigmatic makers of personal experience and historical context in the film, the role of the body motif in placing the love story of Almásyand Katharine in the context of human history is reduced in favour of stressing the significance and intensity of their love. The

95 Patient'sbodyisduetothe visualunambiguousness of film as fixed as his remembered selfAlmásy, in contrast to the novel'selusivetitle character. The novel'smultiperspectivity had to be sacrificed in the film in order to concentrate on the central love story and the Tuscanynarrative. Film techniques are used effectively to reproduce Almásy'sand Hana'spointofview. Especially the sequence after the plane crash at the beginning does so toaveryhigh degree, thus reproducing some of the sense of disorientation that is transported in the novel's corresponding passages. The history/historiography motif is subordinated to the love theme as well. Even though Herodotus's Histories , supplemented by Almásy'sown contributions, remains in the film, it does so primarily in physical form. The work'scontentisonly hinted at when he talks about the different storms. More importantly, it is not mirrored in the structure of the film itself as is the casein the novel, where this double image stresses the point that history is not solely about the stories of great men or great events, noris it linear or can once and for all be fixed in a definite discourse, but is rather made up of myriads of individual fates whose memories emerge in fragments, and their order and meaning is constructed. Historiography, and narration in general, is presented not as a means of fixing the'truth'but as an ongoing process trying to uncover it. The result of the film'slinearised structure, then, is that it contributes to expressing an altered view on history and memory. Thematically connected to the uncovering of the past and its meaning is the construction of identity. In the film, too, the Patient does not know at the beginning who he is and what he experienced, but the linearity with which the pieces of his past comeback to him, along with the omission of the novel'srepetitionsand digressions suggests they were not as deeply buried after all, and that their cohesion is inherent and simple. No effort seems to be required for constructing an identity out of incoherent experiences, bits one has read, places one has seen, and people one has met. The prolepsis of the flying sequence at the opening of the film and the determinacy of the visual image further reduce the Patient'senigma, since his remembered self is physically established before he has even assumed his role of 'rememberer'.

96 A crucial obstacle in adapting a novel for the screen is length. To make a 150- minute film (already much longer than the average) based ona 300-page novel inevitably requires drastic abbreviation, be it regarding story events, dialogue, commentary or descriptive detail. As the chapter"Making of"described and various sections in the analysis illustrated in detail, The English Patient is no exception. That something had to be omitted is beyond question. But there is always an infinite number of possible choices of what is left out and what is not, and they have very different effects. What is the result of the specific narrative omissions that were made in this particular film? The filmmakers obviously followed the conventions of narrative film for the adaptation of literature in deciding ona central narrative , in this casetheAlmásy -Katharine romance, and another, the Tuscanynarrative, placed as 'frame'around it (cf. Forshey 92). Including more narratives would have meant sacrificing much detail on the individualdiegetic levels, which is problematic especially if the aim is strong emotional involvement. We have looked in detail especially at the omissions regarding the character Kip, since they are the most obvious and drastic. Of the novel'smaincharacters, he is the one representinga colonial subject and ethnic Other torn between loyalty to the colonists and love for their culture on the one hand, and an awareness of cultural difference, prejudice, and unequal treatment on the other. To reduce the role of this character means to omit Ondaatje'spostcolonial comment, silencing one of the "supplementary[voices]to the main argument" (119) that form the structure at the heart of the novel. The point that is made by the film'sportrayalofhis relationship withHana (and also Bermannand Kamal's) is-less complex and in line with its overall thematic focus-that love can overcome cultural and racial boundaries, a message that is visualised for instance by the sharing of condensed milk and olive oil, and in the chapel scene. Naturally, due to the visual nature of film, the Arab Orient is always in the frame when events take place in that setting, and as a result references may not be as subtly woven into the fabric of the narrative as is the casein the novel. It serves as an exotic backdrop for the central love story that is designed to satisfy the desire fora

97 "pseudonostalgic longing fora time and place other than one'sown" (Hugganqtd. in Ty 19). The reduction of the embedded tales and memory fragments of the other characters of the novel to the single one of the Patient, along with the fact that the vast majority of flashbacks are clearly marked as memories, not narration, moves the novel'smetafictionality to the background as the centrality of the narrative act is subdued. In the novel, where one of the Patient'sfunctionsisto embody an allegorical storyteller (an"Opener of Ways"mirroring the novel'sNarrator, cf. Haswell&Edwards), it is lifted to the foreground in several instances.67 It needs to be acknowledged, however, that the film includes a few instances of metafiction in its own way. Since film does not have a narrator in the sense that literature does, who can emerge like on the closing pages of Ondaatje'snovel, it makes indeed sense to refrain from attempting fidelity and develop an alternative, film-specific strategy. The combination of the cartography motif with a framing and editing that replicates the cinematic gaze, along with a few interfilmic references maybe more difficult to discern than the novel'smetafiction, but is nonetheless an adequate strategy since it makes use of what cinematic specificity offers. With regard to landscape, it is self-evident that symbolic features are often difficult to discern in the film, since (as we also observed regarding the Oriental setting) it is inevitably always in the frame, and mere visual representation tells less about what is displayed than the nuances of verbal description. The connotation of the Tuscanvilla'sgardenwith Eden, however, emphasised by the lush green tones and the inclusion of water motifs, becomes quite clear. The stunning photography of the desert not only sets off its beauty but transports a sense of vastness that echoes the novel'sportrayalofthe desert as a symbol of"an earth that had no maps" (261), although this sense is naturally not as fine-grained as in the novel. The notion of anthropomorphism/geomorphology is well adjustable to the visual medium. It is, however, especially realised with regard to the female body, whose shapes can be 67 E.g.: "It was important during such evenings to proceed into the plot of the evening" (245, orig. emphasis); " Death means you are in the third person " (247, orig. italics); "You must talk tome, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book?" (253).

98 easily para llelised with the dunes of the desert. With regard to the novel'sownership theme, this constitutes an effective reproduction especially in combination with the frequent use of grid patterns. Female sensuousness is, however, highly emphasised by the film in line with its focus on the love story. As Jairethsays, "the film romanticises the 'epic'struggle of a nationless, borderlessand nameless explorer"who"loves'his' woman as much as he loves 'his'desert. For him the two are the same, to be mapped, name and owned. To die for her is to die exploring for inland seas, 'undiscovered' oases, caves, and origins of rivers" (Jaireth 74). The question of how the film stages its central focus, love and passion, revealed that its makers indeed orchestrated various cinematic techniques quite effectively. For example, visual features of setting and props are used for symbolism (e.g. Katharine's'shroud/bridal dress'thrown against the relief of the rock massif). The crucial feature of music, that it expresses and evokes emotions, is utilised extensively (e.g. in the Christmas scene). In fact, throughout the film, visual and musical aesthetics and dynamics are employed to emotionally engage the audience. To conclude by referring back to the quote from the very beginning of this paper, it has become apparent in the comparison that"translations of form and emphasis" (Ondaatje 1997: viii) are inevitable and necessary in any adaptation toa different medium. As Forsheyobserves, films normally require a central narrative, characters with clear intentions and images to communicate the ideas and powers within its story-things the novel The English Patient did not have. The act of adapting is as much one of the imagination as the act of imagining anew story. Minghellatooka central narrative and by adding, subtracting and rearranging, gave his audience anew experience. (Forshey 97-98) This new experience may suggest that the tragic, exotic, and passionate love story is "thestoryworth telling, the story Hanaremembersand is projected into the young woman'sfutureinan endless dream-world of sentiment" (Shin 231). But one must not forget that a film adaptation can never be anything but a film based on a work of literature, to a more or less faithful degree. How exactlya particular adaptation turns out to be is in the end the decision of its makers, dependent on their personal reading

99 of the novel and the circumstances and aims of the production, and whether it is worth watching depends on the personal taste of the viewers. The comparison of the two 'versions'can, however, serve to highlight the specific means of film to narrate, signify, and engage. It can also tell us something about the novel'sdegreeof literary specificity. An adaptation of a novel characterised by a language as intricate and poetic and a structure as complex as Ondaatje's The English Patient can, it seems, hardly achieve comparable results.

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CARTMELL, Deborah, and Imelda WHELEHAN (2007) "Introduction." The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen . Eds. idem . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAFE, Wallace (1990) "Some Things that Narratives Tell Us about the Mind." Narrative Thought and Narrative Language . Eds. Bruce K. Brittonand Anthony D. Pellegrini. Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 79-98.

CHATMAN, Seymore (1990) Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film . Ithaca&London: Cornell University Press.

COHEN, Keith (1979) Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange . New Haven: Yale UP. COOK, Rufus (1999) "Being and Representation in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient ." ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 30.4: 35-49.

CORRIGAN, Timothy (2007) "Literature on Screen, a History: In the Gap." The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen . Eds. Deborah Cartmell&Imelda Whelehan. Cambridge: Cambridge .

CORTAZZI, Martin (1993) Narrative Analysis . London: Falmer Press.

CURRAN, Beverley (2004) "Ondaatje's The English Patient and Altered States of Narrative." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: AWWWebJournal 6.3: 13 paragraphs.

DEER, Patrick (2005) "Defusing The English Patient ."InSTAM 2005: 208-32.

DESMOND, John M., and Peter HAWKES (2006) Adaptation: Studying Film and Literature . New York: McGraw-Hill. EMERY, Sharyn (2000) "'Call Me by My Name': Personal Identity and Possession in The English Patient ." Literature Film Quarterly 28.3: 210-13.

ERLL, A strid, Marion GYMNICH, and Ansgar NÜNNING (2003) Eds. Literatur Erinnerung-Identität: Theoriekonzeptionenund Fallstudien . Trier: WVT.

FORSHEY, Gerald E. (1997) " The English Patient : From Novel to Screenplay." Creative Screenwriting 4.2: 91-98.

GANAPATHY-DORE, Geetha (1993) "The Novel of the Nowhere Man: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient ." Commonwealth Essays and Studies 16.2: 96-100.

GAST, Wolfgang (1993) Grundbuch: Einführungin Begriffeund Methodender Filmanalyse . Frankfurta. M.: Diesterweg.

GROEBEN, Norbert (1982) Leserpsychologie: Textverständnis -Textverständlichkeit . Münster: Aschendorff.

GYMNICH, Marion, Ansgar NÜNNING, and Roy SOMMER (2006) "Gauging the Relation between Literature and Memory." Literature and Memory: Theoretical Paradigms -Genres-Functions . Eds. idem . Tübingen: Francke, 1-10.

HASWELL, Janis, and Elaine EDWARDS (2004) "The English Patient and His Narrator: 'Opener of Ways.'" Studies in Canadian Literature 29.2: 122-40. HICKETHIER, Knut (2007) Film-und Fernsehanalyse . 4thed. Stuttgart&Weimar: J.B. Metzler.

HILGER, Stephanie M. (2005) "Ondaatje's The English Patient and Rewriting History." Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje'sWriting . Ed. Steven Tötösy deZepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 38-48.

HILLGER, Annick (1998) "'And this is the world of nomads in any case': The Odyssey as Intertextin Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient ." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 33.1: 23-33. HSU, Hsuan (2005) "Post-Nationalism and the Cinematic Apparatus in Minghella's Adaptation of Ondaatje's The English Patient ." Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje'sWriting . Ed. Steven Tötösyde Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 49-61.

HURKA, Thomas (1997) "Philosophy, Morality, and The English Patient ." Queen's Quarterly: A Canadian Review 104.1: 47-55.

HURST, Matthias (1996) Erzählsituationenin Literaturund Film: Ein Modellzur vergleichenden Analyse vonliterarischen Textenundfilmischen Adaptionen . Medienin Forschung+Unterricht, Serie A, 40. Tübingen: Max Niemayer.

HUTCHEON, Linda (2006) A Theory of Adaptation . New York&London: Routledge. ISMAIL, Quadri (1999) "Discipline and Colony: The English Patient and the Crow'sNest of Post-Coloniality." Postcolonial Studies 2.3: 403-36.

JACOBS, J.U. (1997) "Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992) and Postcolonial Impatience." Journal of Literary Studies (JLSTL) 13.1-2: 92-112.

KLEIN, Michael, and PARKER, Gillian (1981) Eds. The English Novel and the Movies . New York: Frederick Ungar.

KORTE, Helmut (1999) Einführungindiesystematische Filmanalyse: Ein Arbeitsbuch . Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag.

KRANZ, David L. (2003) " The English Patient : Critics, Audiences and the Quality of Fidelity." Literature Film Quarterly 31.2: 99-110.

. LOWRY, Glen (2002) "Between The English Patients : 'Race'and the Cultural Politics of Adapting CanLit." Essays on Canadian Writing 76: 216-46.

MARTINEZ, Matias, and Michael SCHEFFEL (2007) Einführungindie Erzähltheorie . 7th ed. München: C.H. Beck. MCFARLANE, Brian (2007) "Reading Film and Literature." The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen . Eds. Deborah Cartmell&Imelda Whelehan. Cambridge: Cambridge .

METZ, Christian (1972) Semiologiedes Films . München: Wilhelm Fink. MINGHELLA, Anthony (1997a) The English Patient: A Screenplay . London: Methuen. Minghella, Anthony (1997b) "Introduction."InMINGHELLA 1997a: xiii-xvi.

MORGAN, Maggie M. (1998) " The English Patient : From Fiction to Reel." Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 18: 159-73.

MULVEY, Laura (1975) "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Feminist Film Theory: A Reader . Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York UP, 58-69. NADEL, Alan (2003) "Mapping the Other: The English Patient , Colonial Rhetoric, and Cinematic Representation." The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film . Ed. David Blakesley. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 21-36.

NALBANTIAN, Suzanne (2003) Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience . Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

NAREMORE, James (2000) Ed. Film Adaptation . New Brunswick: Rutgers UP. NOVAK, Amy (2004) "Textual Hauntings: Narrating History, Memory, and Silence in The English Patient ." Studies in the Novel 36.2: 206-231.

PENNER, Tom (2000) "Four Characters in Search of an Author -Function: Foucault, Ondaatje, and the'Eternally Dying'Author in The English Patient ." Canadian Literature 165: 78-93. PESCH, Josef (1997) "Post-Apocalyptical War Histories: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient ." ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 28.2: 117-39.

PROVENCAL, Vernon (2003) "The Story of Candaulesin Herodotusand The English Patient . " Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly 23.1: 49-64.

RANDALL, Don (1998) "The Kipling Given, Ondaatje'sTake: Reading Kim through The English Patient ." Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 5.2: 131-44.

RENGER, Nicola (2000) "Cartography, Historiography, and Identity in Michael Ondaatje's The EnglishPatient ." Being(s) in Transit: Travelling, Migration, Dislocation . Ed. Liselotte Glage. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 111-24.

ROBERTS, Gillian (2002) "'Sins of Omission': The English Patient , THE ENGLISH PATIENT , and the Critics." Essays on Canadian Writing 76: 195-215.

ROXBOROUGH, David (1999) "The Gospel of Almásy: Christian Mythology in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient ." Essays on Canadian Writing 67: 236-54.

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Bibliography

BARBOUR, Douglas (1993) Michael Ondaatje . New York: Twayne Publishers.

BAZIN, André (2000) "Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest [1948]."InNAREMORE: 19-27. BOLLAND, John (2002) Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient : AReader'sGuide . New York&London: Continuum.

BORDWELL, David (1985) Narration in the Fiction Film . London: Methuen. Bordwell, David (1989) Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema . Cambridge &London: Harvard University Press.

BORDWELL, David, and Kristin THOMPSON (2008) Film Art: An Introduction . 8thed. New York: McGraw-Hill.

BRANIGAN, Edward (1984) Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film . Berlin: Mouton Publishers. Branigan, Edward (1981) "The Spectator and Film Space. Two Theories." Screen 22.1: 55-78.

BRITTAN, Alice (2006) "War and the Book: The Diarist, the Cryptographer, and The English Patient ." PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 121.1: 200-13.

BURCAR, Lilijana (2006) "Mapping the Woman'sBodyinMichaelOndaatje's The English Patient ." English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries (ELOPE) 3.1-2: 105-114.

CAHIR, Linda Constanzo (2006) Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approach . Jefferson: McFarland.

CARTMELL, Deborah, and Imelda WHELEHAN (2007) "Introduction." The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen . Eds. idem . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAFE, Wallace (1990) "Some Things that Narratives Tell Us about the Mind." Narrative Thought and Narrative Language . Eds. Bruce K. Brittonand Anthony D. Pellegrini. Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 79-98.

CHATMAN, Seymore (1990) Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film . Ithaca&London: Cornell University Press.

COHEN, Keith (1979) Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange . New Haven: Yale UP. COOK, Rufus (1999) "Being and Representation in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient ." ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 30.4: 35-49.

CORRIGAN, Timothy (2007) "Literature on Screen, a History: In the Gap." The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen . Eds. Deborah Cartmell&Imelda Whelehan. Cambridge: Cambridge .

CORTAZZI, Martin (1993) Narrative Analysis . London: Falmer Press.

CURRAN, Beverley (2004) "Ondaatje's The English Patient and Altered States of Narrative." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: AWWWebJournal 6.3: 13 paragraphs.

DEER, Patrick (2005) "Defusing The English Patient ."InSTAM 2005: 208-32.

DESMOND, John M., and Peter HAWKES (2006) Adaptation: Studying Film and Literature . New York: McGraw-Hill. EMERY, Sharyn (2000) "'Call Me by My Name': Personal Identity and Possession in The English Patient ." Literature Film Quarterly 28.3: 210-13.

ERLL, A strid, Marion GYMNICH, and Ansgar NÜNNING (2003) Eds. Literatur Erinnerung-Identität: Theoriekonzeptionenund Fallstudien . Trier: WVT.

FORSHEY, Gerald E. (1997) " The English Patient : From Novel to Screenplay." Creative Screenwriting 4.2: 91-98.

GANAPATHY-DORE, Geetha (1993) "The Novel of the Nowhere Man: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient ." Commonwealth Essays and Studies 16.2: 96-100.

GAST, Wolfgang (1993) Grundbuch: Einführungin Begriffeund Methodender Filmanalyse . Frankfurta. M.: Diesterweg.

GROEBEN, Norbert (1982) Leserpsychologie: Textverständnis -Textverständlichkeit . Münster: Aschendorff.

GYMNICH, Marion, Ansgar NÜNNING, and Roy SOMMER (2006) "Gauging the Relation between Literature and Memory." Literature and Memory: Theoretical Paradigms -Genres-Functions . Eds. idem . Tübingen: Francke, 1-10.

HASWELL, Janis, and Elaine EDWARDS (2004) "The English Patient and His Narrator: 'Opener of Ways.'" Studies in Canadian Literature 29.2: 122-40. HICKETHIER, Knut (2007) Film-und Fernsehanalyse . 4thed. Stuttgart&Weimar: J.B. Metzler.

HILGER, Stephanie M. (2005) "Ondaatje's The English Patient and Rewriting History." Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje'sWriting . Ed. Steven Tötösy deZepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 38-48.

HILLGER, Annick (1998) "'And this is the world of nomads in any case': The Odyssey as Intertextin Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient ." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 33.1: 23-33. HSU, Hsuan (2005) "Post-Nationalism and the Cinematic Apparatus in Minghella's Adaptation of Ondaatje's The English Patient ." Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje'sWriting . Ed. Steven Tötösyde Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 49-61.

HURKA, Thomas (1997) "Philosophy, Morality, and The English Patient ." Queen's Quarterly: A Canadian Review 104.1: 47-55.

HURST, Matthias (1996) Erzählsituationenin Literaturund Film: Ein Modellzur vergleichenden Analyse vonliterarischen Textenundfilmischen Adaptionen . Medienin Forschung+Unterricht, Serie A, 40. Tübingen: Max Niemayer.

HUTCHEON, Linda (2006) A Theory of Adaptation . New York&London: Routledge. ISMAIL, Quadri (1999) "Discipline and Colony: The English Patient and the Crow'sNest of Post-Coloniality." Postcolonial Studies 2.3: 403-36.

JACOBS, J.U. (1997) "Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992) and Postcolonial Impatience." Journal of Literary Studies (JLSTL) 13.1-2: 92-112.

KLEIN, Michael, and PARKER, Gillian (1981) Eds. The English Novel and the Movies . New York: Frederick Ungar.

KORTE, Helmut (1999) Einführungindiesystematische Filmanalyse: Ein Arbeitsbuch . Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag.

KRANZ, David L. (2003) " The English Patient : Critics, Audiences and the Quality of Fidelity." Literature Film Quarterly 31.2: 99-110.

. LOWRY, Glen (2002) "Between The English Patients : 'Race'and the Cultural Politics of Adapting CanLit." Essays on Canadian Writing 76: 216-46.

MARTINEZ, Matias, and Michael SCHEFFEL (2007) Einführungindie Erzähltheorie . 7th ed. München: C.H. Beck. MCFARLANE, Brian (2007) "Reading Film and Literature." The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen . Eds. Deborah Cartmell&Imelda Whelehan. Cambridge: Cambridge .

METZ, Christian (1972) Semiologiedes Films . München: Wilhelm Fink. MINGHELLA, Anthony (1997a) The English Patient: A Screenplay . London: Methuen. Minghella, Anthony (1997b) "Introduction."InMINGHELLA 1997a: xiii-xvi.

MORGAN, Maggie M. (1998) " The English Patient : From Fiction to Reel." Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 18: 159-73.

MULVEY, Laura (1975) "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Feminist Film Theory: A Reader . Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York UP, 58-69. NADEL, Alan (2003) "Mapping the Other: The English Patient , Colonial Rhetoric, and Cinematic Representation." The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film . Ed. David Blakesley. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 21-36.

NALBANTIAN, Suzanne (2003) Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience . Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

NAREMORE, James (2000) Ed. Film Adaptation . New Brunswick: Rutgers UP. NOVAK, Amy (2004) "Textual Hauntings: Narrating History, Memory, and Silence in The English Patient ." Studies in the Novel 36.2: 206-231.

PENNER, Tom (2000) "Four Characters in Search of an Author -Function: Foucault, Ondaatje, and the'Eternally Dying'Author in The English Patient ." Canadian Literature 165: 78-93. PESCH, Josef (1997) "Post-Apocalyptical War Histories: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient ." ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 28.2: 117-39.

PROVENCAL, Vernon (2003) "The Story of Candaulesin Herodotusand The English Patient . " Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly 23.1: 49-64.

RANDALL, Don (1998) "The Kipling Given, Ondaatje'sTake: Reading Kim through The English Patient ." Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 5.2: 131-44.

RENGER, Nicola (2000) "Cartography, Historiography, and Identity in Michael Ondaatje's The EnglishPatient ." Being(s) in Transit: Travelling, Migration, Dislocation . Ed. Liselotte Glage. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 111-24.

ROBERTS, Gillian (2002) "'Sins of Omission': The English Patient , THE ENGLISH PATIENT , and the Critics." Essays on Canadian Writing 76: 195-215.

ROXBOROUGH, David (1999) "The Gospel of Almásy: Christian Mythology in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient ." Essays on Canadian Writing 67: 236-54.

SADASHIGE, Jacqui (1998) "Sweeping the Sands: Geographies of Desire in The English Patient ." Literature Film Quarterly (LFQ) 26.4: 241-54. SAID, Edward (1978) Orientalism . New York: Random House. SALETT, Pathy (1996) "Castinga Pall on a Movie Hero." Washington Post , 4 December 1996.

SCHACTER, Daniel L. (1996) Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past . New York: Basic Books SCHMID, Wolf (2005) Elementeder Narratologie . Berlin&New York: de Gruyter.

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