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Cohen reviews three books: Film Adaptation edited by James Naremore, Cinematic Shakespeare by Michael Anderegg, and Jane Austen in Hollywood, 2nd edition edited by Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield.

TRENDS IN ADAPTATION: WILL AND JANE GO CELLULOID Film Adaptation. Edited by James Naremore. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Pp. 258. $21.95 paper.

Cinematic Shakespeare. By Michael Anderegg. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Pp. 227. $21.95 paper.

Jane Austen in Hollywood, 2nd edition. Edited by Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Pp. 221. $17.00 paper.

Cinematic adaptations of great literary works have traditionally, in the words of the late Rodney Dangerfield, gotten no respect. The earliest such adaptations, made during the silent era, were produced for their snob value-to attract a better-quality audience to movie theaters. Later adaptations, made during the heyday of the Hollywood studio system, were designed to work in the opposite way: they popularized the classics, turning War and Peace and Wuthering Heights into lavish entertainment vehicles. In no case was the adaptation meant to usurp or even equal the literary work that inspired it. Hitchcock, in an interview with Truffaut, summarized the case by citing a New Yorker cartoon in which two goats are conversing while eating cans of film stock; the caption reads: "Personally, I liked the book better."

James Naremore cites this cartoon in the introduction to his edited collection, Film Adaptation. He explains that the assumption that "books are better" has its roots early in the twentieth century, when critics borrowed from the esthetic doctrine of Matthew Arnold to establish the preeminence of the literary canon and literary form. When the Cahiers de Cinema critics began to promote film as a valid esthetic medium in the 1950s, they simply adopted the terminology of literature. The director became an auteur, and the camera, a kind of pen in the service of an idealized cinematic vision.

The essays in Naremore's volume take issue with this kind of thinking and terminology. They look at film adaptation without measuring it against an elevated concept of literary or cinematic form. Instead, they consider the cultural, economic, and political forces that shape the films we see.

Two of the essays in the collection are reprints and reflect the prescience that some critics had on this subject decades ago. The first is by the brilliant French film theorist André Bazin. Written in 1948, it could have emerged today from a forward-thinking Media Studies department, were it not for its refreshing lack of theoretical jargon. "Faithfulness to form, literary or otherwise, is illusory," maintains Bazin. And he goes on to explain that literature can generate cultural myths-characters like Don Quixote and Gargantua-that exist apart from their source. "The style of a literary work is its body but not its soul," Bazin argues, "[a]nd it is not impossible for the artistic soul to manifest itself through another incarnation." He concludes: "we are moving toward a reign of the adaptation in which the notion of the unity of the work of art, if not the very notion of the author himself, will be destroyed. . . . The chronological precedence of one part over another would not be an aesthetic criterion any more than the chronological precedence of one twin over the other is a genealogical one."

The other reprinted essay in Naremore's collection is a 1984 piece by film theorist Dudley Andrew, who also argues against a hierarchical distinction between literary and cinematic representation. Both forms, notes Andrew, involve an engagement with a prior model. He invokes a "sociology of adaptation" in which films are studied not in terms of some antecedent original, but as "acts of discourse," in which many forces and texts coalesce.

If we look at cinematic adaptation sociologically, as Andrew suggests, then two recent trends in adaptation-of Shakespeare and of Jane Austen- seem to warrant special attention. Both authors have always been a favorite for filmmakers, but in the past decade and a half there has been a veritable deluge of cinematic adaptations of their work.

Michael Anderegg's Cinematic Shakespeare is useful in supplying a review of Shakespeare adaptations since the earliest days of cinema. Even the silent era, it seems, had its share of Shakespeare adaptations, a fact that supports Bazin's view that mythic elements can be derived from texts and can circulate apart from what may seem essential to them (in this case, language).

Anderegg notes that Shakespeare on film has been largely associated with three figures: Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, and Kenneth Branagh-each a distinctive creative personality and a product of his time and place. Olivier, working in the 1940s and '5Os under the British studio system, was the quintessential establishment figure. He developed his career as Britain and then America plunged into World War II, and his films emphasize Anglo-American cultural superiority, using Shakespeare as a vehicle for expressing it. Welles, a quirkier, more erratic figure, operated on the margins of the Hollywood system during the same period. He made Shakespeare into a rough-hewn American-style genius, much like himself. Branagh, who originally trained in the British theater and began working in movies in the late 1980s, has been viewed as the heir to Olivier. But he is also a uniquely postmodern sensibility with a taste for outsized spectacle and chaotic pastiche.

Anderegg's book has elements in common with Branagh. It reflects an eclectic, wide-ranging knowledge of cinematic Shakespeare, but there is little structure or consistent focus. One dips into this book for its scattered pleasures. These range from evaluative judgments to political and social analysis to genre discussion to minute facts about costume, elocution, casting, and so forth. Some of the most interesting points appear in boxed sidebars on topics like "How Not to Speak Shakespeare" (a critique of Jason Robards's performance in the 1970 Julius Caesar) and "Domestic Violence in the Capulet House" (on how each cinematic production of Romeo and Juliet has ratcheted up the level of violence in Capulet's dealings with his daughter).

In some cases, Anderegg delivers judgments on films and performances that are irritatingly subjective. He maintains, for example, that the Burton-Taylor Taming of the Shrew is "witless," that Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh, as Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, "only intermittently find the core of their characters," and that Peter Greenaway's adaptation of The Tempest, Prospero's Books, in some ways re-creates the court masque of Shakespeare's time. All these statements seem to me wrong. But there are also many observations that seem right-such as why Shakespeare is often more effective in modern dress ("his imagination was fundamentally contemporary"), why television is perhaps the best medium for Shakespeare (it has a global reach while not demanding that the production be "opened up," as cinema does), and why Shakespeare in Love has practical value for our understanding of Elizabethan theater (it helps us understand why cross-dressing doesn't have to impede a suspension of disbelief).

Characteristic of Anderegg at his best is an extended riff on Julius Caesar, the 1953 film directed by Joseph Mankiewicz and produced by John Houseman for MGM. Anderegg gives this underrated film its due, noting how artfully it incorporates political references, evoking an Albert Speer-like architecture in its set design and playing up the demagoguery of Antony through Brando's characteristically slurred speech (far from doing a disservice to Shakespeare's language, Brando's slack-jawed enunciation dramatizes the idea that his language is a manipulative cover for true meaning). Anderegg situates the film in its Cold War context, pointing out elements not only of film noir-ish gangsterism, an association which he thinks has been overstated, but also of film gris: a more psychologically and socially realistic approach, more concerned with moral choice than film noir. He also notes how the film borrows from its new rival, live television, in its use of black and white photography, long takes, and close-ups, creating a domestic feel that complements its public and political message. Anderegg ends the discussion by touching on what has always bothered me about this movie: the unsatisfying nature of the crowd scenes. The use of a real crowd, he observes, is required by cinematic realism, but this obscures the sense that individuals make up crowds and thus lessens the dramatic impact that one would get by a handful actors as "stand-ins for the people."

One might have liked to see these disparate observations integrated into some general statement about the film as a whole, but the book resists such generalization, and this may well be its strength. The reality of filmmaking is that it is a creative undertaking that is also a communal and corporate one. This fact works against any totalizing effort, which is why auteur theory now so often seems naïve and outdated. Anderegg's discussion of films, scattershot though it is, always yields something of interest and has the added benefit of bringing to mind a scene or a performance once viewed with pleasure. Indeed, not the least of this book's value lies in encouraging us to revisit movies that we may not have seen in years. I was led back, for example, to Welles' Macbeth, a towering rough draft, and to Olivier's Henry V, which Anderegg astutely notes is "as much about the struggle to adapt Shakespeare to the screen as it is about an adaptation of a Shakespeare play."

If Anderegg's book is a somewhat sloppy cornucopia of facts and insights, Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield's collection, Jane Austen in Hollywood, is more orderly if also more predictable. Since the essays are mostly by literary scholars who have written on Austen, they tend to take the view that Naremore critiques: they put Austen on a pedestal and measure the success or failure of an adaptation by how it approximates what they take to be her vision.

Given that most of the contributors are also feminist critics, their essays tend to be of the finger-wagging type. They judge an adaptation by the degree to which it supports progressive ideas about class and gender, and give demerits when it falls short. A general complaint is that movie adaptations tend to make Austen's world too cozy, draining it of social significance (an echo of Lionel Trilling more than fifty years ago). Amanda Collins chastises the films for engaging in postmodern nostalgia, and H. Elisabeth Ellington for fetishizing an image of old England that we associate with Austen. Nora Nachumi says that the films over-romanticize Austen, and Deborah Kaplan refers to the "harlequinization" of Austen. Both Cheryl L. Nixon and Kristen Flieger Samuelian argue that the male heroes in many of the films are too attractive, thereby pandering to conventional expectations about masculinity. Taking special issue with Emma Thompson's 1995 Sense and Sensibility, Samuelian notes that by assigning some of the swashbuckling traits associated with the caddish Willoughby to the heroes, Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon, the film runs "counter to the aims-and the feminism-of [Austen's] novel." Feminists apparently believe that good men cannot be heartthrobs.

In some cases, the contributors critique the films on the basis of political ideals that can hardly find support in the novels. Carol M. Dole starts from the premise that there is not enough class consciousness in most Austen adaptations. She makes the interesting if rather strained point that the appearance of Harriet and Emma in a "two-shot" (the characters positioned symmetrically within the frame) in Douglas McGrath's 1996 adaptation of Emma suggests an equivalency in the characters' status that is out of keeping with the novel's sense of class hierarchy. From here, she proceeds to the more extreme observation that many Austen adaptations are remiss in ignoring the plight of the working class. She praises Nick Dear's Persuasion for shooting servants in close-up and showing us their labor so as to encourage us to identify with them, and faults Thompson's Sense and Sensibility for showing servants as background characters. She has apparently decided that Austen on film should be more like Dickens. Devoney Looser tries to be more reasonable. She sees Austen films as valuable to the gender/class struggle by insinuating a progressive social analysis into light, romantic material.

Some of the most interesting remarks deal with movies that are not, strictly speaking, adaptations. This includes Amy Heckerling's 1995 Clueless, loosely based on Emma. The movie is condemned by Suzanne Ferriss as reactionary in its support for material culture, but lauded by Leslie Stern (in Naremore's volume) as a creative social critique, in which the "great shopping mall" of Los Angeles "is simultaneously invoked and undercut." Troost and Greenfield also contribute an essay on Patricia Rozema's 1999 Mansfield Park, applauding the way it artfully incorporates details of Austen's life into the character of Fanny Price, turning Fanny into a far more weighty and likable character. (It is apparently permissible to improve on Austen's heroines but not on her heroes.)

A number of contributors to the Troost and Greenfield volume also mention Whit Stillman's Metropolitan, a stylish independent film made in 1990, which invokes Mansfield Park in its representation of a group of bored, New York preppies, passing the time with inbred social chatter. A brainy, impecunious outsider occupies a vaguely Fanny Price-like role and even discourses at one point on the pros and cons of Austen's novel (though he has only read Lionel Trilling's essay on it). Metropolitan is a quirky film aimed at a niche audience and is an example of the kind of adaptation that, Rachel M. Brownstein suggests, thinks it is smarter than Austen.

Perhaps the most welcome essay in the Troost and Greenfield volume (because it departs from the tendency to literary or political correctness) is M. casey Diana's on her experiment teaching Sense and Sensibility to a class of undergraduates. She explains how she divided the class into two groups, one that read the novel first and then watched the Emma Thompson movie, and the other that watched the movie first and then read the novel. At the end, she surveyed class response and discovered that those who began by watching the movie were better able to understand and appreciate the novel. She makes no excuses for this result, relaying it simply as a useful pedagogical discovery. It also serves to illustrate how Bazin's non-genealogical understanding of literature and film might be put to work in the classroom.

All three of these books make us think about the choices involved in cinematic adaptation. They explore how these films reflect or diverge from their literary sources and how they correspond to meanings and trends in contemporary culture. However, none of the books grapples with the larger question of the role film currently plays in our society and how this affects the way it engages with literature. This seems a central issue for our time.

Like literature a few generations ago, film has begun to see its power and authority decline. Indeed, movies are no longer at the vanguard of popular culture; that mantle has passed to cable television, DVDs, video games, and the Internet. As a result, film seems to be over-compensating in two ways: catering to low-brow tastes through formulaic action and gross-out comedy movies and appealing to high-brow tastes through adaptations of serious literary works. The best gloss on this bifurcation can found in the film Adaptation by Charlie Kaufman. The main character in this film, a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage), struggles to adapt a serious literary work (Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief), while his twin brother (also played by Cage) tries to convince him to go the formulaic, action-packed route and forget about faithful adaptation. Charlie finally succumbs to his brother's advice, though not without spending more than half the film valiantly trying to resist it. The final film is a hybrid: it ends as a cheap action thriller but is framed by a quirky art film. Although it does not adapt Orlean's book, it nonetheless makes frequent reference to it (even quoting it at times) in order to become the movie it does. The result thus points in two directions: toward low-brow commercial entertainment and toward high-brow literary adaptation-an achievement made possible through irony. As Rachel Brownstein notes, irony may well be the preferred style for adaptation today. It allows filmmakers to have it both ways: to take liberties with a source but to do so self-consciously and avoid being accused of ignorance or crass commercialism. This can be a form of cowardice, as Brownstein suggests, but it can also be a way to freedom-a means of taking possession of a work that may otherwise be too intimidating and weighted with conventional associations to tackle directly.

A final question that needs to be asked in a discussion of cinematic adaptation is why so much attention is being paid to Shakespeare and Austen right now. Although other canonical authors have been commandeered to the screen, these two have inspired a veritable mini-industry of cinematic and televised fare. Why them and why now?

The simple answer is that these authors are inherently more suited to movies and television than other great writers. Shakespeare as a playwright and Austen as a satirist of manners are by definition more concerned with surface than depth. They are cinematic avant la lettre. No work suggests this more than The Tempest, which seems to have been waiting these four hundred years to achieve its full realization on screen. Peter Greenaway did not accomplish this in Prospero's Books, but Steven Spielberg, with the help of Pixar, very well could.

The appeal of Shakespeare and Austen can also be explained in larger social and formal terms. Both authors were living and writing in the context of new cultural paradigms. For Shakespeare, a medieval theocracy had given way to a more humanistic society-a transition that he explored in the Henriad. For Austen, a class-bound and rigidly gender dichotomous society was evolving into a more fluid and democratic one (Pride and Prejudice brightly dramatized this shift; Persuasion did so more soberly; Mansfield Park seemed to want to turn back). For both Shakespeare and Austen, moreover, societal change had bearing on their literary form. Shakespeare helped shape a more inclusive, human-centered theater. His Globe was among the more impressive of the new theatrical constructions, designed to accommodate the populace as well as the gentry, that had been cropping up around London at the end of the sixteenth century. Austen helped pioneer a more inclusive, human-centered novel, a form for the middle class and specifically for women, who would take on greater social and economic power as the century progressed.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are faced with changes in cultural experience and its representation that compare with those of Shakespeare and Austen. We live in a globally connected world served by increasingly interactive and varied forms of entertainment. Shakespeare and Austen can help ease us into this new paradigm. If their actual texts have begun to fade from cultural memory, their "souls," as Bazin would put it, live on and are available for appropriation. We can bemoan the death of literature and the ways that movie adaptations fall short of the originals, or we can see these films as the means by which enduring cultural meaning and value gets carried forward.

Personally, I am awaiting the new frontier of representation: "Pride and Prejudice: the Video Game."