The intersection of genre and adaptation is, I think, a really interesting area. Whilst it is fair to say that adaptation ‘happens’ across the whole landscape of screen genres, there is also a tendency to more readily identify certain films and groupings of films (or TV for that matter) as adaptations. Screen versions of canonical literary texts, as well as of contemporary literary fiction, would tend to fall into such a category. What has been called ‘heritage film’ is often foregrounded by its makers, and received by audiences and critics, in terms of a relationship with a prior written text. Here, I would go so far as to say that a ‘bookish’ quality may be imputed to some heritage pictures that do not actually originate from any literary source. Conversely, films that may be based – howsoever loosely – on real-life events, and for which the rights to a relevant biography or first-hand account (for example) might have been acquired, are rather less likely to be perceived as adaptations first and foremost. They may more likely be judged by their perceived adequacy to historical fact, and any anterior written account understood as another version rather than the version.
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