Adaptation films are often held against their source materials, looked at as secondary to them, rather than as new, creative works with the potential for true aesthetic and dramatic innovation.
This is why, for Cinephile volume 11, issue 3, we’ve emphasized not only cinema’s powers of adaptation, but its powers of translation and permutation; cinema has a remarkable ability to re-imbue source material with new life, and launch it into new audiences not in spite of its anchoring to source material, but because of it.
Cinema does not just adapt. It transforms.