Fifty percent of Hollywood productions each year are adaptations--films that use an already published book, dramatic work, or comic as their source material. If the original is well known, then for most spectators the question of whether these adaptations are "true to the spirit" of the original is central. The recent wave of adaptation studies dismisses the question of fidelity as irrelevant, mistaken, or an affront to the unstable nature of meaning itself. The essays gathered here, mixing the field's top authorities (Andrew, Gunning, Jameson, Mulvey, and Naremore) with fresh new voices, take the question of correspondence between source and adaptation as seriously as do producers and audiences. Spanning examples from Shakespeare to Ghost World, and addressing such notable directors as Welles, Kubrick, Hawks, Tarkovsky, and Ophuls, the contributors write against the grain of recent adaption studies by investigating the question of what fidelity might mean in its broadest and truest sense, what it might reveal of the adaptive process, and why it is still one of the richest veins of investigation in the study of cinema.

本書は映画化における「忠実さ」という難問に挑んだ画期的な評論集です。学術界で軽視されがちな「原作の精神」を議論の中心に据え、テクストから映像へ変容する際に何が不変として残るのかを問い直します。巨匠たちの論考は、映画と文学の幸福なマリアージュを再考させ、読者の知的好奇心を激しく揺さぶります。 ウェルズやタルコフスキーらの名作を例に、単なる模倣を超えた「創造的忠実さ」を解明する筆致は圧巻です。物語が媒体を越えて呼吸を始める瞬間に立ち会うような体験は、作品の魂を追い求める全ての読者を虜にするでしょう。映画と文学の境界線で火花を散らす、情熱的で鋭利な知の冒険がここにあります。