The Art of Adaptation in Film and Video Games

Dear Colleagues,

We live in a world of adaptation, and a failure to study that world means we must ignore an increasingly important part of contemporary culture.

—Dennis Cutchins

Studying the transformative journey of content from one genre or medium to another is of great interest to academics in several disciplines, to members of the public who are avid consumers of media, and also to practitioners of adaptation—and we are all practitioners, whether we are delivering a message by email that was originally intended to be spoken, or adapting a graphic novel into a television series like HBO’s Watchmen. But what exactly is adaptation, and what constitutes an original work? Scholars within the relatively new, interdisciplinary field of adaptation studies often cite persistent ideas from the Romantic era as driving current notions of what it means to be original, but should those ideas still dominate today? Or should we allow ourselves to be convinced—as Linda Hutcheon writes that she is in “On the Art of Adaptation”—that TS Eliot and Northrop Frye were correct in suggesting that “all art is derived from other art”?

Although questions such as these may seem somewhat abstruse, other questions remain concretely present whenever adaptation is involved. For example, when we see a beloved film remade, we are conditioned to immediately ask if it is faithful to the original. And in the case of content that is transferred from one medium to another—such as when the 1979 film Alien was loosely adapted into the 2014 video game Alien: Isolation—an exciting new layer of complexity emerges: we must now ask profound questions about the differences between, and the true potentials of the mediums involved in order to understand the adaptation process in a meaningful way.

How we answer these questions can help us to understand the mediums through which we create, communicate, and learn. It can help us to understand ourselves, and the culture of adaptation in which we live.

Christian Thomas
Guest Editor

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