The Impact of Film Adaptations on Audience Understanding

Running head: ENGLISH LITERATURE
ENGLISH LITERATURE
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1ENGLISH LITERATURE
Introduction
George Bluestone points out that the main motto of adapting a piece of written
document into film, is to make the audience see, feel, hear and visualize overall, about the
story which the writer had intended to convey (Bluestone 1968). He argues that words of a
writer can fail sometimes in making an audience feel what the writer has intended to make
him or her feel. This is the purpose which a film tries to fulfill while adopting a story. The
argument is that films make audiences understand a story better, through the help of
visualization and adding realism.
Scene analysis
In the film, “300”, which was an adaptation of the comic of the same name, by Frank
Miller and Lynn Varley, there is a scene where Leonidas meets Xerxes. It is a scene which is
heavily loaded with dialogues, with dialogues themselves playing the single most important
aspect in building the intensity of the scene. It is through a series of metric montages that the
editor and the director of the film has portrayed the expressions of both of the characters, to
build that intensity. The background is a very aesthetic coast, with the lighting conditions
adding to the appeal of the scene. The voices of both the characters were low and bold,
adding to the intensity of the scene. These factors, of course, could not be presented through a
series of depictions in the comic, to provide the same feel as that of the movie.
Annotated bibliography
McDonald, K.I., 2016. From Book to Screen: Modern Japanese Literature in
Films: Modern Japanese Literature in Films. Routledge.
The main purpose behind adapting a story or comic into a film is to make the
audience understand the context and the occurrences of the story better. The idea here is that