Adaptation: The Method that Demands Change
By Wesley Newman // CBT
When bringing the Bible to the screen, it seems like most filmmakers face the same dilemma:
Adaptation demands change, while audiences search for faithfulness.
According to scholars, adaptations by definition are never meant to be fully faithful to the original material.
And many talented filmmakers have bought into the belief that if you’re going to turn a book into a film, you have to change things.
Perhaps the problem is our language?
Perhaps the Bible does not need another adaptation.
It needs to be translated.
And a translation faithfully carries information from one language to another. (We’ll get into that later…)
Not just from Hebrew to English.
But from literature into cinema.
That is the challenge at the heart of Cinematic Biblical Translation:
How do we preserve what Scripture communicates while changing the language through which it communicates?
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It seems like whenever a new biblical movie comes out, we have the same conversation.
"They left that part out."
"That isn't how it happened."
Whether it's Noah (2014), The Chosen (2019), or The Ten Commandments (1956), we seem to instinctively compare the film or TV series to the biblical text.
We often want to discuss what was added, omitted, or rearranged.
Why?
We care about the biblical story, and we want to see it done well on screen.
But if we truly want to experience a faithful and engaging biblical film, we may have to do something drastic.
We may have to accept that the Bible might never have a faithful “adaptation.”
Most adaptation scholars no longer judge a film by how closely it follows the original.
Brian McFarlane argued in his 1996 book, Novel to Film, that…
“Books and films speak different languages.”
Therefore, adaptations are not expected to preserve every detail from the original story.
For example:
Steven Spielberg's Jaws leaves behind entire subplots from Peter Benchley's novel.
Ron Howard's How the Grinch Stole Christmas expands a 64-page picture book into a 104-minute feature film by inventing new characters, conflicts, and emotional backstories.
Neither film is criticized for making these changes.
Why?
1: they are super enjoyable, crowd-pleasers!
2: that’s precisely what adaptations do…
It reshapes a story so it can live in a new medium.
Translation offers another path.
The goal of translation is to preserve what the text communicates, as well as the pattern in which it’s presented.
Even when the narrative is presented through a new language.
But translating from a written language of words to a language of images, sound, and emotion is a demanding task.
It also raises very interesting questions like…
How do we portray spiritual realities on screen?
How do we show what a character is thinking without having a narrator explain it?
How do we use images and sound to show an unseen God at work in a visual medium?
Adaptations can ignore these issues if they choose.
Translations can not.
A translation must strive to preserve the unseen in a way that does not add to the original narrative or make interpretive decisions.
The question is how…
How could a cinematic translation of scripture be accomplished?
That’s what this journey is all about.
Through this blog, we will discuss…
The fundamentals of filmmaking and biblical research that inform our method of translation.
Building one piece at a time,
so that we can be confident in the films that we are producing,
as well as the impact they might have.
…Next time we will discuss the hidden contender in the field of biblical films… recitation.
Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film, 21.; Mary H. Snyder, “Adaptation in Theory and Practice: Mending the Imaginary Fence,” in The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 114.
Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film, 9, 29, 198.
