People with intellectual aspirations often posit that books are better than films. But this is not true. Certainly there are some books that are better than most movies, and some movies that are better than most books. But even such a general comparison is difficult to make, for when we compare books and movies to each other we are engaging in the traveling comparison of apples and oranges. And the essential difference between the two (movies and books in this case, not apples and oranges) ensures that the process of adapting a book for the big screen is replete with aesthetic and intellectual perils. This paper examines one particular instance of such an adaptation - the film Girl with a Pearl Earring (directed by Peter Webber), which was adapted from Tracy Chevalier's novel of the same name.
One of the most important distinctions between the experience of reading a book and that of watching a film, as Seger (1992) notes, is the difference of the way in which time is dealt with by the two media.
But the experiences of reading a novel is quite different from watching a film. And it's exactly this difference that fights translation into film. When we read a novel, time is on our side. It is not just a chronological experience, where someone else determines our pacing, but a reflective experience. Rarely do we read a novel in one sitting. In fact, part of the joy of reading is going back to the book. The reading, putting it down, thinking about it, sometimes reading a page twice is part of the pleasure. It is a reveling in the language as much as revealing the story pp. 13-14).
Books are not our own creations, but those of their authors, and of course we realize this. And yet, the act of reading - of choosing, as Seger notes, to stop at a certain place and go back to reread a section, to put the book down for a week so as to draw out the ending for as long as possible - all of these things give us possession of a book in a way t...