2012Supervisor: Dr. Alexandera SchneiderSecond reader: Dr. Er ik Laeven

Harm RieskeMaster Thesis Film Studies by

Comics, Games, and Rides Adapted to FilmRevisualization

Master thesis Revisualisation: Comics, Games, and Rides Adapted to Film Harm Rieske 5634717 H_Rieske@hotmail.com 06-14968367 Markengouw 143, 1024 CX Amsterdam Supervisor: Dr. Alexandra Schneider Second reader: Dr. Erik Laeven Master Film Studies University of Amsterdam 02-06-2012 Cover design: Harm Rieske Upper cover picture: Miller, Frank. ‘Marv jumps through a window’ Sin City:

The Hard Goodbye. Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Books, 2005. 15. Lower cover picture: Rodriguez, Robert, Frank Miller. Sin City. Marv jumps

through a window (00:15:11).

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Table of Contents Abstract Keywords Acknowledgements Foreword Part I 1. Introduction 2. Corpus and Methodology 3. Understanding Adaptation

3.1. On the Origin of Adaptations 3.1.1. The Limits of Adaptation

3.2. Recurring Concepts in Adaptation Studies 3.2.1. Accessibility 3.2.2. Primacy 3.2.3. Fidelity

3.3. Theoretical Approaches to Studying Adaptation 3.3.1. The Problem of Semiotic Heresy 3.3.2. Intertextuality as Alternative

3.4. Model: Plot as Sequence and Modes of Narration Part II 4. Comic Book Adaptations

4.1. Crosspollination: The Common History of Comics and Movies 4.2. The Ontology of the Comic Book 4.3. Comics and Film as Distant Cousins: Parallels and Discrepancies 4.4. Case Study 1: Sin City (Rodriguez & Miller, 2005)

4.4.1. Fidelity to the Story 4.4.2. Fidelity to the Style 4.4.3. Sound

4.5. Concluding Thoughts: Reduction, Addition and Split-screen 5. Video Game Adaptations

5.1. The Relationship between Video Games and Film 5.2. The Use of Video Game Elements in Film 5.3. Case Study 2: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Newell, 2010)

5.3.1. Synopsis of the Film’s Story 5.3.2. Description of the Video Games 5.3.3. Story and Iconography 5.3.4. Plot Structure 5.3.5. Space-Time Warps

3 3 3 3

4 5

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32 33 33 38 40 44 45 46 48 51 58 58 63 67 67 68 69 69 71

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5.3.6. Repetition 5.3.7. Pause-and-Save Functions 5.3.8. Immediate Rewards and Punishments 5.3.9. Camera Positions 5.3.10. Avatar Moves

5.4. Concluding Thoughts: Easter Eggs in Game-Movies 6. Ride Adaptations

6.1. The Relationship between Rides and Film 6.2. Case Study 3: Pirates of the Caribbean

6.2.1. Synopsis of the Film 6.2.2. Iconography 6.2.3. Plot Structure 6.2.4. Thrill 6.2.5. Looking at Vignettes

6.3. Concluding Thoughts: Sliding Sources and Pastiche Part III 7. Conclusion: Sprinkles on Top Sources a) Literature b) Other - Films - Television Series - Video Games - Amusement Park Attractions - Other Audiovisual Sources List of Illustrations - Images - Graphs - Tables - Schemas Appendix

71 71 73 73 74 76 79 80 83 84 85 86 87 88 90

96 97

101 101 108 108 110 110 110 111 113 113 113 114 114 115

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Abstract Adaptation is a common practice in film production and a part of the trans-media dissemination of stories in franchises. This thesis investigates the use of comics, videogames, and theme park attractions as source media. How are these media translated to film? More specifically, I believe that not just the stories are brought to the silver screen, but also the iconography is main-tained, and scenes are meticulously replicated. Even the source media them-selves, and their modes of narration, are referenced. It is a matter of fidelity to plot and style, independent of the issue of fidelity to the story. The in-stances discussed can be seen as remediations, however, as intertextual ref-erences they appeal to audiences who recognise the similarities to the source texts. Keywords Adaptation, Fidelity, Plot, Iconography, Style, Comic Books, Video Games, Rides. Acknowledgements This thesis took the necessary time and effort to come into being; time and effort not only on my part. First I want to thank my supervisor, Alexandra Schneider, for bearing with me, her extensive feedback, and helping me de-cide where to take the project. For the long discussions I had with Roxanna Booms to figure out bits and pieces of the adaptation puzzle I am most grate-ful. I also want to express my thanks to her, Deborah Regan, Dineke Rieske and Patricia Zwolsman for their linguistic and editorial advices. Foreword I started working on this thesis after studying at the University of Amsterdam for four years. Before I could finish it though, I had started studying directing at the Dutch Film and Television Academy. Whereas at the university I was primarily dealing with the final products, at the academy I was confronted with aspects of production itself. In the writing of this thesis I became inter-ested not only in what filmmakers do in their films to create such a striking resemblance to the products of popular culture they adapted, but also how, and why, they do it. The focus in this thesis remains on the first question, but at times I shall make an excursion to the other two. Through all the struggles and holidays spent on this thesis, I worked on it with a sense of en-joyment as I gained a better understanding of the revisualisation of source elements in adaptations.

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PART I

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1. INTRODUCTION Young Dastan hops over the roofs of a Persian town like a parkour athlete.1 A soldier takes a wrong step and falls through the roof. Dastan takes a huge leap to a house across the street and hops from one beam to the other. ‘It’s just like the game’, I say to my girlfriend as I sit in the cinema and watch Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Newell, 2010. Hereafter referred to as Prince of Persia.) for the first time. My reaction to the opening sequence of Prince of Persia set me thinking; what the filmmakers had done in their adaptation of the 2003 video game to give me that feeling? Why might they have done it, and how could I define this in relation to existing theories of adaptation? For I realized, more than just the story had been translated to the screen.

Beside adaptations of video games, this thesis also analyses two other visual media that are used as source texts: comic books and amusement park attractions (rides). As it is has become more common to draw the raw ma-terial for films from media relatively young compared to written text, our under-standing of adaptation has to deal with elements that are outside of the story. The issue is that, besides story, plot, and iconography can also be adapted; elements that are generally considered as form or style. As Greg Smith notes, ‘[p]roducers adapting works from other media make choices about how to translate formal elements into their functional equivalents in the other medi-um’.2 This is what I want to investigate. My hypothesis is that reference to the original text’s plot elements and iconography facilitate fidelity to the source text independent from fidelity to the story. In the case of visual media these references are arguably more objective too. How a feeling akin to the experience with the source medium is facilitated in film’s form and narrative structure has not yet been thoroughly addressed in adaptation studies. To address the ways in which the source medium shimmers through in the ad-aptation I pose the following research question: In what ways do adaptations based on comics, games, and rides incorporate plot elements and iconogra-phy from their sources?

1 Parkour is a sport also called free running in which athletes aim to move from one place to another as fast and efficient as possible. 2 Smith, 1999, 32.

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Adaptations are no new phenomenon. Rachel Carroll writes about ‘a cultural compulsion to repeat [of which] adaptations are perhaps symptomatic’.3 In her opinion, ‘[a]ll adaptations express or address a desire to return to an ‘original’ textual encounter’.4 This compulsion to repeat goes deeper than adap-tations, remakes and the lot. People tell each other the same basic stories again and again. Character, places, and structure change, but it has long been noticed that similar themes reoccur and that the same building blocks are used.5 Georges Polti, for instance, categorized the dramatic situations in stories in The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations,6 and Vladimir Propp breaks down the folktale into 31 narrative units: functions.

Functions serve as stable, constant elements in folktales, independent of who performs them, and how they are fulfilled by the dramatis per-sonae. They constitute the components of a folktale.7

With this in mind, an adaptation would come down to maintaining enough functions, dramatic situations, and characters.

Genres are a good example of how we like to consume similar texts but where every text differs enough from its predecessors to be new. Rick Altman observes that ‘[b]y assaying and imitating the money-making qualities of their most lucrative films, studios seek to initiate film cycles that will provide successful, easily exploitable models associated with a single studio’.8 Block-busters, on the other hand, are ‘one-off’ productions, Thomas Elsaesser ex-plains, that are intended to flood the market with the opportunity for sequels when successful. Such productions demands that a large part of the budget is dedicated to creating ‘recognition value’. The advantage of adaptations and those from visual media in particular, is that there already is a lot of existing material that audiences are familiar with. By publishing material across vari-ous media each instance acts as advertisement for the others as well. One can even go as far as calling a film a, ‘sign board stretched over time’.9 Jeff Smith writes about cross-promotion strategies with film: ‘[b]y creating multi-ple profit centres for a single property, synergy spreads risk among several

3 Carroll, 2009, 1. 4 Carroll, 2009, 1. 5 Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the folk tale for instance takes a formalist approach to separate elements or morphemes that make up stories. 6 Polti, 1931. 7 Propp, 1958, 20. 8 Altman, 2000, 60. These cycles are already based on elements of existing genres and can in turn spawn a industry-wide genre. (Altman, 2000, 60-61.) 9 Elsaesser, 2000, 28.

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different commodities’10 ranging from movies to toys. Disney, for instance, ‘has a long history of using creative properties to link together its various business concerns’.11

Franchises, like genres, rely on supplying new texts and products to an established base. Martin Picard describes how franchise play into our ap-petite for more of the same.

This aggressive strategy played on consumers’ desire for franchises they liked; once the consumption of a franchise begins, one wants logically and emotionally to obtain other products in the franchise, to obtain a complete vision of the whole, both materially and narratively.12

In the case of adaptations, when viewers are familiar with the text cited and spot the references in the film it strengthens their relationship to both texts. Viewers can use their knowledge of the texts to distinguish themselves as in-dividual. I want to argue, as Linda Hutcheon does, that ‘[p]art of this pleasure [of adaptations] comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise’.13 Alternatively viewers unfamil-iar with the source may purchase that too. André Bazin already refers to ‘publishers’ statistics that show a rise in the sale of literary works after they have been adapted to the screen’.14

The reuse of story material, characters, and story worlds in franchises is also a result of convergence in media industries. Convergence is one of the reasons there currently are so many big budget adaptations of popular mate-rial. Henry Jenkins explains that:

[t]he last several decades have moved the entertainment industry into a logic of franchises and transmedia story telling. That is an economic necessity given the way the Hollywood structure operates, where the same companies own interest in many different media platforms. It is also an aesthetic possibility.15

10 Smith, 1998, 188. Smith explains that scale economics is intended to maximise the use of existing resources and spread risk. (Smith, 1998, 189.) For example, visual effects companies and game developers are closely linked and can reuse each other’s work such as 3D character models. Although Smith is concerned with cross-promotion of film and music, the model of scale economics he talks about, that is the basis for synergy, is also applicable to other cross-promotions with film. 11 Nelson, 2008, 39. 12 Picard, 2008, 298-299. 13 Hutcheon, 2006, 4. 14 Bazin, 1967, 65. 15 Henry Jenkins Interviewed at the 5D conference. ‘5D Presents: The Amazing 5th Di-mension!’ 12.11.2009. 28-09-2011. 00:02:53 – 00:03:12.

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Convergence represents ‘a reshaping of media aesthetics and economics’16. Jenkins not only uses the term convergence to describe ‘the cooperation be-tween multiple media industries’ and to represent ‘a cultural shift as con-sumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content’.17 Also, media themselves are taking over each other’s traits. Jenkins also uses convergence to denote ‘the flow of con-tent across multiple media platforms’.18 Adaptation should thus be regarded as a practice among many that is part of, and influenced by, the convergence in the media.

The number of films based on stories from visual media has never been as high as in the last decade (2000-2010) as graph 1 illustrates.19 Graph 1: Number of Films Based on Comics, Games and Rides per Decade.20

Adaptation is a common practice taking place, back and forth, between many different media that accounts for a large part of our media production.21 Our theatres are flooded, not only with adaptations but also sequels, prequels, remakes, spin-offs and franchise reboots. Especially now, in a time with me-

16 Jenkins, 2004, 35. 17 Jenkins, 2006, 2-3. Tim Dwyer summarizes that ‘[c]onvergence is never just a techno-logical process but is implicated in, and expressed as, profound and ongoing social, cul-tural and economic change’. (Dwyer, 2010, 8.) 18 Jenkins, 2006, 2. 19 Although film is also a visual medium remakes are not considered. Graph 1 is limited to the three media analysed as source media in this thesis. 20 Data collected from IMDb keyword searches. The Internet Movie Database. ‘Earliest "Based On Comic Book" Titles.’ 2011. 17-04-2011. / The Internet Movie Database. ‘Ear-liest "Based On Video Game" Titles.’ 2011. 17-04-2011. / The Internet Movie Database. ‘Earliest "Based On Theme Park Attraction" Titles.’ 2011. 17-04-2011. 21 See appendix 1 for an overview of the numbers of films that are based on pre-existing texts.

22 40

56

97

174

69

8

56

87

49

1 6 1 0

20406080

100120140160180200

1960's 1970's 1980's 1990's 2000's 2010's

Comics Games Rides

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dia conglomerates that rely heavily on intellectual property, adaptations offer excellent chances for boosting sales.1 Hewitt, O’Hara, and Goldsmith are right to point out that ‘[s]uperhero films, and Marvel movies in particular, saved many a studio’s balance sheet. Now, comic-book flicks are as close to a sure thing as you can get in Hollywood’.22

The ‘world/universe’ or diegesis a story takes place in has come to dominate transmedia story telling as it is disseminated across various prod-ucts. Hence, intellectual properties such as the rights to specific characters or the concept for a world have become more valuable than actual stories. From this perspective, adaptations do not have to stay true to the story of the original but to its diegesis and iconography. This thesis is not concerned with fidelity to the story but with the recognition of stylistic elements. To analyse the ways in which adaptations incorporate plot elements and iconography from their sources this thesis is structured as follows. Part one introduces the topic and casus of this thesis. The corpus of films and the methodology used in this thesis shall be discussed in the up-coming chapter. Next, chapter three introduces the topic of adaptation. This includes the standard approaches to adaptation focusing on fidelity as well as intertextual approaches along the lines of transmedia storytelling and re-mediation. Accessibility, primacy, and fidelity are discussed as key concepts. The chapter ends with my own perspective that privileges plot. The frame-works of thinking described in this chapter are for a basic understanding of adaptation and serve as a foundation for the rest of the thesis.

Part two is concerned with the analysis of the case studies. These are: Sin City (Rodriguez & Miller, 2005) in chapter four on comic book adapta-tions; Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for video game adaptations in chap-ter five and the Pirates of the Caribbean series23 is the prime example of films based on a ride discussed in chapter six. Because three different kinds of source media are analysed in chapters four to six, theories pertaining to the medium in question and issues of adapting them to film are introduced at the beginning of each chapter. The structure of the analyses and the intro-ductions to these chapters differ from each other since the various media re-quire different points of attention. Also, the introduction to comic book adap-tations is much longer than the other two because comic book adaptations have been around as long as cinema whereas video game and ride adapta-

22 Hewitt, O’Hara and Goldsmith, 2006, 88. 23 Currently the series contains the following four instalments: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Verbinski, 2003); Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (Verbinski, 2006); Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Verbinski, 2007) and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Marshall, 2011).

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tions are phenomena barely two decades old. After the theoretical introduc-tions and the analysis, the chapters end with a short discussion on topics that come up during the analysis. Chapter seven looks back on these adapta-tions of visual media to see how they work in terms of intertextuality.

The last part contains the concluding chapter to this thesis. Chapter eight ends the thesis by reviewing the analyses, findings, and the value of adapting modes of narration as sprinkles on top.

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2. CORPUS AND METHODOLOGY With comics, games, and rides as sources, the adaptations can translate nar-rative and formal elements into film’s audiovisual language and make visual and auditory citations. This relation to their sources makes them of interest for adaptation studies that strives to go beyond the literature-to-film para-digm. Besides, adaptation from literature, which is discussed as starting point in the next chapter, has had enough scholarly attention compared to the other kinds of adaptations that have overwhelmed us the last decade. Comics, games, and rides are considered because they are all visual and have varying amounts of story to be adapted which might indicate more reli-ance on iconography and modes of narration in adaptations. Compared to adaptations from novels, adaptations from comics, games and rides also re-sist traditional fidelity to stories because authorative sources are hard to lo-cate or less dependent on storylines than novels.

The corpus for this thesis is limited to the three source media: comics, games, and rides. Per source medium there is one in-depth case study. The films analysed are all from between 2000 and 2010, supplemented with some earlier examples for historical perspective. Furthermore, the films chosen are all intended for large audiences. Comics, games, and rides are chosen as source media to be investigated because they are visual, narrative, and time-based. Moreover, they are not too close to film as television series are or as remote from film as painting or sculpture.24

For the comic books chapter I have read Frank Miller’s graphic novels that are the source for Sin City.25 I have also read a selection of the source material for the other examples I mention.26 Unfortunately, I have not been to Disneyland in California or Paris to experience the Pirates of the Caribbean ride myself. My analysis of the ride is based on film and video documenta-tions, as well as written descriptions.27 Outside of Disneyland I have ridden

24 Animation films are not in the main casus because they are too much alike the source medium. Adaptations to live-action films, also those using Computer Gener-ated Imagery (CGI), have to deal with an aesthetic that does not match the source. But it is the ‘translation’ to film that is of interest here. As CGI is also animation, the animation films that are left out of the corpus are those that have no live action at all. 25 Miller, 1994. Miller, 1996. Miller, 2005. Miller,2005. 26 I have also read the six graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley that the film Scott Pil-grim vs. the World (Wright, 2010) is based on. (O'Malley, 2004. O'Malley, 2005. O'Malley, 2006. O'Malley, 2007. O'Malley, 2009. O'Malley, 2010.) 27 For the precise information on these sources please see appendix 2.

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roller-coasters and dark rides, therefore, I do understand the experience and the techniques involved. I also had to rely on videos and written descriptions for the video games. I am not a gamer. I could never play through all the lev-els of all the versions of Prince of Persia for the sake of this thesis. I do re-member the 2D platformer28 version of Prince of Persia (Brøderbund Software, 1989) on the NES29 in the early nineties. For an impression of the games analysed I have looked at walkthrough videos on YouTube and for the story-lines I have consulted fan encyclopaedias as well as developer’s websites.30 Furthermore, I have consulted Barry Atkins’ chapter on the video game Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Ubisoft, 2003) as well as Jason Rhody’s and Drew Davidson’s conference papers on the game. Davidson describes the whole game as he played through it.

To find the elements that relate to the source medium I use film and textual analysis. Comics, games and rides are interpreted as ‘texts’. I use text according to Mieke Bal’s definition of the term, as ‘a finite, structured whole composed of language signs’31. The readings of the films are based on the media specific traits of the source medium in question. For instance, the analysis of a comic book adaptation reviews which film techniques are used to emulate traits such as panels and the style of drawings. The elements looked for are based on elements that are characteristic for the source medi-um whilst not ontologically impossible to transpose to film. In finding these elements I also rely on the works of scholars before me who have investigated the media in question and their relationship to film. In the case of rides, however, I was unable to find scholarly work on the topic so I relied on my own observations of rides in general.

Both the analyses of the films and the source text are about the way the stories are told. This comes down to a comparison of the plots; the tech-niques they use; and, to a lesser extent, includes style and genre. The anal-yses focus on formal aspects and are not concerned with characters’ actions, psychoanalysis, or ‘hidden’ messages. Rather, they are a means of finding how and when formal aspects of the source medium are used. The analysis of a few cases aspires to gain insight about the use of such adaptation practic-es. The following case studies provide examples and make connections to ad-aptation in general. I am aware that as samples the adaptations in question

28 Platformer is a term used to describe games in which the avatar must find a way through the game space by climbing and jumping from platform to platform. For a full definition of the genre see appendix 10. 29 NES is the abbreviation of Nintendo Entertainment System. 30 For the precise information on these sources please see appendix 3. 31 Bal, 1999, 5. Although language is not so evident in rides they do have recognisa-ble elements.

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will not use all means possible to translate traits of the source medium and have their individual reasons to do so. To touch upon the consequent hiatus-es, incidental references are made to other adaptations. This approach pre-sents a manageable task relative to the scope and intricacies of adaptation as a practice in the film industry and as a cultural phenomenon in general.

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3. UNDERSTANDING ADAPTATION All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experiences into new forms. The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.32

Marshall McLuhan 3.1. On the Origin of Adaptations The adaptation of stories from one medium to the other has been around since people started writing them down; transferring them from speech to writing. And even before that, in oral traditions, each storyteller of the story would indivertibly make changes. With every telling, the story is mutated a little to suit the teller and the audience. When a story is written down, or otherwise recorded, one has to deal with subtle alterations, a diversity of ver-sions, and the medium of recording.

Adaptation is described in the dictionary as the ‘adjustment to envi-ronmental conditions [and] a composition rewritten into a new form’.33 Both def-initions stem from the Latin adaptō34 meaning to adjust or modify and describe a change in something due to it being placed in a new environment. The term is also used for the text based on a previous text. In my opinion, adaptation is best used to describe the process rather than the product; the verb rather than the noun.

As the words adaptation and mutation suggest, the adaptation of texts is not to dissimilar to that of evolution. Robert Stam even links it to the sur-vival of texts, saying that:

if mutation is the means by which the evolutionary process advances, then we can also see filmic adaptations as “mutations” that help their source novel “survive.” Do not adaptations “adapt to” changing environ-ments and changing tastes, as well as to a new medium, with its distinct industrial demands, commercial pressures, censorship taboos, and aes-thetic norms?35

32 McLuhan, 1994, 57. 33 Merriam-Webster. ‘adaptation.’ 2011. 12-05-2011. 34 Wiktionary. ‘Adapto.’ n.d. 12-05-2011. 35 Stam, 2005, 3.

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When one thinks of adaptation and evolution Charles Darwin comes to mind. He built on existing evolutionary theories of transmutation. That term combines translating and mutation: the change in the translation. This is also what we observe in adaptations across media. Darwin’s insight is the explanation of transmutation as the result of natural selection. Linda Hutcheon makes an analogy to this process.

[A]daptations – as both repetition and variation – are their form of repli-cation. Evolving by cultural selection, traveling stories adapt to local cul-tures, just as populations of organisms adapt to local environments.36

My understanding of the term adaptation is also inspired by its place in evo-lutionary theory. Adaptation is about the change a being, in this case a text, undergoes to survive when it is placed in a new environment, in this case a different medium. By adapting to new circumstances it is able to survive in the new environment, but it differs from its ancestors. Thus, adaptation is about the process of change rather than the status of a text. I refer to text because it is the text that changes as a whole, even if the story stays almost the same.

Already in the silent-film era, the movies partake in the exchange of characters and stories between media. I believe that adaptation is just one of the symptoms of cinema’s parasitic nature. It requires beautiful things to be filmed, music to be reproduced, and stories to be told. It is a synthetic art that relies on other arts. Cinema is good at telling stories visually, but writ-ing those stories is only one of the disciplines, or pillars, that the seventh art is built on. So, getting stories from somewhere else is only natural. Modifying them to work cinematically is like the mutation of a story when it is told by different people in an oral tradition. Just as bringing a play to the stage re-quires translation,37 all films mutate when they go from script to screen, whether they are based on literature or not. Christa Albrecht-Crane and Den-nis Cutchins sum it up well saying that ‘all films are dialogic, heteroglossic ad-aptations [and] are intertextual by definition, multivocal by necessity, and adap-tive by their nature’.38 To a certain extent every film deals with the process of adaptation.

36 Hutcheon, 2006, 177. 37 To take a play from page to stage always requires adaptation to fit it in the con-temporary context and carry the performers’ message and interpretation. But as Neil Sinyard observes, ‘[t]he status of the text is different in both. In theatre, it can be infinitely reinterpreted. When filmed, that is absolutely its final form’. (Sinyard, 1986, 157.) 38 Albrecht-Crane & Cutchins, 2010, 19.

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When thinking of adaptation and film one likely associates it with film versions of novels. This may be a consequence of adaptation studies begin-ning in literature faculties. Though adaptation can also be used to describe more than just films based on novels, in practice there are limits to the term. 3.1.1. The Limits of Adaptation Adaptation occurs when messages go from one medium to the other; when they move to other sign systems. But this is not just translation. All media and arts are different whilst sharing traits with neighbouring media and arts. Content can go from any one to any other, only some are more alike requiring less alteration to match the target medium or form.39 Because media differ in the way they communicate information, transposing content from one medi-um to another involves reinterpretation of the information. The adaptation to the target medium likely requires that certain elements of the source text have to be removed while others have to be added. Film, for instance, uses moving images and sound, whereas comics only have still images. A comic book adaptation will have to add sound and movement. I agree with Noël Carroll that ‘[u]se determines what aspects of the medium are relevant for aesthetics, rather than some essential trait of the medium determining the proper use of the medium’.40 I hope my analyses show that film can also use techniques that are ‘specific’ to other media.

Transferring content between media that use different senses is harder and the resulting text is often not regarded as an adaptation. The general use of the term adaptation caries an underlying assumption that the source and destination media are time-based. Literature may not be considered time-based, but it takes time to read it or tell it as a story. One does not speak of adaptations when considering the exchanges between still pictures, sculpture or architecture for instance. One talks about copying, borrowing, appropria-tion, referencing, adopting even, but not adaptation. These works can be in-spired by one another and be inspired by time-based media and in turn in-spire time-based media, but, they will not easily form a relation that one con-siders adaptation. The spreading of ‘property’ between time-based and static media is better called repurposing. It is the ‘term used in the entertainment industry to describe the practice of adapting a “property” for a number of differ-ent media venues,’41 as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin explain. Gener-

39 For a visual representation of neighboring media see appendix 4. 40 Carroll, 1996, 29. 41 Bolter & Grusin, 1999, 273.

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ally speaking, time-based media are used for narrative.42 Narrative comes in the senses we are familiar with: sight and hearing. Familiarity and narrative are on one side of a spectrum that has abstraction on the opposite end.43 Ad-aptation of an ‘abstract’ art like music is immensely difficult because music is so open to interpretation. Disney’s Fantasia (1940)44 is a wonderful exam-ple of translating music to moving pictures, but is it an adaptation?45 In summary, narrative forms are prone to adaptation, and, adaptation is most straightforward between narrative media that are familiar to us.46

From a scholarly perspective the good thing about adaptations is that they are very suitable for comparative research.47 Ironically, this is also a bad thing. Finding differences between an adaptation and its source provides concrete information about the changes made. Even more can be learned from studying adaptations if one takes into account that multiple adapta-tions are made from the same story; across various media even. Comparing versions informs one about the choices that are made during the production, and, possible cultural influence of the time and place of production. These comparisons can reveal the ‘signature’ of the maker or auteur. Nevertheless, I believe that comparative research should not be about finding obvious differ-ences but about finding similarities. It are exactly those things that are per-haps not the same but similar, which provide rich information for scholars because they inform about the efforts of translation. If one wants to tell a story with a different medium well, one has to find analogies in that other medium to convey the same idea. This approach celebrates the creative pow-er of filmmakers to help a story adapt to a new medium rather than mourn for the ‘lost’ source. It is this ‘mourning’ that is also the basis for what can go wrong with comparative research. Linda Hutcheon points out that ‘[a]lthough adaptations are also aesthetic objects in their own right, it is only as inherently

42 This does not deny that pictures, for instance, are able to tell stories and that films and music can choose not to tell stories. The correlation between time and nar-rative is more a general trend. 43 For a diagram depicting senses and media on a scale from familiar to abstract see ap-pendix 5. 44 Individual segments were directed by James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe, Norman Ferguson, Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield and Ben Sharpsteen. 45 Walter Ruttmann’s Opus series can be seen as a remediation of music. It does not want to visualize a specific piece of music. It is as abstract as music is and builds on the same structures of music: rhythm and volume. Timbre and melody were arguably ‘translated’ as colour and shapes. 46 There are few media for smell and taste, though perfumes and food come to mind and can be considered as media. I am also aware that my analysis ignores Braille as writing through touch. 47 The source can be used as control group, the adaptation as the test.

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double or multilaminated works that they can be theorized as adaptations’.48 It is this multilaminated nature that makes adaptations so debated. 3.2. Recurring Concepts in Adaptation Studies Traditionally, adaptation studies have predominantly favoured one text (the source) over another (the target). The fidelity approach usually privileges the novel over the film.49

Richard Berger Although the terms are contested I continue to use source and adaptation or target as means to indicate the relation between texts throughout this thesis. This is not due to a sense of hierarchy but as a means to make comprehensi-ble their mutual history and relation to one another. Although the texts ana-lysed in this thesis, and many others out there, are not adaptations, strictly speaking, they are based-on a previous text50 which means there is a source to speak of. I mostly use adaptation as verb though, indicating the altering process. Three other recurring concepts in adaptation studies are accessibil-ity, primacy, and fidelity. 3.2.1. Accessibility Any adaptation has to account for people who are not familiar with the source text. Enough exposition has to be provided for novice viewers to understand the text and the characters. If the information is integrated naturally, initiated view-ers may appreciate that such a fundamental element of the text is preserved. Viewers familiar with the source text pick up on what is preserved, added, or deleted. Although intertextual references to the source will be picked up by this group, they cannot be essential to understanding the story for risk of alienating new audiences. 3.2.2. Primacy In adaptation studies the term primacy is used to describe how the version encountered first becomes a benchmark to which following encounters are compared. Primacy is also a prerequisite for audiences to experience an adapta-tion as adaptation. Viewers familiar with the source text ‘oscillate’ between that and the adaptation. As Lefèvre puts ‘the problem of primacy: usually people

48 Hutcheon, 2006, 6. 49 Richard Berger, 2008, 88. 50 Or they are based on a preferred/authorative text in the case of simultaneous distri-bution of transmedia franchises.

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prefer the first version of a story they encounter’.51 The source text is ‘already treasured’ as Dudley Andrew puts it.52 Often people encounter older versions first, but, as Linda Hutcheon puts it, ‘to be second is not to be secondary or inferior; likewise, to be first is not to be originary or authoritative’.53 Hutcheon also explains that this process can also happen in reverse when one comes in contact with the source text after the adaptation.54 Adaptations are no threat to their sources. Adaptations can actually help them; granting them an ‘afterlife’ as Hutcheon calls it.55 Bazin already points out that more copies of a book are sold after the work is adapted to film.56 People who see the film and want more seem to be inclined to by the source text too.

Why do people usually prefer the first version they encounter though? I believe it has everything to do with imagination. The best narratives, be they in the form of comics, films or otherwise, work on the imagination of the consumer. Films that let the audience actively fill in certain elements create a stronger experience because the audience is engaged. This is why horror films, for instance, use sound a lot to generate images in the imagination of the viewer that are never shown on screen. The first experience a person has with a given story is also the time that there are still the most blanks to be filled in by one’s imagination. In this regard literature works entirely through images the reader creates, making it a very strong first encounter. If one con-siders the way the first experience with a story becomes the benchmark for later encounters, it makes sense to use movies as tent poles for transmedia dissemination of characters and stories. I think it is fruitful to make a con-nection here to Marshal McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cold media. If the first encounter is hot, as McLuhan describes media that leave little to the user to fill in,57 a person will use memories of that first encounter to fill in the gaps in subsequent encounters with the story that are colder. Thus, if the first encounter is in the hottest medium, film, subsequent encounters do not create a conflict that easily. The other way around conflict is more likely to occur. This brings us to the thorny issue of fidelity.

51 Lefèvre, 2007, 2. 52 Andrew, 2000, 29. 53 Hutcheon, 2006, XIII. 54 Hutcheon, 2006, XV. 55 Hutcheon, 2006, 176. 56 Bazin, 1967, 65. 57 McLuhan writes that ‘[a] hot medium is one that extends in one single sense in “high definition”. High definition is the state of being well filled with data. [...] Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.’ (McLuhan, 1994, 22-23.) Film actually caters to two senses in high definition leaving even less for audiences to fill in.

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3.2.3. Fidelity In reading adaptations as adaptations, that is to say, to pay attention to the source a text is based on, one will compare the two. The term fidelity is used to describe how adaptations stay true to their sources. Robert Stam explains that the ‘notion of fidelity gains its persuasive force from our sense that some adaptations are indeed better than others and that some adaptations fail to “realize” or substantiate that which we most appreciated in the source nov-els’.58

This returns us to the problem of individual consumers filling in ele-ments in a cold medium. If a person’s first encounter is with a ‘colder’ ver-sion of a story, the elements filled in by the ‘hotter’ version are likely to con-flict with the way the person had imagined it. If one does not recognize the parts filled in, the distance will be too great to bridge resulting in the feeling of being cheated. Furthermore, people engaged with the source text will check the adaptation for deviations. Fans will scrutinize adaptations for mis-interpretations and other deviancies from the source, as Pascal Lefèvre writes, to show off their expert, albeit ‘autistic-savant knowledge of [for in-stance] a particular [...] comic book series’.59 Fans form extremely engaged communities that can be killing for a film if they are negative about the re-sult. To take superman as an example, there have been so many incarna-tions going in different directions that a new superman-text can never be faithful to all the pre-existing incarnations but must privilege some over oth-ers. Satisfying consumers comes down to controlling recognition to the first encounter. The blockbuster combines various strategies that are all designed to control recognition. First of all, it will attempt to position itself as the new benchmark. On the one hand, this entails managing the transmedia dissem-ination of standardised diegetic elements such as the character. On the other hand, the film must become recognised as authentic by fans and creators of the original text. This helps in the second strategy: satisfying initiated view-ers by proclaiming fidelity to the source. This can be achieved by advertising fidelity to any number of the source’s following elements: story, spirit, and style.

One has to question though, as Stam does, ‘whether strict fidelity is even possible’.60 Film adaptations indivertibly make changes. Thus, to talk about fidelity is to talk about the degree of correspondence to the source. In terms of story, Kamilla Elliot remarks: ‘[n]arratologists figure what transfers

58 Stam, 2000, 54. 59 Lefèvre, 2007, 5. 60 Stam, 2000, 55.

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between literature and film as an underlying “deep” narrative structure akin to genetic structure’.61 That is why Elliot labels the approach to adaptation that focuses on the transfer of story as the genetic concept of adaptation.

Whereas the story is transferred the easiest, the spirit evokes notions of authorial intent. Studies focusing on the ‘spirit’ adhere to what Elliott la-bels the ‘psychic concept’ of adaptation. Neil Sinyard subscribes to this point of view, writing in Filming Literature that ‘the great screen adaptations are the ones that go for the spirit rather than the letter of the text [...] or use the camera to interpret and not simply illustrate the tale’.62 James Reynolds is of the same opinion. He uses the concept of ideologem, a basic textual or ideo-logical unit, to refer to the core message of a text on which al aesthetic and narrative choices are based.63 For Reynolds, ‘engagement with the ideologem is key to producing coherence’, 64 both in the reading of a comic or film and, thus, also in adaptation. In his article on ride adaptations, Andrew Nelson draws the comparison to comic book adaptations, stating that such adapta-tions, ‘must negotiate between remaining faithful to an established iconogra-phy and mythology […] while fashioning a new narrative, [because producers cannot afford to alienate audiences] unfamiliar with said elements’.65 Story is thus not as important as it seems; it is subordinated to mythology.

Fidelity to themes and iconography are more useful in adaptations with visual source media. In the case of visual media one can trace the adap-tation of these elements very well. In contrast to most studies, I focus on style as fidelity to stories is pushed aside in blockbuster film production. Henry Jenkins’ example of a screenwriter in the context of convergence and immersive design attests to how the attention has shifted away from stories in film production in general.

As a long time screenwriter described the trajectory of his career: early on they pitched a story, because you had to have a good story to get a great movie. Then he pitched a character, because you need a great character to support a franchise. Now they pitch worlds, because a world can support many stories with many characters across many media platforms.66

61 Elliott, 2003, 150. 62 Sinyard, 1986, X. 63 Reynolds definition, based on that of Patrice Pavis (Pavis, 1998, 84.), is more tailored to the use in adaptation studies than that of Julia Kristeva who explains that the ‘ide-ologeme of a text is the focus where knowing rationality grasps the transformation of utterances (to which the text is irreducible) into a totality (the text) as well as the inser-tions of this totality into the history and the social text’. (Kristeva, 1980, 37.) 64 Reynolds, 2009, 126. 65 Nelson, 2008, 39. 66 Henry Jenkins Interviewed at the 5D conference. ‘5D Presents: The Amazing 5th Di-mension!’ 12.11.2009. 28-09-2011. 03:26 – 03:44.

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Although the use of worlds is more evident in the last decades due to conver-gence, Marvel already uses this strategy in their comics in the 1960s.

Fidelity, be it to story or style, does not guaranty success however. Marsha Kinder explains why the highly stylized Dick Tracy (Beatty, 1990) flopped and Batman (Burton, 1989) did not. ‘Even though both were based on comics [...], only Batman (like Superman before it) was part of an elaborate ongoing network that included not only the original comic and the current media hype, but also numerous radio and TV series, parodies, and spinoffs.’67 Keeping in mind that the position of a film within a pre-existing franchise can influence its success and may limit experimentation with form, I propose that the source text’s style and medium can inspire the form of a film and establish a valuable link to the pre-existing franchise. Marketing the film and establishing its position in the franchise is a separate issue. 3.3. Theoretical Approaches to Studying Adaptation The truth is that all adaptations are complex analogies.68

Albrecht-Crane & Cutchins

In fact, adaptations are the collection of analogies. The various approaches in adaptation studies all seek to explain them. The first serious book published on the subject of adaptation is Novels into Film (1957) by George Bluestone. His approach, writes James Naremore, ‘relies on an implicit metaphor of translation, which governs all investigations of how codes move across sign systems’.69 Bluestone uses a medium specific approach and takes the in-commensurability of sign systems as a means to explain the infidelities in adaptations. He states that ‘changes are inevitable the moment one abandons the linguistic for the visual medium. [E]ach is autonomous, and each is char-acterized by unique and specific properties’.70

The second approach is that of the auteurists, which relies on the meta-phor of performance according to Naremore. ‘It, too, involves questions of tex-tual fidelity, but it emphasises difference rather than similarity, individual style rather than formal systems.’71 Creating a new version that deviates from the source, rewrites it or finds cinematic ‘equivalences in meaning of [a nov-

67 Kinder, 1991, 131. 68 Albrecht-Crane & Cutchins, 2010, 16. 69 Naremore, 2000, 7-8. 70 Bluestone, 1957, 5-6. 71 Naremore, 2000, 8.

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el’s] forms’,72 is seen as confirmation of the capabilities of the directors and their status as auteur. Andrew Horton and Joan Magretta write about the adaptations by European directors that ‘a creative filmmaker can bring the spirit of the original text to life in a different medium at a different time and, as a result, produce a work with a clear life of its own’.73

Quite a number of new wave films are adaptations of short stories and pulp fiction. Also some of Alfred Hitchcock’s best cinematic work is based on pulp novels. Because they often have vivid descriptions of action rather than character psychology, pulp novels are better suited for film adaptation. And, instead of having to subtract to fit in the desired ninety minutes film format, using sources with less story material allows filmmakers to add.

André Bazin’s following statement on ‘Mixed Cinema’ shows how fideli-ty need not derive from a one-on-one relationship.

The more important and decisive the literary qualities of the work, the more the adaptation disturbs its equilibrium, the more it needs a crea-tive talent to reconstruct it on a new equilibrium not indeed identical with, but the equivalent of, the old one.74

Over forty years later, Albrecht-Crane and Cutchins also write in Adaptation Studies: New Approaches that the ‘cross-fertilization [between media] is both ar-tistically productive and affirmative of difference’.75 Many of the approaches to adaptation, at least those concerned with fi-delity, are divided by Kamilla Elliott into six concepts of adaptation: The psy-chic, ventriloquist, genetic, de(re)composing, incarnational, and trumping con-cept of adaptation. The last ‘addresses which medium represents better’76 and the incarnational concept is based on the idea that ‘the word is only a partial expression of a more total representation that requires incarnation for is fulfil-ment’.77 Neither of these are productive in my opinion. The psychic and genetic concepts have been addressed earlier in the section on fidelity. In the ventrilo-quist concept an adaptation only leaves the shell of the source text to tell its own story. It combines the novel’s signifiers to the film’s own signifieds.78 Lastly, in the de(re)composing concept of adaptation, ‘[t]he adaptation is a composite of textual and filmic signs merging in audience consciousness together with other cultural narratives and often leads to confusion as to which is novel and which

72 Bazin, 2000, 20. 73 Horton & Magretta, 1981, 5. 74 Bazin, 1967, 68. 75 Albrecht-Crane & Cutchins, 2010, 20. 76 Elliott, 2003, 174. 77 Elliott, 2003, 161. 78 Elliott, 2003, 144.

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is film’.79 The position of adaptations in franchises is an example of this, where it means little to be first. The insertion of elements form the source texts and media in the films discussed here can thus be understood as recompositions of elements decomposed from the source texts. One problem remains for adapta-tions though: in terms of semiotics they seem impossible. 3.3.1. The Problem of Semiotic Heresy All approaches in adaptation studies share the problem of semiotic heresy. El-liot distinguishes two sides of the heresies.

Adaptation has been the bad boy of interart criticism […] because it commits two central heresies against mainstream twentieth-century aes-thetic and semiotic theories. First, it suggests that words and images may be translatable after all. […] second heresy: that form separates from content – that the characters, plots, themes, and rhetoric of a novel distill to content apart from form and transfer into the form of film.80

The second heresy severs the unity of the sign, which Ferdinand De Saus-sure divides into its signifier and signified like two sides of the same coin. Adaptation appears to be the moving of substance independently of its form. As shall be further discussed in the next section, the apparent moving of substance independent of form is best understood in terms of Intertextuality. The first heresy, the translation of words into images, connects to the theo-ries of Charles Sanders Peirce, who distinguishes the way a sign communi-cates its meaning using three categories: icon, index, and symbol.

The content of the media we are familiar with are mostly iconic or symbolic. In adaptations from a visual medium to film (also a visual medium) translations of iconographic elements are more objective. To specify, the im-age of the source is an objective control; one can compare the adaptation to ‘a well-established referent’81 as Berger calls it. In contrast, images described using words create a subjective mental image.82 Brian McFarlane addresses the problem of two different signifying systems in the adaptation of novels, stating that ‘the verbal sign, with its low iconicity and high symbolic func-tion, works conceptually, whereas the cinematic sign, with its high iconicity and uncertain symbolic function, works directly, sensuously, perceptually’.83 The possibility for exact representation of iconography is an issue specific to 79 Elliott, 2003, 157. 80 Elliott, 2003, 133. 81 Berger, 2008, 90. 82 Bluestone already acknowledged this problem stating that ‘between the percept of the visual image and the concept of the mental image lies the root of the difference between the two media’. (Bluestone, 1957, 1.) 83 McFarlane, 1996, 27.

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film adaptations from visual media such as comics, games, and rides. Nelson poses that these kinds of adaptations, ride adaptations in his case, show a similar dynamic to their source as genre films do to their predecessors. Nel-son uses genre to signify that what Rick Altman calls a ‘formal framework’,84 that is, the basis for individual films. ‘An individual film draws on a pre-existing tradition of representations - including iconography, character types, and story elements - and fashions them into a new-yet-familiar narrative.’85 Some of the iconography might be known to uninitiated viewers, but, it is definitely a means for creating fidelity perceived by fans of the original. The reuse of iconographic elements, intertextualy references the source text. I agree with Elliott who writes that ‘[w]e learn more from adaptation’s heresies than we do from attempts to conform adaptation to semiotic dogma and rigid categorical models’.86 One has to conclude that the adaptation is a new text altogether. To speak of an adaptation is to speak of a new text based on an earlier one with an intertextual relation so strong that we perceive it as a reincarnation of the source; a copy in another medium. But it is no photocopy, nor even a monk’s handwritten copy because, to use the words of Albrecht-Crane & Cutchins, ‘[a]daptations are always interpretations’.87 3.3.2. Intertextuality as Alternative Most of the writing on adaptation comes from literature departments. Over the last decade adaptation studies in general has come away from the fidelity studies of literature-to-film adaptations. In A Theory of Adaptation (2006) Linda Hutcheon argues for a broader interpretation of adaptation across nu-merous media, and Rachel Carroll too ‘aims to expand the range of texts con-sidered under the rubric of ‘adaptation’’.88 Robert Stam also sees that for cul-tural studies an ‘adaptation becomes just another text, forming part of a broad discursive continuum’.89 Meanwhile, studies on intertextuality have moved in the direction of adaptation studies. ‘Intertextuality refers to the way in which texts gain meaning through their referencing or evocation of other texts.’90 It can take place between any two media and in any direction.

84 Altman, 2000, 14. 85 Nelson, 2008, 39. 86 Elliott, 2003, 181. 87 Albrecht-Crane & Cutchins, 2010, 18. 88 Carroll, 2009, 1. 89 Stam, 2005, 10. 90 The International Society for the Study of Narrative. ‘Intertexuality.’ n.d. 11-09-2011. The term is introduced by Julia Kristeva in Word, Dialogue and Novel written in 1966 and first published in Séméiotiké (1969). Kristeva uses it to include how the knowledge of other texts influences a readers understanding of a text. ‘The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity.’ (Kristeva, 1987, 37.)

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The semiotic problem with adaptations is the assumption that the sig-nifiers of the target text refer to the source’s signifieds. I believe it is the tar-get’s signified that refers intertextually to the source’s signified as is illus-trated in schema 1. There is also an intertextual relationship between the signifiers of the target and source text. The source’s signifiers are like signi-fieds for the target. Schema 1: Intertextual References between Source and Target Texts.91

I use intertextual references as a way to explain the semiotic conundrum. The advantage of an intertextual approach is that it is not restricted to scale. An entire text can be a reference, but also a sentence, an image, or just a movement. Related to intertextuality are three other media theories that go beyond the confines of adaptation to understanding the interrelation of texts and media which might be useful here. These are intermediality, remediation, and transmedia storytelling.

Dick Higgins (re)introduces the term intermedia in the 1960s using Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s definition from 1912 ‘to define works which fall conceptually between media that are already known,’92 The term is soon

91 My schematic representation of my argument. 92 Higgins, 1984, 23. Higgins writes this in 1981 referring to his essay Intermedia (1965) that first appeared in The something else newsletter, vol. 1, no. 1, February 1966.

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adopted by others though often misused and confused with mixed media.93 In contrast to mixed media however, intermedia indicates works that combine multiple media in a way that they are ‘fused conceptually’.94 According to Eckart Voights-Virchow studies into intermediality see ‘the space in-between the media, the manifestations and interreferences of media change as media hybridity, as its real object of study’.95 Because the adaptations considered in this thesis do not combine media, nor succeed in creating hybrids of the source and target media, they are not intermedia. But, Intermediality is be-coming an umbrella term. Christopher Balme lists that the term is being used to describe ‘the transposition of diegetic content [and] a particular kind of intertextuality’.96 The third use Balme lists is ‘the attempt to realise in one medium the aesthetic conventions and habits of seeing and hearing in an-other medium’. 97 Balm’s list comes closer to the relation the references in question here have to the source texts because he describes processes rather than works. Hence, the interaction between source and target media can be understood in terms of intermediality, but the resulting films are not inter-media themselves as Higgins intended the term. Remediation may be a better way to understand what is happening. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin introduce the topic of remedia-tion by pointing out that filmed versions of classic novels, repurpose the sto-ry content but do not appropriate or quote the source medium. They go on to call ‘the representation of one medium in another remediation’.98 This seems to apply to the adaptation of plot elements this thesis investigates, but in the case at hand, not the entire medium, just elements, are represented in film. Remediation can be restated as ‘the mediation of mediation’99 but this defini-tion is so broad that it is of little use here. Bolter and Grusin give the exam-ple of Dutch painters incorporating maps and globes into their works.100 The paintings mediate the other media, but they are more of a reference to these media than anything else. Emulating modes of narration encounters the same problem: the appropriated elements do not fulfil the same function when ‘remediated’. For example a film may emulate avatar moves but will not let you control the avatar. It is best to use Bolter and Grusin’s definition of

93 Higgins, 1984, 24. 94 Higgins, 1984, 24. 95 Voights-Virchow, 2009, 139. 96 Balme, 2006, 7. 97 Balme, 2006, 7. 98 Bolter & Grusin, 1999, 45. 99 Bolter & Grusin, 1999, 55. 100 Bolter & Grusin, 1999, 45.

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remediation from the glossary: ‘the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms’.101 Remediation too has become an umbrella term. To simply label all the replications studied here that take elements from the source texts as remedia-tion fails to address the nature of these references. Marie-Laure Ryan distin-guishes nine kinds of remediation.102 Of those, the following five are of particu-lar interest for adaptations. - ‘Transposition from a medium into another’103 is what is generally under-

stood as adaptation. - ‘Insertion of a medium in another’104 can be used as literal reference to the

source medium but is not discussed in this thesis. - ‘The representation of a medium within another medium by either mechani-

cal or descriptive means’105 is also a possibility for adaptations but not the case in the examples in this thesis.

- ‘A medium imitating the techniques of another’106 is what this thesis mostly deals with.

- ‘Absorption of the [production] techniques of a new medium by an older one’107 is related to the previous kind of adaptation.

Two other terms from Bolter and Grusin I use are the two strategies of

adaptation: immediacy and hypermediacy. They are useful in understanding contemporary media but not specific to adaptation alone. Bolter and Grusin explain that ‘hypermediacy makes us aware of the medium’.108 It is a ‘style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium’.109 Immediacy, on the contrary, is transparent. Bolter and Grusin define it in their glossary as ‘[a] style of visual representation whose goal is to make a viewer forget the presence of the medium (canvas, photographic film, cinema and so on) and believe that he is in the presence of the objects of representa-tion’.110 The medium is hidden or made to feel natural and unobtrusive to those interacting with it. Whereas film, cinema especially, is designed to be

101 Bolter & Grusin, 1999, 173. 102 Ryan, 2004, 32-33. 103 Ryan, 2004, 33. 104 Ryan, 2004, 33. 105 Ryan, 2004, 33. 106 Ryan, 2004, 33. 107 Ryan, 2004, 33. 108 Bolter & Grusin, 1999, 34. 109 Bolter & Grusin, 1999, 272. 110 Bolter & Grusin, 1999, 272-273.

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immediate, comics and games display more of their mediality. In adaptation this is played down or the film has to allow more hypermediacy.

Because the films analysed in this thesis are part of larger franchises, I want to pay some more attention to Jenkins’ concept of transmedia story-telling. The idea of this concept is that episodes of the story are told in differ-ent media, each making a ‘distinct but interrelated contribution to the un-folding of the narrative universe’.111 Playing into what Jenkins calls the ency-clopaedic impulse, audiences are encouraged to look for more information about the diegesis and adventures of the characters in different media.112 Jenkins’ example The Matrix franchise uses three live action films, a collec-tion of short animated films, and a video game to tell one large narrative. The stories of the films discussed in this thesis, however, do not form an episode in line with the text they are based on. Rather they reshuffle source text ele-ments; playing down some while others are added or brought centre stage. Hence, it is better to understand the adaptations’ aesthetics discussed here as the result of cross-media adaptation and not as transmedia storytelling.113 Like transmedia story telling, however, adaptations can also ‘maintain audi-ence interest’114 for a franchise and ‘create different points of entry’.115 3.4. Model: Plot as Sequence and Modes of Narration A text based on another text, be it as an adaptation or via intertextual refer-ences, can base its references to the source text on a variety of elements. The story is only the most evident of these elements. Although an adaptation needs a strong reference in terms of story, references can also be made to the source text’s iconography, genre conventions, its medium, and plot. I am interested in the adaptation of form elements rather than content despite the two being hard to truly separate. The two are as closely linked as signifier and signified. To ‘translate’ how Tristan Shandy is a book about the process of writing a book, for instance, Micheal Winterbottom made his film adaptation Cock and Bull about making a film.116 The content was slightly al-tered to maintain its relation to the form. In search of a way to look how form is adapted I have to find an alternative to the form-content dichotomy be-cause the two are too closely related. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson

111 Jenkins, 2004, 40. 112 Jenkins, 2009, 56. 113 This does not deny that these films are part of larger franchises and that new texts may be released alongside the film for transmedia storytelling. 114 Jenkins, 2009, 56-57. 115 Jenkins, 2009, 56-57. 116 Voigts-Virchow, 2009,142.

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question the form-content distinction altogether because they see form as the ‘total system which the viewer attributes to the film [and] subject matter is shaped by the film’s formal context’.117 But the practical pair form and con-tent, so Christian Metz unravels, is actually the result of the entangling of the signifier-signified opposition with the one concerning form and substance. Metz states that ‘[i]n a great many cases the term ‘form’ designates the film signifi-er [...], and the term ‘content’ its signified’.118 Metz continues by explaining that ‘the signifying elements of [a] film have a form (for example montage, oppositions between motifs, counterpointing of image and sound, image and word, etc), [and that] they also have a substance’.119 Contrariwise, also signi-fied elements have both substance and from, although, as Metz writes, ‘what a study of the ‘content’ usually designates is a study related mainly to the substance of the content’.120 Table 1: The Crossing of Substance and Form with the Signified and Signifier.121

Substance Form

Signifier

A Images & sounds

B Form Organization of

images and sounds

Signified

C Content Themes [/ story elements]

D Organisation of themes

[story elements ordered in plot]

As table 1 shows, it are the signified and signifier that exist of both substance, the raw material they are made up of, and form, the organization of those ele-ments into a structure. I agree that form and content are like two sides of the same coin, but it is too cumbersome to assert this stance throughout this en-tire thesis. That is why I have used, and at times will still use, content to de-scribe everything that a text represents and the story it tells. My use of form comes closer to what Bordwell and Thompson label stylistic elements that depend on film techniques.122

Signifier and signified can be used to describe the ‘form’ and ‘content’ of individual signs respectively, but they are intended as an inseparable cou-

117 Bordwell & Thompson, 2004, 50. 118 Metz, 1981, 86. 119 Metz, 1981, 87. 120 Metz, 1981, 87. 121 Schematic representation of Metz’s distinction. (Metz, 1981, 86-87.) 122 Bordwell & Thompson, 2004, 49.

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ple incompatible with adaptation.123 Nevertheless, reading certain signifiers as intertextual references is a good way to handle iconography; the visual el-ements I also intend to trace.

On the level of entire narratives the distinction between plot and story proves most fruitful. Bordwell and Thompson’s define the story as ‘all the events in a narrative’.124 Plot on the other hand, ‘is used to describe every-thing visibly and audibly present in the film before us’.125 Plot is about nar-rating the story. As Edward Branigan explains, ‘[n]arration in general is the overall regulation and distribution of knowledge which determines when and how a reader acquires knowledge from a text’.126 To do this plot both entails the order of revealing information and the means used to convey the infor-mation. An example of these means is dialogue. It is a mode of narration both film and novels can use, but the mode of sound is an option only to film. Thus, form and plot are related through the modes of narration plot uses. McFarlane makes almost the same distinction, separating ‘elements that can be transferred and those which require adaptation proper, the former essen-tially concerned with narrative, which functions irrespective of the medium, and the latter with enunciation, which calls for consideration of the two dif-ferent signifying systems’.127 The question is how ‘untransferable’ elements are adapted from visual source media if they can be adapted at all. Hence, I look at the way plot is adapted in my analyses. The order of scenes is stud-ied, but the modes of narration are of more interest.

Due to ontological differences some traits of the source media prove to be impossible, and undesirable, for film to adopt. Where possible, filmmakers find analogies in film language to reference the source media and their modes of narration. In this age of transmedia storytelling, fidelity to story is no longer the primary concern. But films can still acknowledge and advertise that they are based on a well known text because through all the references, to story and plot, the process of adaptation is still tangible.

123 In studying adaptations others have used signifier and signified to describe entire texts, with the same problem. 124 Bordwell & Thompson, 2004, 70. 125 Bordwell & Thompson, 2004, 71. 126 Branigan, 1992, 106. 127 McFarlane, 1996, 195.

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PART II

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4. COMIC BOOK ADAPTATIONS Comics and film, as many writing on the subject note, have been interacting with one another since their appearance at the end of the nineteenth centu-ry; using each other’s techniques, stories, and characters. Writing on comics often includes a section that compares the two media.128 Despite their paral-lels, differences in the two’s ontologies foreshadow problems in comic-to-film adaptations. To analyse the specific transfer of visual elements from a comic book page to the cinema’s screen, this chapter includes a case study of Sin City, and discusses elements from Hulk (Lee, 2003) and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Wright, 2010). 4.1. Crosspollination: The Common History of Comics and Movies Towards the end of the nineteenth century the newspapers started the mass distribution of comic strip features as relief from the news stories.129 At the same time another medium using sequential pictures emerged: Cinema. Maurice Horn locates the resemblances between comics and film in their shared goals.

[T]he comics come closer to the movies than to any other art form. Not only were they both born around the same time and from the same ar-tistic and commercial preoccupations, but both tended to the same end: the creation on of dialectical movement, either through optical il-lusion (cinema) or through kinetic suggestion (comics). It is well to point out at this juncture that many techniques which came to be called “cinematic” originated in the comics.130

Pascal Lefèvre and Charles Dierick add that ‘the broad public which had re-ceived an elementary education created a demand for cheap entertainment’.131

Many characters that early twentieth century Americans were familiar with appeared in both films and comics. ‘Films have served as content fodder for comics since the silent-film era, including the creation of comic-strip or

128 Crawford, 1978, inside the cover. Gordon, Ian, Mark Jancovich, Matthew P. McAllis-ter, 2007, VII. Horn, 1976, 56-57. Lefèvre & Dierick, 1998, 20. Inge, 1997b, 44. 129 Crawford, 1978, inside the cover. 130 Horn, 1976, 56. 131 Lefèvre & Dierick, 1998, 20. According to David Kunzle, the ‘number of literate peo-ple increased eightfold during the first half of the [nineteenth] century, twofold in the second half’. (Kunzle, 1990, 7.)

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comic book versions of such movie icons as Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Hopalong Cassidy and Bob Hope’132 write Ian Gordon, Mark Jancovich and Mathew P. McAllister in their introduction to Films and Comic Books. There was even a sub-genre of strips imitating movies.133 Vica versa, there is also evi-dence of early silent comedies based directly on favourite comic strip charac-ters such as Buster Brown. ‘[T]here is testimony, too, of several early film makers that on frequent occasions, and especially on slack days when inspi-ration was running low, directors turned directly to the comic papers to steal ideas with no regard for intellectual property rights’134 writes Thomas Inge.135 And though it is easy to forget at this point, comics could experiment with speech well before cinema. Horn is apt to point out that ‘[a]s for the “audio,” the comics had ample time to develop the voice-off, the voice-over and over-lapping dialogue during the 30 years when the movies had at their disposal only the barbarous subtitle’.136

Historically, the nineteen thirties to fifties are the golden age of com-ics. ‘After the boom of the war years, readership fell off drastically. […] The novelty of the medium had by now worn thin, and its most popular feature, the super-hero, was no longer able to pull in the customers.’137 The golden age comes to an end with the introduction of television.138 Comics have to re-invent themselves in the nineteen sixties. In this decade, Marvel editor Stan Lee captures the zeitgeist via the superheroes he creates for comic book giant Marvel. In Horn’s opinion, this was ‘the famous age of Marvel’s “super-heroes with problems,” characters’.139 Marvel also starts using the concept of a ‘world’ stretching over multiple stories and characters. Richardson describes this.

132 Gordon et al. 2007, VII. 133 Scott, 1988, 15. The best example being Ed Wheelan’s Midget Movies started in 1918 to satirize movies. (Wikipedia. ‘Ed Wheelan.’ n.d. 08-08-2011.) 134 Inge, 1997a, 42-43. 135 At the time, 1894 to 1912, films were submitted for copyright on paper as sepa-rate photographs because there was no copyright law for films up until 1912. In one of the books registering the ‘photographs’ Inge found ´specific information on forty-two films which were adaptations of popular comic strips of the period from 1894 to 1912’. (Inge, 1997b, 44.) The book mentioned is: Niver, Kemp R, & Bebe Bergsten. Early Motion Pictures: The Paper Print Collection in the Library of Congress. Washington: Mo-tion Picture, Broadcasting, & Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, 1985. 136 Horn, 1976, 56. 137 Horn, 1976, 29. 138 Rovin, 1985, X. Also Crawford locates the impact of television on the entertainment industry in the early nineteen fifties. ‘1952: The impact of television as home enter-tainment begins to threaten the motion picture industry, the comic book industry, pulp magazines, radio drama, and the adventure comic strip in newspaper.’ (Crawford, 1978, 432.) 139 Horn, 1976, 33.

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[I]n Lee’s comic books, a some-time good guy may turn bad in later is-sues and bad guys often do good or become champions of virtue in some other book of the Marvel line. There are frequent “guest shots” and cameo roles.140

But it turns out TV-series are good publicity for comics as they are adapted for the new mass medium. ‘Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and the Hulk featured in low production value television series from the 1950s to the 1970s’,141 generating audience awareness for the characters. The next step in the intermedia dissemination of the comics is blockbusters. ‘Comic book char-acters such as Superman and Batman [both characters of DC comics] ap-peared in B-movies and film serials long before the blockbuster adaptations of the 1970s and 1980s.’142 In succession, the number of comic-movies has increased over the last two decades.

To recapitulate, characters that originated in comics have progressed via movie serials in the nineteen thirties to television movies and series, blockbusters in the seventies, and now transmedia franchises with sequels. ‘[M]edia corporations have increasingly created synergies between comics and films based on the concept of superhero characters as product to be sold across different media and merchandising forms.’143 Less money is being made from comic book sales, leaving most money to be made from merchan-dise of the legendary characters. The comics have become one of many media in the transmedia dissemination of comic book characters in strategies that centre the blockbuster movie.144

In his article on comic-to-film adaptation James Reynolds suggests that one of the reasons for the boom of comic book adaptations in the new millennium is the take-over of Marvel in the late nineteen nineties.145 The new owners, who were already producing marvel character toys, saw how much the intellectual property of these characters was worth.146 The new Marvel owners did not concentrate on making comics though. Instead, they used the characters as basis for transmedial resurrection, starting with mak-ing movies.147 DC comics responded by commissioning new Bataman and Superman movies. The success of comic book characters in film, or those

140 Richardson, 1977, 188. 141 Gordon et al. 2007, VII. The Batman television series from the 1960s stands out for its use of graphic representations of sounds. For further information on the series see appendix 6. 142 Gordon et al. 2007, VII. 143 Gordon et al. 2007, XI. 144 For a miniature history of comics see appendix 7. 145 Reynolds, 2009, 122. 146 Hewitt et al. 2006, 86. 147 Hewitt et al. 2006, 86.

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originated in other media, is due foremost to their transmedia presence. ‘Commercially speaking, comic-to-film adaptation seems to benefit both com-ic and film industries.’148

‘Production deals for comic book character-based movies have multiplied rapidly.’149 As graph 2 illustrates, the number of comic book adaptations has increased since the 1960s to the point that the number of films based on comics released in the 2000s more than doubles the amount from the 1990s. Graph 2: Number of Film and Television Adaptations per Decade in 2011.150

If one looks at the percentages of film adaptations in graph 3, more films have been based on comics after the year 2000 than before it. In the case of television adaptations, depicted in graph 4, the 1990s and 2000s provide half the comic book adaptations, followed by the 1970s and 1980s making up another quarter.

148 Reynolds, 2009, 123. 149 Gordon et al. 2007, VIII. 150 Data collected from IMDb. For more information see appendix 8. The Internet Movie Database. ‘Earliest "Based On Comic Book" Titles.’ 2011. 17-04-2011.

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Graph 3: Film Adaptations Graph 4: Television Adaptations in Percentage per Decade.151 in Percentage per Decade.152

David Hughes thinks the surge in comic book adaptations might be due to the fact that many people now in charge of film productions grew up with comics from the sixties.153 A further reason Reynolds puts forward is that ‘comics could acquire fresh ‘cultural legitimacy’ in the 1990s, because post-modernist, pragmatic shifts in how art is perceived support the recognition of comics as art’.154

The last, and obvious, reason for the comic-to-film boom of the last decade is the advance in visual effects technology. Comics have the fantastic ability to make the most improbable actions happen by just drawing it. Un-limited by budgets, all that can stop a comic book artist from creating new worlds and civilisations are the limitations of his skill and imagination.155 Although visual effects can, by now, convincingly recreate the marvels of comic book character, on the screen they remain extremely expensive; ‘espe-cially when compared to the cost of a pencil’.156 The advent of CGI, more powerful and readily available since the start of the new millennium, makes it possible to recreate the comics with film’s realism. Where drawn anima-tions of comics may stay closer to the original’s style, the photorealism achieved with CGI poses challenges for filmmakers. Can one transpose the

151 Data collected from IMDb. The Internet Movie Database. ‘Earliest "Based On Comic Book" Titles.’ 2011. 17-04-2011. 152 Data collected from IMDb. The Internet Movie Database. ‘Earliest "Based On Comic Book" Titles.’ 2011. 17-04-2011. 153 Hughes, 2003, 1. 154 Reynolds, 2009, 121. Reynolds uses V for Vendetta (McTeigue, 2006) to illustrate ‘that significant differences in production and reception between the media of comic book art and film need to be addressed in the process of adaptation, and that adap-tations that do not address these features can be reductive of complexity, and even censorious.’ (Reynolds, 2009, 121.) 155 Lefèvre. 2007, 7. 156 Lefèvre, 2007, 8. Because the superheroes are well known and appeal to studio’s target audiences, adaptations of these character are more likely to make the returns at the box-office to fund the costly visual effects.

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story to ‘real’ life or does the film benefit from allusions to the source medi-um and its style? But what defines comic books? 4.2. The Ontology of the Comic Book Style, presentation, the economy of space […], balloons and panels are still the basic tools with which to work.157

Will Eisner ‘Strips. Comics. Bandes Dessinées. Manga. Historietas. Fumetti. Tegneserier. Historias em quedrinhos. Sarjakuva.’158 These are some of the words Dutch comics expert, Joost Pollman has found that are used to describe what he calls Beeldverhalen (image stories). His favourite term is from the Chinese who talk about connected images. Another label used for visual narratives that attempts to escape from the rather one-dimensional term comic is Graphic Novel.

Graphic is respectable. Novels are respectable. Graphic Novel? Bam! Twice as respectable.159

Though expressed rather sarcastically, Joost Pollmann recognizes very well the cultural value of words and their use for distinction in a high/low-culture divided climate.160 Maurice Horn notes that comics owe their name to ‘the first examples of the form, which were all of a humorous nature’.161 However, whereas the first comics took ‘humor from newspaper funnies and its adven-tures from the pulp magazines, it was superhero fantasy [introduced by DC comics in the late nineteen thirties that, according to Crawford,] established the comic book as a distinct form of literature of its own’.162 Actual comic books, books that bundle comics, first appear in the nineteen twenties in Japan.163 Be-cause graphic stories contain a great diversity of style elements, conventions,

157 Eisner, 2004, 142. 158 Pollmann, 2008, 111. 159 Pollmann, 2005, 27-28. My translation. 160 The request for recognition due to the genre did not go unacknowledged. Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, about his father’s experiences in concentration camps, even won a Pulitzer Prize. (Pollmann, 2005, 27.) To label the art form as comic or graphic novel, is all about status and recognition. 161 Horn, 1976, 730. ‘The term “comics” applied to the form has also proved unwieldy, as it does not easily lend itself to grammatical derivatives (e.g., there is no comic equivalent to the word “cinematic”).’ (Horn, 1976, 731.) And as Pollmann notes, ‘there are many tragic image stories [beeldverhalen]. Why does nobody ever talk about trag-ics?’ (Pollmann, 2005, 96. My translation.) 162 Crawford, 1978, 1. 163 Horn, 1976, 24.

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and genres, definitions and labels are sought to cover more than the news-paper funnies.

As can be deduced from the title to his book Comics & Sequential Art, Will Eisner, a comic book artist himself, refers to sequenced images to include other uses of visual narratives that are not comical.164 Scott McCloud, also a comic book artist and theorist, defines comics as: ‘[j]uxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer’.165 This comes close to the short prototype definition theorists Pascal Lefèvre and Charles Dierick pro-pose: ‘[t]he juxtaposition of fixed (mostly drawn) pictures on a support as a communicative act’.166 Many other definitions include the use of text or em-phasize the book medium. In relation to film, ‘the juxtaposition of fixed imag-es´ is what makes the biggest differences. Whereas cinema is literally about movement, comics work with static images to suggest movement.167

The comic strip is still largely regarded as a bastard medium, combin-ing two different languages: the pictorial and the verbal.168 Historian Danièle Alexandre-bidon reminds us that ‘there are few so-called modern techniques that medieval artists did not discover earlier’.169 Already in the 13th century book illustrators divide pages into frames, use onomatopoeia, and thought balloons, to name just a few comic book techniques they started.170

Belgian comics critic Jan Smet distinguishes between realistic and schematic strips.171 Most comics, however, belong to a subcategory that Smet labels stylised realism. Such comics have realistic content but miss realistic details such as backgrounds and shadows.172 Because every comic is drawn, it requires some degree of cartooning. This comes down to the fact that the image becomes easier to digest because detail is deleted in the image either

164 Eisner distinguishes two applications of sequential art: instruction and enter-tainment. ‘In the main, periodical comics and graphic novels are devoted to enter-tainment while manuals and storyboards are used to instruct or sell.’ (Eisner, 2004, 139.) 165 McCloud, 1994, 9. 166 Lefèvre & Dierick, 1998, 12. 167 Recently animated cartoons are being created. Viewable online, these expanded com-ics add interactivity, movement and sounds to the existing panels. 168 Lefèvre & Dierick, 1998, 20. 169 Danièle Alexandre-bidon in Les Origines de la bande dessinée, 1996, 11-20. Qtd. in Lefèvre & Dierick, 1998, 13. In contrast to the popular comics of the twentieth cen-tury the books Alexandre-Bidon writes about were handmade, not printed, and desig-nated for the upper class. 170 Lefèvre & Dierick, 1998, 13. 171 Smet, 1983, 4-7. According to Smet schematic comics use caricatures and animals behaving like humans to tell their stories and often critique society. (Smet, 1983, 5-7.) 172 Smet, 1983, 8-10.

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by exaggeration or simplification.173 The style used by the comic book artist can become their signature or trademark. The pictures are stylized represen-tations of reality, wherein the size and positioning of subjects can be easily altered without adherence to the laws of nature.

Comics generally use four-colour or black and white prints.174 The lay-out of the page and panels are contrived in early drafts. Because the compo-sition of the images in the panels needs to allow space for the text, the script must be finished at this point. The comic book page is divided into segmenta-tions of different shapes and sizes called frames or panels. To follow the sto-ry, the reader goes from one panel to the other, page to page. But readers al-ready see the pictures of the upcoming events as they turn to a new page. Leafing through, skipping back and forth are further possibilities. Sound, however is not an option. As McCloud puts it:

through their still images using only one sense comics represent all the senses and through the character of the lines themselves comics repre-sents the invisible world of emotion.175

The borders of the panels and speech bubbles can also be used ‘as part of a non-verbal “language” of sequential art’.176 Straight borders imply the present tense and wavy edged or scalloped ‘panel border is the most common past time indicator’.177 Comic book artists can also chose not to provide a frame to suggest unlimited space. This is something that film can never do, just as a comic must also stick to the confines of the page. 4.3. Comics and Film as Distant Cousins: Parallels and Discrepancies In the world of comics, time and space are one and the same.178

Scott McCloud Being essentially a two dimensional medium, comics have their own way of dealing with time. Whereas film has a set screen time, Horn writes that ‘[i]n the comics time is a function of space [...]; the frames of a strip or page are divisions of time’.179 The difference between the panels is more an indicator of

173 Eisner, 2004, 151. 174 Colouring is done by a separate department at the publisher. The colouring of comics sometimes happens without consent or influence of the comic’s author/drawer. 175 McCloud, 2000, 2. 176 Eisner, 2004, 44. 177 Eisner, 2004, 44. 178 McCloud, 1994, 100. 179 Horn, 1976, 60.

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how quickly time is passing than the text.180 In Lefèvre’s opinion a ‘film oblig-es the viewer to follow the rhythm of the sequences’.181 Readers of comics, and the players of games, set their own pace. Or as Michael Cohen aptly put it: ‘[c]ontrol is taken out of the hands of the spectator in cinema, but is liter-ally held in the hand of the comic book reader’.182 The close resemblance between the cinematic frame and the comic book’s panel, also referred to as a frame, is a starting point for many who compare the two media.183 In contrast to cinematic frames those of comics ‘are part of the creative process, rather than the result of the technology’184 as Eisner points out. McCloud observes a second obvious difference.

Each successive frame of a movie is projected on exactly the same space - the screen - while each frame of comics must occupy a differ-ent space.185

The way layout assists in storytelling is something that film misses. Using split-screen, Hulk evokes the comic book page but it is not the same.186 Dave Gibbons, the creator of Watchmen, thinks this parallel between comics and films is ‘a completely bogus comparison. A comic’s script looks a bit like a film script and comic art looks a bit like storyboards, but there is no sound in a comic book and no movement.’187 The moment to moment narration in comic book panels can be understood with Eisenstein’s term montage188 but compared to the immediacy of (mainstream) film, comics are closer to hyper-mediacy. The still panels, onomatopoeias, speech bubbles, and the turning of the pages make readers aware of the medium.

Although the two media resemble each other, adapting comics poses some specific problems. Pascal Lefèvre discusses the issue in Incompatible visual ontologies: the problematic adaptation of drawn images.189 Lefèvre men-tions two categories of differences between comics and films: ‘the material shape of the images and the social aspects of reception’.190 For Lefèvre the

180 Furthermore, ‘comics are a-historical [...] because real time is irrelevant to their purpose’. (Horm, 1976, 60.) 181 Lefèvre, 2007, 5. 182 Cohen, 2007, 31. 183 Besides the strong relation between comics and films, [...] the cells in comics recreate the theatre’s proscenium. Furthermore, comics have been dramatised and plays turned into strips. (2005, 97 & 111-113. Free translation of Pollmann.) 184 Eisner, 2004, 38. 185 McCloud, 1994, 7. 186 For a definition of split-screen see page 53, around and in footnote 241. 187 Gibbons qtd. in Hughes, 2003, 1. 188 Pollmann, 2008, 113. 189 His contribution to Film and comic books (Gordon et al. 2007.) 190 Lefèvre, 2007, 3.

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difference in reception is in the ‘direct emotional sharing with others’.191 Reading comics is an individual activity. Watching movies is traditionally a shared experience preferably in a cinema. This difference of experience and reception, one should not forget, is also the mechanism that is the cause for adaptations; to reach new audiences, different kinds of consumers. But con-sidering adaptations, the differences in material shape of the image is of more interest. Four main differences between comics and films are analysed by Lefèvre. Compared to the silent and static drawings in panels arranged on a page, film consists of moving photographic images in a fixed aspect ratio (the screen frame) accompanied by a soundtrack.192 Lefèvre translates these onto-logical differences to the following four problems of adaptation.

(1) [T]he deletion/addition process in rewriting that occurs with rewrit-ing primary comics texts for film; (2) the unique characteristics of page layout and film screen; and (3) the dilemma of translating drawings to photography; and (4) the importance of sound in film compared to the “silence” of comics.193

When looking at the modes of narration used by comics that can inspire films, I would like to amend Lefèvre’s list with a fifth issue: what to do with symbolic and iconic representations that do not signify sound? Examples of this are chapter names inside panels and character introduction boxes. Re-appearing in a film they can function on a symbolic level, conveying exact in-formation and on an iconic level too, emulating the look of a panel.194 Re-turning to Lefèvre’s list, problem one is applicable to all adaptations, but in the case of comics it is often hard to locate a single source text. These issues and that of layout in connection to aspect ratios are discussed at the end of this chapter with examples from Hulk and Scott Pilgrim. Before that an analy-sis of Sin City will concentrate on problems three and four. Lefèvre’s third problem can be further specified into the transition to photorealism and translation of static to moving images. I also want to be more specific on sound.

191 Lefèvre, 2007, 3. 192 Lefèvre, 2007, 3. 193 Lefèvre, 2007, 3-4. 194 Even though Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) is adapted from a novel it has a scene where the protagonist’s apartment is shown as if it is in a lifestyle magazines, complete with prices and descriptions floating next to the furniture. The description text is not meant to be read, as symbols, but as an iconic image reminiscent of the magazines.

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Michel Chion writes about four basic categories of sound in film: nois-es, silence, music and dialogue.195 Comics have to communicate sound visu-ally. It is in the ontology of comics that comics exist without sound but they can still be noisy.196 Through the use of onomatopoeia and lines suggesting movement and shouting, noises are communicated to the reader who in turn imagines them. Even silence can be written out as the Japanese do with the word shun197, but comics have a harder time with music. With good lettering and the adding of music notes, lyrics can suggest music, but this can only go so far. For adaptation, inspiration for music to match the comic can come from titles mentioned by characters or deduced from the setting in which the comic’s story takes place. Dialogue or speech in general, has found its place in speech bubbles or balloons.198 The shape of the bubbles can indicate the kind of speech. For instance, cloud shapes are used for thoughts.199 Also through lettering artists seek to convey the ‘essence of sound’200. Rectangular boxes are often used for direct storytelling. In Lefèvre’s opinion the ‘texts in speech balloons are generally not suited for film dialogue and they need some rewriting’.201 Another problem with transposing comic dialogue to movies is the imagination of the reader. Readers imagine a particular way the voice of a character sounds. Some readers are shocked when the way an actor playing the character speaks does not match their expectations.202 This shock can break the cinematic illusion.

Film adaptations usually transpose all written indicators of sound to speech and sound effects. In fact, the elements in comics that required ono-matopoeia are by and large the same as the elements that Foley artists are already providing sound effects for when film was still ‘silent’. Alternatively, as visual medium, one can choose to represent sounds graphically too.203 The appearance of written sound in film, however, doubles the sound already

195 Chion, 1994, 45 & 58-59. 196 Pollmann, 2005, 131. There is one comic with sound however. In 1995 Marvel pub-lished Golden Sound Story featuring Spider-Man that had a keyboard that matched symbols on the pages to add sounds to elements. (Pollmann, 2005, 131.) 197 Pollmann, 2005, 22. 198 The use of speech bubbles in comics only becomes the conventional way of ren-dering speech about a hundred years ago. ‘The ‘American Model’ became largely dominant’ because although they did not ‘invent’ the speech balloon, it were the Americans who deliberately and continually used the device.’ (Lefèvre & Dierick, 1998, 17-18.) 199 Eisner, 2004, 27. 200 McCloud, 1994, 134. 201 Lefèvre, 2007, 11. 202 Lefèvre, 2007, 11. 203 A third option is to mute the film and only use visual indicators of sound.

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there, depriving that of its prime function. The only way this works if it is done self-consciously. The latest reincarnations of Spider-Man, Batman and the like take a very serious approach and do not play with visual representations of sound. They strive to make the character and their superpowers as real as possible. They start out with the events that make the ordinary person into someone special. The origins of the superheroes are the first stories. After the first film on the hero’s origins sequels are pitted around the villains. This focus on origin, give the films authenticity and introduces the story to novice viewers: the teenage boys who have never read the comics are the intended audience for these films.204 Although these films are successful enough commercially, David Hughes observes that ‘many comic-to-film adaptations have failed, at least artistically’.205 Also the idea prevails that good comics cannot be turned into a movie. This has to do with primacy, but it also rests on a notion that film cannot express itself the way comics can. As the upcoming analysis and discussion will show, movies have found ample ways to emulate comic book style and some of its modes of narration. however, movies move and comics stay silent. These are things that are beyond adaptation. 4.4. Case Study 1: Sin City (Rodriguez & Miller, 2005) While in that saloon, I opened a laptop and showed Frank my first test footage. His reaction was, “That’s powerful stuff, mister.” “Those Images are straight from your books, Frank.” I pointed out. I told him that I wanted to “translate” it to the screen.206

Robert Rodriguez The film Sin City is almost an exact ‘copy’ of Frank Miller’s graphic novels. As I will show it is about as close to the source text as one can get. Because Robert Rodriguez considers this movie to be a translation, rather than an ad-aptation, he even takes Miller on as co-director.207 But the film cannot truly be called a copy or reproduction nor can it escape adaptation. The film is not an exact mechanical reproduction of the comics as photographs of the pages are. The film reproduces the story and style with its own means. It is in the

204 The distribution deal paramount made with marvel allows them to reach the crucial audience of teenage boys. 205 Hughes, 2003, 1. 206 Rodriguez in, Miller & Rodriguez, 2005, 10. 207 To do this Rodriguez had to quite the writers’ guild of America and screenwriting is not mentioned in the credits. (Miller & Rodriguez, 2005, 10.)

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translation to these cinematic means that comic elements have to be adapted.208

In every aspect of the adaptation process the attempt is made to recre-ate the panels of the comics. Rodriguez is the translator, or ventriloquist, bending cinema to the aesthetics of Miller’s graphic novels. With Miller co-directing and the careful imitation of the panels it is obvious that the icono-graphy is copied too. In regard to Lefèvre’s four problems of adaptation, page layout is not referenced but the content of the individual panels is meticu-lously turned into widescreen shots. The comics are actually used as the ba-sis for a storyboard. As Rodney Brunet, visual effects artist at Troublemaker Digital, recalls, ‘the film is so close to Frank’s books, I guess you could say Frank Miller did most of our previsualization for us’.209 The way the film deals with the dilemma of translating drawings to photography and its treat-ment of sound are discussed after a look at the deletion/addition process which has been kept to a minimum. 4.4.1. Fidelity to the Story Miller has always been protective of his material and sceptical about adapta-tions. In his opinion, comic book adaptations ruin the stories of the comics.

Historically, the first thing usually done in developing a comic-book movie is to throw out the original material and start from scratch. The results are predictably horrible.210

This opinion does not take into account that many (superhero) comics do not have such an authorative source as Sin City, which is created by an autono-mous artist. The adaptation of Sin City does not start from scratch. The most important question is which episodes of Miller’s work are to be filmed. The body of the film consists of three storylines that are based on three separate graphic novels that Frank Miller wrote and drew. The combination of the three story-lines adds enough material together for a feature length film. The Hard Good-bye, is about Marv who wants to avenge the murder of his sweetheart. The Big

208 Because adaptations are always different from their sources it is of little use to ana-lyse them as reproductions in the sense of Walter Benjamin. In his discussion on me-chanical reproduction Benjamin states that the ‘presence of the original is the pre-requisite to the concept of authenticity’. (Benjamin, 1968, 220.) Both comics and films however, are mechanical reproductions already with little concern for the au-thenticity of the singular. In the case of Sin City the film is made by the same artist and there is a great likeness to the source text, or original. Precisely because Frank Miller made both the graphic novels and the film it becomes apparent that they are two separate works. 209 Brunet in Miller & Rodriguez, 2005, 27. 210 Miller in Miller & Rodriguez, 2005, 16.

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Fat Kill tells the story of a man who gets caught up in the fight between prosti-tutes and assassins. The third story is about Hartigan, the only straight cop in Basin City, who saves a young girl from the yellow bastard. To have the events unfold chronologically, the scenes from That Yellow Bastard which are in the present follow the other two stories. The scenes with Hartigan from eight years earlier are at the beginning of the film. In addition, the three stories are framed by a scene from The Customer is Always Right as opening and an original scene written for the film at the end.211 Miller interconnects the separate volumes of Sin City into a world of its own with the main characters from one story making small appearances in other stories. In the film the That Yellow Bastard-storyline was to intersect with the The Hard Goodbye-storyline via a scene with Lucile: Marv and Hartigan’s parole officer. The scene can be found in the script and was even shot but did not make the final cut.212 4.4.2. Fidelity to the Style Miller objected to previous attempts to adapt Sin City because the style, that makes it so special, could not be recreated in film. Rodriguez’s solution was not to think of the process of turning the comic book into a film, but the oth-er way around.213 He had gathered a lot of experience in visual effects in pre-vious projects which enabled him to copy Miller’s style using CGI. But the adaptation had to tackle three ontological differences. The first issue at hand is Lefèvre’s third problem of adaptation: trans-lating drawings to photography. Because Miller creates his signature look with large areas of pure black or pure white to create high contrast silhou-ette-like images making a film in black and white is an obvious starting point. But merely making a black and white neo-noire movie is exactly what Miller had resisted. John Ford, a visual effects artist at Troublemaker Digital, recalls the trouble they had making this work in moving pictures.

One of Frank Miller’s trademarks is his use of black and white, nega-tive and positive images. So it became one of Troublemaker’s biggest challenges to find a way to translate that look to film without it becom-ing distracting.214

211 The Customer is Always Right is published as a short story both in The Babe Wore Red and Other Stories and in Booze, Broads & Bullets. The Hard Goodbye was originally published as Sin City episodes 1 to 13. (The Internet Movie Database. ‘Sin City (2005) Trivia.’ 2011. 22-08-2011. Wikipedia. ‘List of Sin City yarns.’ n.d. 22-08-2011.) 212 Miller & Rodriguez, 2005, 228-230. 213 Rodriguez in, Miller & Rodriguez, 2005, 19. 214 Ford in Miller & Rodriguez, 2005, 25.

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Rodriguez reasoning is that ‘[b]lack and white movies really aren’t black and white, they are mostly gray and white’.215 Using a green screen he shoots the actors separate from the background. As image 1 illustrates this enables him to work on each element separately, create backgrounds from scratch and get as little grey tones as possible.216 Image 1: Development of Hartigan’s Suicide.217

The film images have to look more like the comic instead of making a film that would just retell the stories. Miller’s images belong to Jan Smet’s category of stylized realism. Their expressive styling makes them what Lefèvre indicates as being ‘less analogous to the external world’.218 Art Direc-tion, special make-up, props, costume, mise-en-scène and lighting, not to forget visual effects can all be used to diminish the realism of the photo-graphic medium film to approach a comic book aesthetic. This hypermedial lack of realism coaxes a different reaction from viewers than the same scene would when depicted photographically. Writing about comics, Lefèvre ob-serves that ‘[v]iewers tend to accept more from a stylized medium than from a photographic medium’.219 The strong stylization and use of black and white images, making blood look whit as in Miller’s panels, also allows the makers of Sin City to depict more blood and violence than the MPAA would normally permit.220 Only blood that is very important to the story or the intensity of the scene is shown in red. Rodriguez and Miller decide to use colour for important elements of the story as Miller had done in the comics. The selective colour effect allows them to have the yellow bastard, for instance, be yellow in an otherwise black

215 Rodriguez in, Miller & Rodriguez, 2005, 10. 216 Rodriguez in, Miller & Rodriguez, 2005, 10. 217 Rodriguez & Miller, 2005, 19. As the caption under the illustrations mention the image of Hartigan’s suicide is actually taken from an image of A Dame To Kill For, that also shows a man shooting a bullet through his head. The actual moment of Hartigan pulling the trigger is not depicted in That Yellow Basterd. (Rodriguez & Mil-ler, 2005, 19.) 218 Lefèvre, 2007, 7. 219 Lefèvre, 2007, 9. 220 Keefe Boerner, Post Supervisor / Visual Effects Producer at Troublemaker Digital in Miller & Rodriguez, 2005, 28.

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and white shot. The use of colour and the amount of contrast differs per storyline. The post-supervisor, Keefe Boemer explains that ‘for continuity’s sake, we had one VFX house assigned to each story, so each one could have their own look, but it would be for each story’.221 The second and third issues in comic book adaptations are movement and film’s fixed aspect ratio compared to the varying shapes of comic book static panels. Because most panels do not share film’s aspect ratio the image has to be framed closer or amended, showing more of the setting, to fill in what is not in the drawing. Miller’s panels show the ultimate moment of the action of what is a shot in the film. The pacing in the comics is influenced by the size of the panels, the difference in action from panel to panel and the text. In film the time needed to play out the action or speak the text influ-ences the duration of a shot. In practice one panel in the comic does not al-ways equate to one shot in the film. The sequence depicting Marv's execu-tion, for instance, is told in one panel in the comic, framed from head to foot. Individual elements from the panel were shot in close-up to accent the dia-logue in the beginning of the scene and to fill the time needed for Marv’s sto-rytelling. The opposite happens in the scene the police come to arrest Marv in the beginning of the story. Four images of Marv’s taking pills out if a con-tainer and swallowing them are replaced with a single shot of him fiddling with a lighter. In the comic it are four of six square panels that fill the page. The four panels have no text so they are easy to digest in the comic and rep-resent how tension stretches time. In film four shots would attract too much unnecessary attention relative to the simple action. So panels can be either expanded or compressed. The choices of shots are definitely based on the panels of the comics but to create the flow of film, inserts and other addi-tional shots are used. Although Rodriguez’s mission is to bend the film to-wards comics he and Miller cannot deny that film requires its own pacing. Sound being one of the reasons as it needs time to work. 4.4.3. Sound Lefèvre’s fourth problem for comic book adaptations is that cinema uses both moving images and sound, whereas comics rely on visual means to signal sounds.222 In comic book movies, choices for sound elements can reinforce a comic book aesthetic or remediate and ‘hide’ it. The use of ‘cartoony’ sound effects, for instance, may not match the action but in doing so create a mo-ment of hypermediacy recalling comics. Alternatively, making sound effects realistic and turn the direct dialogue of comics into film dialogue hides their 221 Boerner in Miller & Rodriguez, 2005, 28. 222 Lefèvre, 2007, 3-4.

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origins. The makers of Sin City remediate by finding cinematic equivalents for the various sound elements.

Rodriguez and Miller use no graphic means to illustrate sound in the film. The comic’s onomatopoeias are not translated to the screen as a literal im-age to image translation would demand. They are translated to their cinematic equivalent: sound effects. All the text from the comic is translated from writ-ten to spoken words. Although graphic novels already contain less text than regular novels Rodriguez and Miller still have to cut out some superfluous text but leaving the preserved lines unchanged. Miller uses relatively little dialogue. Much of the narration is done in square boxes. Most comics use these for text that is on a level of narration that Edward Branigan designates as part of the fiction but not part of the story world: the domain of the nondiegetic narrator.223 Miller, however, uses his main characters as narrators. Although the characters are diegetic they never narrate inside the diegesis. The main characters’ lines in the square boxes are in the present tense. Through the narration one also gains insight into the characters thoughts. These texts are translated to voice-overs in the film. This can best be described as an instance of remediation. The par-ticular function of the comic is now performed by a film technique. A closer look at the opening scene and the end of The Hard Goodbye shows how the film makes Miller’s visual representations of sound audible. In the opening scene a woman in a red dress stands on a balcony. Sounds of the city fill the air. Soft sirens and a saxophone introduce the Film Noir genre. We hear the voice of a man describing the woman in a voice-over. The phrases make him sound like he might be the narrator of the film but when the shot changes we see the man behind the woman. We hear his footsteps and then his text, ‘I let her hear my footsteps.’224 The film is full of such direct references characters make to sounds. This may be the result of the fact that in a comic sound has to be mentioned by characters or shown as onomatopoeia. The refer-ence to the footsteps does not feel double though. This is because the mention-ing comes after the actual sound and it carries a meaning beyond the literal phrase: the strategy the man uses and that he could also choose not to be heard.

Rodriguez sticks to the literal thoughts uttered as voice-over when the man recounts, ‘I tell her that everything will be alright’ to, ‘…that I love her’.225 Meanwhile we see the man’s lips move asynchronous and without direct sound.

223 Branigan, 1992, 87. 224 Rodriguez, Robert, Frank Miller. Sin City. Assassin walks up to woman. (00:00:53). 225 Rodriguez, Robert, Frank Miller. Sin City. Assassin holds woman close. (00:02:30).

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Rodriguez shows how the man is telling the woman in normal dialogue while one hears the monologue voice-over. The resulting discrepancy between image and sound, and possibly past and present, as the voice-over narration lends has an air of anecdote, feels very cinematic. As dialogue is substituted for mono-logue full use is made of film’s image and soundtrack and neither doubles the other.

The constant return of voice-overs do not only help one identify with the main characters, they also accentuate the rough style. Because comics have no sound and cannot influence the flow of time as precisely as cinema can, they must be more explicit on occasion. The ‘roughness’ of comics comes from their staccato style and explicitness. When bending cinema towards comics one task is to find ways to exaggerate, simplify, and accentuate. Voice-overs help to do just that. They lead the audience and set the pace; tasks performed in comics primarily by layout. Up until his execution we hear Marv’s voice-over retelling the events after he murdered the person behind the death of his sweetheart. The text sounds like he is telling someone in a pub, but that is impossible.

The sequence is characterized by the use of negative sound. As Michel Chion describes negative sounds, ‘the image calls for them, but the film does not produce them for us to hear’.226 A comic works like this all the time. Here it is used as a means to connect the separate short scenes, united by Marv’s rec-ollection of them, into a montage sequence. We see how Marv is beaten up by policemen while hearing only the sounds Marv mentions in his voice-over: the blows and the blood he spits out. Because one is in Marv's memories the scene continues without sound belonging to the image. It is a kind of unnatural si-lence. The only sound to break the silence is a heavy bass note rumbling. Dur-ing the shot inside a courtroom, one hears only the hammer of justice delayed to a deep drone. Translating the non-diegetic text into voice-overs provides a similar space for these lines in cinematic techniques as they occupy in the comics. This way not only Miller’s signature style of drawing is translated, his writing is too. Because the result of the adaptation is an Arthouse film rather than a superhero blockbuster, its audience accepts the episodic plot structure and irregular story arcs. Although Miller’s books are ‘the ultimate anti-movie’227 as Rodri-

226 Chion, 1994, 192. In chapter six Chion also addresses the issue but here the trans-lation uses the term phantom sound to describe the effect created through the suspen-sion of a part of the sound track. (Chion, 1994, 132.) 227 Rodriguez in Miller & Rodriguez, 2005, 10.

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guez writes, the two of them are able to turn the ‘anti-movie’ qualities into sur-filmic qualities. The abundance of voice-overs, silhouette, high contrast black and white images, and selective colour all add to the ‘vocabulary’ of cinema. Rodriguez and Miller have found ways to make film look and sound more like graphic novels, but films can appropriate even more from comics.

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4.5. Concluding Thoughts: Reduction, Addition and Split-screen Reduction and addition do not only apply to Lefèvre’s first point; rewriting the text. They are the chisel and clay of the adaptation’s sculptor; used in gathering source material, referencing the source medium modes of narra-tion, and recreating its style. As shown, in comic book movies sound is al-ways added.

Compared to adaptations of large novels, which often need to reduce the story for a screenplay, comics have a limited number of pages so the amount of source material is less of a reason to delete elements in an adapta-tion.228 However, comic book adaptations rarely use just one issue of a comic book series. In Sin City three books are combined and Scott Plilgrim vs. the World is comprised of all six episodes currently in existence.229 As Pascal Lefèvre notes, ‘[f]ew adaptations respect meticulously the storyline of a par-ticular comic’.230 The obvious reason is that ‘most comic book narratives have no secure and permanent source text’.231 In these instances it is better for films to focus on the character, as is done for Hulk, the character’s back sto-ry or to capture the spirit instead of trying to faithfully translate a specific storyline to the screen. Elements from various issues are used and new ele-ments are introduced by the screenwriter. From this perspective, literature adaptations require reduction and comic book adaptations are prone to addi-tion.

Comic book production itself ignores fidelity as Richard Berger’s case study Superman shows. Comic book series that have spread over several dec-ades tend to have variations of the main characters, undesirable storylines, and were even created by successive artists. In the case of Hulk, the comic itself made some drastic changes in its beginning making it a relatively un-stable base.232 Due to conflicting stories between various series of a comic and its possible television adaptations too, no ‘true’ source can be identified. The Incredible Hulk television show (1978-1982), staring Bill Bixby as Dr. David Banner, has a strong influence on the hulk character because it had

228 Film does not have an almost infinite time span or space to store and tell its story in the way that literature can fill thousands of pages. The, The Lord of the Rings Trilo-gy (Peter Jackson, 2001, 2002, 2003) is a good example of trying to be as compete as the book with three long films and extended version DVDs. 229 Based on Bryan Lee O'Malley’s humorous graphic novel series (2004-2010), the film appears only a week after O’Malley’s latest volume. This is because director Edgar Wright starts working on the script in 2005 and develops it alongside O’Malley who meanwhile works on another four volumes that are all integrated into the film. The result is that the film matches almost shot to panel to the first volume but the story in the film differs in details to the later graphic novels. 230 Lefèvre, 2007, 4. 231 Berger, 2008, 90. 232 At first Banner only turned into the hulk at night for instance. (Hughes, 2003, 261.)

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re-configured the hulk at the time.233 David Hughes writes how executive producer and Marvel executive Kevin Feige believes that ‘the television show, not the comic, is the reason that awareness of The Hulk is so high’.234 At the same time the TV show is a rich ground for inspiration and offers the possi-bility for intertextual references. Lou Ferrigno, for instance, who played the Hulk in the TV show, makes a cameo appearance as security guard in the movie. On a more subtle level, the theme for the film score is based on an el-ement in the music composed for the TV show.235

After many rewrites, Ang Lee’s Hulk is a totally new story that recycles previous incarnations of the hulk character.236 In the deletion/addition pro-cess of rewriting the texts for film both elements from the comics and the TV were added. Still, due to the surplus of texts, the final story is enormously reductive. The film only shows a new version of the basic hulk story. A movie could never translate all the previous adventures. All the ‘deletion’ thus opens space for productive addition of elements from varying sources in-cluding the comic book medium it-self.

As image 2 shows, Hulk starts with an animation of the marvel logo.237 Motionless comic book draw-ings rapidly change from one to the next. Reminiscent of a thumb cine-

233 In fact some important steps of adaptation were already taken on the way to the television movie in 1977 and the subsequent TV-series. For instance, the hulk talked nonsense as a big brute. Producer/writer/director Kenneth Johnson did away with that. ‘He didn’t have the hulk talk at all.’ (Hughes, 2003, 263.) Ang Lee’s hulk does utter two phrases though. The hulk calls Bruce, himself, a puny human in a dream se-quence when he falls of the jet plane back to earth. Also in a rather dream like se-quence, the hulk says take it all to his father in their final fight. 234 Hughes, 2003, 262. 235 The theme around 30 seconds into Danny Elfman’s end credits score is very much like that around 50 seconds in the soundtrack composed and conducted by Joe Harnell in 1978. ‘Hulk End Credits Soundtrack - Danny Elfman.’ 26-06-2008. 20-08-2011. ‘THE INCREDIBLE HULK (1978) Soundtrack Score Suite (Joe Harnell).’ 02-02-2010. 20-08-2011. 236 In Comic Book Movies David Hughes traced how it took seven years and ‘a dozen or so screenwriters’ to get a script that universal and marvel wanted to make. (Hughes, 2003, 269.) But it still was not good enough. In 2008 The Incredible Hulk (Leterrier) came out with yet a different storyline. Starring Edward Norton it rebooted the franchise setting itself as a new authoritive text that was closer to the TV show. 237 Just as Paramount starts with the stars around the mountain; Disney with its castle or universal with the globe, all Marvel adaptations start with an animation customised to the comic adapted taking images from the original comic. ‘The tonality of the images and the set of colors refer to the film hero’s outfit.’ (Tomasovic, 2006, 313.) This Marvel animation is green instead of its customary red to get into Hulk’s green theme.

Image 2: Marvel Animation. Lee. Hulk. (00:00:27).

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ma, it refers to how one perceives motion from still pictures. It sig-nals the transition from comic to film. furthermore, the opening and end credits link to comic book practices with their font and plac-ing. The opening credits are super-imposed over images of handwrit-ten notes made by the scientist who turns out to be Bruce’s father. Written in capitals are the most im-portant clues to the research into the technology that will be responsible for Bruce Banner’s mutation. Moreover, words are underlined to draw attention. The rest is told by the images: cells dividing, lab animals, and scientific equipment. The end credits are placed in cells and speech bubbles that di-vide it like a comic book page, as one can see in image 3. The font of the credits is like the writing in the speech bubbles; handwritten capital let-ters.238 The most salient characteristic of Hulk that refers to the comic book medium is the way it tackles Lefèvre's second problem: ‘the unique charac-teristics of page layout and film screen’.239

The comic book creator orchestrates the interplay between the multi-ple panels on a page. The layout of a page is meticulously designed and the composition in individual panels is arranged to create a harmonious compo-sition with neighbouring panels.240 The cinematic equivalent is split-screen or multiple-frame imagery, defined by Bordwell and Thompson as a process whereby ‘two or more images, each with its own frame dimension and shape, appear within the larger frame’.241 In the editing of Hulk split-screen and wipes are used to reference the multiple images on a comic book page.242 Edi-tor Tim Squyres explains in a bonus feature on the Hulk DVD that ‘they did 238 The writing for comic books is usually done by hand, after the drawings by special-ised personnel. Typed lettering can also be used but does not ‘harmony’ well with the overall style of drawings. (Smet, 1983, 41-42.) To make the writing easy to read capitals are used. Nowadays special comic book fonts are also used when lettering is done in the computer. 239 Lefèvre, 2007, 3-4. 240 Richardson, 1977, 205. 241 Bordwell & Thompson, 2004, 257. Although these two terms essentially refer to the same editing principal of a composite shot, it is practical to use them to refer to sub-categories of that same principal. The typical association with split-screen is a divi-sion of the screen into two. Multiple-frame imagery implies that more than one frame is represented on the screen. I will use it when three or more frames are onscreen. Furthermore, multiple-frame implies a frame, so one wants to see edges of the indi-vidual frames. 242 Wipes let multiple images briefly occupy the same frame and their showy pres-ence hints at the exaggeration of cartoons.

Image 3: Hulk End Credits. Lee. Hulk. (02:07:31).

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not want to imitate a comic book page layout because it would not work in film, but they wanted to come up with some cinematic devices inspired by those dynamic pages’.243 This addition of images in the film breaks the con-ventional aspect ratio of the cinematic screen and suggests simultaneity. In Hulk, multiple frames are often placed next to each other as a mosaic screen. However, due to the difficulty a viewer experiences in following all the frames, the content of the included shots tend to be rather superficial and similar to each other. Hence the montage sequence is the place one usually finds mul-tiple-frame imagery. Size and placing of the frames as well as the lighting and movement inside the shots are means of guiding the viewer’s eye to limit the confusion.244

Not only is the multiple-frame technique reminiscent of the comic aes-thetic, the insertion of hypermediacy here temporarily diminishes the imme-diacy of the cinematic illusion. The breaking of the cinematic illusion may be the reason why split-screen has not become a regular technique applied by comic book adaptations. Neil Smith sees Hulk’s panel based aesthetic as one of the reasons to call it, ‘one big arthouse head-scratcher’.245 As Lefèvre sees it, ‘direct adaptation is seldom a good choice: some elements may work won-derfully in a comic, but cannot function in the context of a film’.246 In the early days of filmed theatre directors faced a similar problem. Filming the en-tire stage recreates the theatre spectators’ position most accurately but not their experience. To this end, multiple-camera set-ups are used for live tele-vised drama to recreate the way audiences watch theatre. To use the words of Philip Auslander, ‘[s]witching from camera to camera allows the television di-rector to replicate the effect of the theatre spectator’s wandering eye’.247 In the case of comic books one can look at the page as a whole or skip from one frame to another in a random order; although this does not make sense. Looking at the whole page one sees colours and boxes. To make sense of it one has to concentrate on one cell at a time; look at the picture, read the text, look at the picture again and go on. Comic book frames come to life consecutively in the mind of the reader as they are ‘read’. With multiple-frame imagery, all the onscreen images are moving at the same time. The best cinematic equivalent to the concentration of reading a comic, panel per panel is in fact regular editing, not split-screen. Exactly recreating the panels in film form is thus both impossible and undesirable at times. This may be

243 Lefèvre, 2007, 6. 244 For more information on Hulk and its use of split-screen see appendix 9. 245 Smith, 2011, 89. 246 Lefèvre, 2007, 4. 247 Auslander, 1999, 19.

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the reasoning why Rodriguez and Miller use the choice of shots and pacing in the editing, rather than split-screen, to recreate the way attention is drawn from one panel to the next through the page layout in comics.

Sin City’s close resemblance to the comic, and subsequent ‘success’ as an adaptation boils down to two things. Robert Rodriguez bent cinema closer to comics, and Frank Miller originally created a comic that was already cine-matic in its choice of images. The stark black and white images may be be-yond what cinema could ever want; the dialogue, characters and stories be-yond what would usually be accepted in a film, but composition and choice of content per panel work as effective as the film noir movies from the 1940s and 1950s that Miller was inspired by.248 In recreating Miller’s signature style reduction and addition are again the tools for the job.

Whereas novel-to-film adaptations require film to add images to the story, translating comic book images and their aesthetic to the screen re-quires film to reduce itself. That is to say, its realism needs to be abstracted. For Sin City this process of cartooning starts with reduction. The black and white is a subtraction of colour from the material Rodriguez shot in colour.249 In fact, most of the recorded film image is deleted by keying away the green screen. The previously green space is filled in with artificial backgrounds adding to the image shot. Backgrounds are an addition of the adaptation as the graphic novel images had no backgrounds.

Before CGI other means were used for cartooning in film. Michael Co-hen traces how Warren Beatty and his crew have sought to replicate visually the comic book aesthetic for Dick Tracy. Using production design, prosthet-ics, diopter lenses, lighting, and framing choices they create an aesthetic of artifice by playing down the photographic realism of film.250 The dioptre lens, for instance, enables Beatty to have both foreground and background in fo-cus like the flat image of comics.251 During a montage sequence Beatty gives Tracy outlines with strong backlighting. Although it is the reverse of a comic book image where the background is white and the character is outlined by a black line the function of separating the character from the background re-mains.252 Cohen explains that Beatty uses a pallet limited to ‘primarily red, green, blue and yellow – to evoke the film’s comic book origins; furthermore, each of the colours was to be exactly the same shade’.253 Unfortunately, the

248 Miller & Rodriguez, 2005, 15. 249 Rodriguez in, Miller & Rodriguez, 2005, 11. 250 Cohen, 2007, 13-36. 251 Cohen, 2007, 34-35. 252 Cohen, 2007, 29. 253 Hughes, 2003, 54.

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film was no great success and as Hughes writes, ‘[m]ost critics saw Dick Tra-cy as a victory of style over substance.’254

Fidelity to the source limits adapters to the style, mood, and genre conventions of the works they base their films on. To take Batman as an ex-ample, the campy tongue-in-cheek approach in the Batman television series of the late 1960s allows the use of onomatopoeias,255 but the series is totally different to the noir vigilante Bob Kane introduced back in 1939. Kane’s au-thorial intent is used, however, as way to ‘add authenticity’256 to the latest Batman films.257 Although the film caries the right mood, it does not refer-ence comics’ modes of narration. At the other end of this spectrum is Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Because the film is a comedy, director Edgar Wright used just about every trick of the trade to give it that thick comic book feel. Apart from split-screens and a drawn animation sequence,258 speed lines and shout lines are sprinkled across the film. Wright used the opportunity of a humorous comic book adaptation to push the styling even further by insert-ing very graphic onomatopoeias that double the sound effects. In addition, he preserves symbolic and iconic representations that do not signify sound. Chapter titles, common to manga, and character introduction boxes are tak-en right from the comics. The result feels very contemporary because of its hypermedial way of making intertextual references. Here, addition of comic book elements is used rather than subtracting from film as is the case with Sin City. Scott Pilgrim manages to achieve a free and over-the-top expression in live action that was previ-ously confined to comics, cartoons, and anime.

Scott Pilgrim is also full of video game references. Wright added dialogue about Pac-Man (Namco, 1980), for instance, and video game sound effects. Another fun moment, depicted in image 4, is when Scott grabs a 1-up

254 Hughes, 2003, 57. 255 Lefèvre, 2007, 11. 256 Gordon et al. 2007, VIII. 257 Batman Begins (Nolan, 2005), The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan, 2012) 258 The drawn animation sequence was inspired by the comic. It featured that scene in a different, sketchy, style of drawing.

Image 4: Scott grabs 1-up. Wright. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. (01:24:30).

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video game icon of himself and says, ‘getting a life’.259 Other video game ref-erences such as big titles saying ‘GAME OVER’ and the video game level plot structure were already part of O’Malley’s work. The upcoming chapter will explore such video game structures as levels and other ways video games in-fluence film in video game adaptations.

259 Wright, Edgar. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Right after defeating the twins. (01:24:30).

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5. VIDEO GAME ADAPTATIONS In the fall of 1961, a large, rectangular box landed on MIT’s doorstep. It came from the Digital Equipment Corporation. The box contained DEC’s new model computer the DPD-1, and its manufacturers hoped that MIT’s electrical engi-neering department would do something interesting with it – win the space race, breed artificial intelligent robots, or at least revolutionize information pro-cessing for the greater glory of corporate America. Within a year, the computing pioneers at MIT had done none of these things. But one of them had written the world’s first video game.260

J.C. Herz This first video game was Spacewar (Russell, Graetz & Witaenem, 1961.). 5.1. The Relationship between Video Games and Film Since their ‘birth’ in the 1960s video games261 are distributed via coin operat-ed arcade machines; floppies and CD-ROMs for PCs; and many other plat-forms including ROM-cartridges and disks ranging from the analogue la-serdiscs to Blue-ray discs for consoles. Although video games use various platforms, Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron locate the uniqueness of the video game medium in the following four elements: ‘algorithm, player activity, interface and graphics’.262 They argue that video games radically differ from previous media as they are:

the first to combine real-time game play with a navigable, onscreen diegetic space; the first to feature avatars and player-controlled surro-gates that could influence onscreen events.263

260 Herz, 1995, 5. 261 As does Wolf, I prefer to use video game instead of videogame (one word) because in that way it describes a game using video (as card games use cards) rather than a type of video technology like videotape. (Wolf, 2008d, 3.) 262 Wolf & Perron, 2003, 14. - Graphics ties in to the video of video games that originally referred to the CRT’s (cathode ray tube) in arcade games and in general to the depiction of the game play in some visual form on a screen. - The kind of games that are made is influenced by restrictions of memory in car-tridges compared to CD-ROMs for instance; the places games are played in, noisy arcades compared to the living room or a quiet study, as well as the economic mod-els of paying per cartridge or CD versus paying per play in an arcade. 263 Wolf & Perron, 2003, 11.

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When adapted to film, these features that come down to player activity are lost and the interface is substituted for the cinema or video player. Graphics and algorithm of games, on the other hand, can be simulated in film adapta-tions. But video games are already adapting film and other media before films started adapting games. Since the beginning of the console era, comic books are used as source material and from ‘the early 1980s, video games already were known for their adaptations of television series and American films’.264 Martin Picard looks at the relationship video games have to other media. Wolf also notes how video games such as Raiders of the Lost Ark (Atari, 1981) ‘relied on characters estab-lished in other media’ instead of creating their own original personalities.265 Pac-Man turns the situation around. Pac-man is the first ‘video game star’.266 An an-imated television series of the glutinous yellow character follows in the 1980s.267 It takes another decade for a game-movie to be released in theatres. This is Su-per Mario Bros (Morton & Jankel, 1993). But basing films on video games really starts to take off around the turn of the millennium with films tied to the Poké-mon franchise and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. (West, 2001. Hereafter referred to as Lara Croft.)268

Video games are used in crossmedia disseminations of stories along with films but they are no longer dependent on other media for their stories. Game developers are creating characters that are worth a game-movie and the ‘video game industry leaders have gained enough power to control the production of the film adaptations of their games’269 writes Picard. Much of the contemporary relationship between video games and film comes down to convergence. Since the 1980s it is the same corporations that produce films that also create video games.270 Jenkins observes that ‘[i]ncreasingly, movie moguls saw games not simply as a means of stamping the franchise logo on some ancillary product

264 Picard, 2008, 294 & 296. 265 Wolf, 2001, 97. 266 Wolf, 2008c, 73. ‘Pac-man was also the first video game character to be heavily merchandised in areas outside of video games.’ (Wolf, 2008c, 74.) For images of some of the products visit ‘The Virtual Pac-Man Museum’. The Virtual Pac-Man Museum. n.d. ZUTCO. 20-07-2011. <http://www.zutco.com/pacman.htm>. 267 Wolf & Perron, 2003, 6. 268 Most of the 202 titles IMDb lists as being “based on video game” are videos and television series rather than movies. Pokémon is abundantly represented. Next to these animated films German writer, director and producer Uwe Boll is notorious among video game fans for his adaptations of video games into live action films that, among others, have given game-movies a reputation of B-films. 269 Picard, 2008, 293. 270 Berger, 2008, 95.

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but as a means of expanding the storytelling experience’.271 Picard amends this with the observation that video games are the obvious tie-in to CGI ani-mated films, such as those by Pixar or DreamWorks, ‘since 3-D animation and video games share the same target audiences as well as the same visual style and technology’.272 Also, the film image itself has come closer to that of the video game with increased use of visual effects in live action films. With CGI, ‘film’ no longer requires a pro-filmic reality. Picard continues that the exhibi-tion outlets of films, television and video games are similar.273 Moreover, film directors, such as Steven Spielberg, are taking an interest in video games.274 And whereas early game sound design is restrained by the storage and tuning issues Eric Pidkameny describes, and composing in the early days is actually programming,275 Picard explains that producing game music is now done ‘in a similar fashion as film music scores’.276 Although movies are still used as the tent pole to the marketing, the video game industry now eclipses the film indus-try. Concerning adaptation of games, Berger observes that the relationship of source and target is not as straight forward as it used to be. ‘Many videogames are ‘based’ on films, although very often they are released simultaneously with the exhibition of the supposed source text, providing a great deal of marketing cachet.’277 In these cases, source and target are not a matter of primacy, but of one text narrating the primary story. But remember, primacy is a result of ad-aptation; not an element of, or prerequisite for it.

When comparing video games, films, and adaptations of each other, corre-spondences between the two are also due to genre conventions. Video games can be classified based on platform, e.g. arcade and CD-ROM; interactivity, e.g. platform, first-person shooter and role playing games; and in terms of themes and iconography, e.g. science fiction. J.C. Hetz’s categorization is practical be-cause of the limited number of categories: action, adventure, fighting, puzzle, role-playing, simulation, sports, and strategy.278 When conceiving a game-movie, some game genres are clearly more suitable. If one takes narrative as a starting point, puzzle games like Tetris (Nintendo, 1984) are impractical. Action and adventure are the logical candidates up for adaptation. As Marie-Laure Ryan writes, ‘[t]he preferred narrative structure of the adventure game is the ar-

271 Jenkins, 2006, 8. 272 Picard, 2008, 297. 273 Picard, 2008, 193 274 Picard, 2008, 293. Spielberg, ‘founded DreamWorks Interactive, a division dedicated in producing video games, including Medal of Honor in 1999, based on an original con-cept by Spielberg himself’. [Picard, 2008, 293] 275 Pidkameny, 2008, 251 & 252. 276 Picard, 2008, 194. 277 Berger, 2008, 95. 278 Hertz, 1997, 25-31.

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chetypical plot of the quest of the hero, as described by Vladimir Propp and Jo-seph Campbell’.279 The plot of such games is stretched in time by having action cycles with similar structures in the piled up levels and episodes.280

Especially in early games, much of the narration happened outside of the game play. Packaging and marketing provide the narrative contexts. Early games even use the manuals to provide back stories to explain their simple graphics. The CD-ROM changes this; its advantage being ‘its massive storage space’.281 With more memory available, narrative context moves to opening scenes and scripted scenes between levels.282 These cut-scenes are fixed scenes that contain necessary information or are necessary nodes that move the sto-ry in the predetermined direction. Lev Manovich sees these introductions as a narrative shell to the algorithm based interaction that video games use to move the story from A to B and so on.283 Carl Therrien explains that:

[w]hile cut-scenes between game levels were already common in the early 1990s and surfaced quite early in the history of video games (most nota-bly with Pac-Man in 1980), CD-ROM technology quickly became an in-centive to include full-motion video [FMV] cut-scenes created with com-puter-generated imagery, live-action video, or both. Minimally, developers would add an animated introduction sequence to action-oriented games.284

The turn to FMV is likely the reason that these intermissions, generally referred to as cut-scenes, are also known as cinematics. Wolf sees these elaborate open-ing and closing sequences, including crawling credits, as attempts towards a more cinematic experience.285

Wolf points out that ‘[n]arrative unifies the action of the game and helps to create the feeling that the player is participating instead of merely interact-ing’.286 The player’s action must make a difference, writes Torben Grodal in his contribution to The Video Game Theory Reader (2003), to give the players a feel-ing of ‘agency’ as they must actively develop the story.287 Moving the story for-ward comes down to what Grodal calls, ‘the execution of low-level (sub)goals like simple navigation and handling processes’.288 Video game players seem to be in control, but their agency is confined by the rules and limitations of the game.

279 Ryan, 2004, 351. 280 Ryan, 2004, 351. 281 Therrien, 2008, 123. 282 Wolf, 2001, 102. 283 Manovich, 2001, 222. 284 Therrien, 2008, 123. 285 Wolf, 2001, 2. 286 Wolf, 2001, 101. 287 Grodal, 2003, 141-142. 288 Grodal, 2003, 131.

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In terms of narrative, a game can have a branching structure with multi-ple endings; a branching structure with nodes reconnecting to narrative strands limiting the number of endings; or choose to have no preset narrative at all. Al-ternatively, key objects or tasks can be used that have to be collected or per-formed before players can proceed. The hypertextual construction and depend-ence on player activity make each playing of a game a unique experience. This also makes it hard to create music that fits as exactly as a film score flows with, and accentuates, the image. As Eric Pidkameny describes, ‘a game’s music is inevitably tied to the player’s actions’.289 Yet even if the structure of a game is nonlinear, ‘[c]omputer games […] are experienced by their player as narra-tives’290 writes Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media (2001). This is due to the way one experiences texts. Grodal explains that ‘even when “reading” a hypertext the experiential flow would always be linear as it would be revealed if we taped our hypertext activity’.291

Most video games now feature characters in a diegetic world with a goal due to conflict.292 Game-fictions or narrative games, both terms used by Barry Atkins, are games that can be understood as narratives. This can be a starting point for adaptations, or narrative analysis as Atkins does. But one should keep in mind that scripting the narrative for games is somewhat more difficult due to the agency of the player, who not only influences the direction of a narrative but also its pacing.293 Conversely, the ludic approach to games is about the rules and structures. As it is not my intention to interpret games as a novel, the way Atkins does, but to analyse films along the lines of video games, rules, and structures to form the basis for the upcoming discussion on challenges for ad-aptations after looking at more elements specific to video games.

Games use modes of address and perspectives foreign to film. For in-stance, players can be addressed directly with ‘you’. Film spectators are rarely addressed directly, instead, they identify with the characters being spoken to. In terms of perspectives Grodal mentions that a ‘third person perspective on sto-ries [, as in films,] enhances the experience of stories that rely on certain third-person emotions, like empathy’.294 But, he continues that ‘the most fundamen-tal emotions like love, hate, jealousy, curiosity, sorrow, and fear rely on a first-

289 Pidkameny, 2008, 255. 290 Manovich, 2001, 221. 291 Grodal, 2003, 146. 292 Wolf, 2001, 93. 293 At a seminar at the Dutch film school, NFTA, I was told by the guest lecturer, a game designer, that they tend to put the action and experience in first place and hence, over-look narrative. 294 Grodal, 2003, 135.

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person perspective for a full experience of these emotions’.295 Video games should thus be good at these emotions. Still, mostly fear and curiosity appear to be stimulated. This is probably why shooter games use a first-person perspec-tive and adventure games use a third-person perspective. For players to have more affinity with Lara Croft, for instance, the makers decided to use a third person perspective so they could always see her.296

These days first or third person perspective is a matter of choice as is photographic perspective. In early text-based video games, there is no visual space. Two dimensional spaces follow and slowly the game space grows beyond the borders of the screens, creating the need for the ‘camera’ to track along or cut to the next room or level. Each space played in is depicted in a single shot without cuts; a long take, using cinematic vocabulary.297 As a visual medium, video games rely on some cinematic conventions such as consistent screen di-rections and off-screen space. Maps become important as game worlds grow. Often placed onscreen as an information sub-screen, they represent the off-screen space. But it is especially in time that video games differ from film. Run-through times of games by far exceed film’s conventional runtime of two hours.298 Hence, more obstacles are to be overcome and most video games are not designed to be consumed in one sitting as is film.299 The action in films al-ways continues, but a player can idle and wander in a video game. The most no-table aspect of game time is that it is full of repetition. This is one of the aspects discussed in the following section charting the challenges for game to film adap-tations. 5.2. The Use of Video Game Elements in Film Apart from reusing story elements and characters, references can be made to the aesthetic and plot structure of the video game on which a film is based. Visual elements, such as costume and set design, are likely to stay true to the game’s iconography if the film is to take place in the same diegetic world as the game. For instance, Croft Manor in the film resembles its counterpart in the original game Tomb Raider (Core Design, 1996). But in Tomb Raider:

295 Grodal, 2003, 135. 296 McMahan, 2008, 184. Citing Adrian Smith. 297 When a character moves through a level, from left to right as they usually do in films, the camera would pan right in a film to keep the character in frame. But as Wolf notes in his analysis of video game space, in ‘the video game, however, it is the space which is being moved [from right to left] instead of the camera/viewer.’ (Wolf, 2001, 58.) 298 Most games have a run-through time, the time it takes to complete the game as quick as possible, of approximately four hours. 299 Although films can be paused, reviewed and amended with extras on DVDs, they are still ‘designed’ to be viewed in one sitting whether in the cinema or at home.

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Legend (Crystal Dynamics, 2006) the Mansion is closely matched to the film.300 Live action films do not have the same kind of image as their game counterparts; they do not resemble video game graphics.301 In the first Lara Croft film the video game’s virtual aesthetic is referenced via electronic devic-es. Point-of-view shots from the robot and computer screens have a raw blue digital look. When Lara looks through her binoculars, extra information is displayed on the sides. It adds a layer of information to the image that brings to mind video game interfaces with onscreen information like radars, hit counts, and scores. Together with the controllers, they make up the interface. They are constant reminders of the video game medium that oscillates between hypermediacy and immediacy as game play is interrupted by cinematic cut-scenes. The cut-scenes are more cinematic because the action shown from var-ious impressive camera angles is edited. As is done in the Hitman series (IO interactive, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006), the cinematics are often accentuated by letterboxing for a cinematic aspect ratio.302 The other way around, the kind of camera positions used in the game to be adapted can inspire the camera style for the film. Typical for adventure games is a camera following a character from behind and looking down slightly. This following-fairy-perspective, as I call it, is referenced in Hitman (Gens, 2007).303 Image 5 shows how the camera angle, oddly high up, shortly emulates gameplay and acknowledges the film’s origin as Agent 47 walks through the corridor in the restaurant. Also common to video games are slow motion, point-of-view shots, often through viewfinders, and orbits of the camera freely moving around the character whilst keeping them

300 Noteworthy at this juncture is that Lara’s projecting breasts, one of her distin-guishing and oft discussed features, approach their iconic size in this film and have more natural dimensions in the sequel Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (de Bont, 2003). / The Internet Movie Database. ‘Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003) Trivia.’ 2011. 20-07-2011. 301 Only films that are entirely computer animated, such as Final Fantasy: The Spir-its Within (Sakaguchi & Sakakibara, 2001), have a video game look and feel. 302 Walkthroughs of Hitman: Codename 47 (Eidos Interactive, 2000). ‘HITMAN-Codename 47 (Hitman 1).’ n.d. 20-07-2011. ‘Hitman: Blood Money Walkthrough.’ n.d. 20-07-2011. 303 The term ‘following-fairy-perspective’ is of my own invention, inspired by the fairy helpers in some adventure games that constantly follow the protagonist. For example see the Hitman gameplay: ‘Hitman 3 - Contracts - Walkthrough - Mission 1 - Asylum After Math - PRO/SA.’ 02-05-2009. 20-07-2011.

Image 5: Game Perspective in Hitman. Gens. Hitman. (00:53:13).

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in frame.304 For adaptations it can also be inspiring to look at less superficial traits of the game in question such as its narrative or level structure and its rules. Video game logic is the term Warren Buckland uses to describe how one can interpret films using rules of video games.305 He demonstrates this in an analysis of The Fifth Element (Besson, 1997)306 and finds that where the film does not work logically in classic narrative terms, the second half of the film adheres to the video game logic in terms of levels and rules.307 Buckland lists seven structures of video games that are used to construct the rules in video games and that he uses as a means to identify the video game logic in The Fifth Element. The seven structures are: repetition, levels, space-time warps, transformations, rewards and punishments, pace, and interactivity.

In films, interactivity is lost and pace, like in games, quickens towards the end. Immediate punishments come down to the loss of lives, or death di-rectly after failing a task. A clear example of immediate rewards in a game-movie is Lara playing her party music mix from the flash card she set as prize for the practice session in the opening scene of Lara Croft. These dynamics of rewards and punishments are not only part of games though. They are com-mon narrative elements in action and adventure movies too. Video games can also feature time and space warps or character transformations in their die-gesis, letting players replay certain sections of the game in an evolved state. For example, in the film Hitman Agent 47 dons various uniforms to get to places unnoticed. Time and space warps are also narrative possibilities open to films, but more natural to games that rely on repetition. Serialized repetition is used to accumulate points and master the rules and avatar moves. This falls under what Wolf and Perron label algorithm in their discussion of video game elements.308 By using multiple levels of adventure in games, similar ac-tions are repeated, though tougher to accomplish each time through. Accord-ing to Wolf, ‘[c]ycled action builds player expectation and anticipation, and knowledge of a pattern is often crucial to the timing of the player-character’s ac-tions’.309 This makes repetition a form of training.310 Grodal sees video games as

304 Orbits are used in conjunction with the following-fairy-perspective to constantly keep characters in frame as they move through the game world in one long take. 305 Elsaesser & Buckland, 2002, 161-167. 306 The Fifth Element also appeared as a 3D adventure video game a year later. The Internet Movie Database. ‘The Fifth Element.’ 2011. 20-07-2011. 307 Buckland, 2002, 166. 308 Buckland uses interactivity to describe how player activity, as Wolf & Perron labelled it, influences narrative beats and is dependent on the design of the interface. In 2001 Wolf also still used interactivity as one of the areas where games differ from other me-dia. (Wolf, 2001, 14.) 309 Wolf, 2001, 81.

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stories in the making because they are based on such rehearsals.311 Besides repetition, levels can also be used to show off the diegetic world and intricate-ly designed locations.

If one reads the film Lara Croft in video game terms one can identify sequences that correspond to levels where Lara has a task to complete. The ‘levels’ are underscored with distinct locations: Croft Manor, the Cambodian temple and the orrery in a Siberian cave. These usually contain many enemies and challenges and end with a boss battle. Table 2 offers a schematic depic-tion of the film’s plot structure in video game terms. Table 2: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider Plot Structure as Levels.312 Level Nr. Sequence Kind 1 1 Training Boss battle - Level 1 2 Shower Cut-scene - Iconicity 3 Venice – illuminate Cut-scene - Start story 4 Remember father Cut-scene - Back-story 5 Finding clock and key inside Cut-scene - Move story 6 Showing it to expert, meeting Alex Cut-scene - Move story 2 7 Fighting off the robbers Level 2 8 Clue from father - finding the letter Cut-scene - Back-story 3 9 Getting to the temple Cut-scene- Vehicles 10 Getting into the temple Puzzle 11 Finding the first half Puzzle 12 Escaping the living statues Boss battle - Level 3 13 Escaping Powel and Alex Cut-scene 14 Phoning Powell and home Cut-scene - Move story 15 Drinking monk's tea Cut-scene - Magic 16 Meeting in Venice Cut-scene - Move story 17 Confronting Alex Cut-scene 4 18 Way to cave in crater Cut-scene - Vehicles 19 Blocked tunnel Puzzle 20 Finding second half in the orrery Puzzle 21 Completing the triangle Puzzle - Race 22 Meeting father Cut-scene - Pay-off 23 Final battle Boss battle - Level 4 24 Getting out without sled Cut-scene- Vehicles 25 Accepting father’s death - training Cut-scene - End

In the upcoming analyses of Prince of Persia elements of Buckland’s video game logic and other traits specific to video games that can find equivalents

310 Wolf, 2001, 81. 311 Grodal, 2003, 147. 312 My schematic representation of the sequences in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (West, 2001) and their video game equivalent.

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in film are used as points of departure.313 Video game structure is built on levels, cut-scenes, and space-time warps which are in turn influenced by nar-rative devices. These are: avatar moves, camera positions, pause-and-save functions, and adherence to rules expressed in serialized repetition and im-mediate rewards and punishment. 5.3. Cases Study 2: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Newell, 2010) After turning a Disney pirate ride into a successful movie, producer Jerry Bruckheimer works with Disney again for another adaptation from a visual source. Prince of Persia is to become the first movie incarnation of the athlet-ic prince after a long lineage of video games. This analysis seeks the refer-ences to these preceding games and the video game medium itself. This is done by investigating the film’s plot structure and the way the film may ref-erence modes of narration used in video games such as repetition, the use of lives, and avatar moves. The following section provides a summary of the film’s story and a description of the video games. 5.3.1. Synopsis of the Film’s Story In sixth century Persia, the adopted prince Dastan and his two foster broth-ers, Tus and Garsiv, reach the holy city of Alamut where their uncle Nizam convinces them to attack the city. After a stealth attack, Dastan gains access to the city, winning the battle. When a man flees on horseback, Dastan stops him and takes a dagger from him - a double-edged fighting knife. Ruler of Al-amut, Princess Tamina, knows that the dagger can turn back a short period of time by letting magical sand stream out of its hilt. She hates Dastan for having it, but flees with him when he is accused of murdering his foster fa-ther, the King of Persia. Dastan discovers the power of the dagger. He thinks Tus wants it, so he tries to convince Nizam of his innocence. But Dastan finds out that Nizam wants the dagger to turn back time so far that he could be king for a lifetime. To do this, Nizam has to find a huge hourglass contain-ing the sands of time underneath the city and pierce it with the dagger. how-ever, this will destroy the world. Tamina and Dastan have to stop him but they are captured, and recaptured, by the comical Sheik Amar and his greedy bandits. They decide to return the dagger to the gods in a remote temple but are hindered by Hassansins, hired by Nizam, who take the dagger. Back in Alamut Dastan, Tamina, and the bandits steal back the dagger and Dastan

313 Elements like pace that are already equalled in film are left out. Arguably pace is different in games because it is influenced by player activity but because this is on-tologically impossible to transfer to film it is also ignored in these analyses.

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convinces Tus. But Nizam enters, kills Tus, takes the dagger and proceeds to the hourglass. Tamina and Dastan have to get there before him, via treacher-ous secret passageways and defeating the last of the Hassansins. While fighting Nizam, Dastan and Tamina fall over a ledge. Tamina lets go of Das-tan so he can save the world. Nizam starts turning back time but Dastan stops him just before the world falls apart. He is transported to the moments after conquering Alamut and now confronts his uncle publicly, thwarting his evil plan. 5.3.2. Description of the Video Games Around a dozen Prince of Persia games have been made since 1989 when the first of two 2D platform games was launched. The first 3D third-person per-spective version appears in 1999. Although the stories of the various games differ, they all feature a nameless prince in ancient Persia trying to save the main element of the plot via athletic feats. The story of interest here is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. (Ubisoft, 2003. Hereafter referred to as Sands of Time.) It is the first episode in the Sands of Time trilogy.314 All the games be-long to the action-adventure genre, which Herz describes as being, ‘about ac-cumulating an inventory of items that are then used to solve puzzles’.315 And, as Drew Davidson points out, ‘there is a feeling of open-ended choices, [but Sands of Time] is actually a linear game that uses environmental puzzles to di-rect your progress’.316 In the video game the nameless prince tells the story. Jason Rhody ob-serves that ‘the goal of the game is a process of actualization, where the player must work through the Prince’s various memories to complete his recollec-tion’.317 In voice-over, the prince starts with a bit of back-story. Through plat-forming, puzzling, fighting, and some cut-scenes, one learns how he was tricked by the vizier into releasing the sands of time in Azad, turning every-one in the kingdom into monsters. This happens after they have taken the hourglass and dagger during the conquering of a city on their way to Azad. In the game, the releasing of the sands of time functions as a way to explain the monster adversaries needed for game play. In the film, it is used as some-thing terrible Dastan has to avert. Like in the film, the prince teams up with

314 The successful trilogy consisting of Sands of Time and its two sequels Prince of Per-sia: Warrior Within and Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (Ubisoft, 2004 and 2005 re-spectively), was amended with the interquel Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands (Ubisoft, 2010) released to coincide with the Disney film. 315 For a full description of the platform and adventure genres by Mark Wolf see appen-dix 10. 316 Davidson, 2005, 5. 317 Rhody, 2005, 4.

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the princess, called Farah in the game, and they gradually fall in love. The dramatic moment where the princess lets go and falls to her death, so that the prince can save the world, is taken directly from the end of the game. In both versions, the hourglass is pierced with the dagger at the end, but in the game, the sands are locked back in the hourglass, reversing the events of the game, and the prince awakes before the invasion. The prince deals with the vizier and returns the dagger to the princess. 5.3.3. Story and Iconography As is the case with comic book adaptations, general audiences are often more familiar with the main character than they are with the specific episode the film is based on. References to traits common to the series and medium offer recognition to broader audiences where citations or direct references please only viewers initiated to the specific source text. When comparing the film’s and game’s stories, elements such as the street rat transformed to prince and the commotion about a stolen apple in the beginning, are not from the game but from Disney’s own collection: Aladdin (Clements & Musker, 1992). The film’s iconography, boasting spiky gates and curly architecture, and an idyl-lic palace with temples and towers, matches that of the game and the con-temporary image of a romanticised ancient Persia. Other elements that impli-cate the game are the sandy secret passage ways, floors that give way, and jumping from ledge to ledge in the last act. Both film and game also feature high towers where the desired objects are guarded: the dagger in the film and the hourglass in the game. The most important objects, the dagger and the hourglass, are preserved and Dastan is dressed in the likeness of the prince in the game with light baggy pants, long black hair and a leather clad torso. In terms of music, the film does not use the same melodies but like the game it also integrates Middle Eastern sounding string instruments and percus-sion.

From this short comparison it can be concluded that the film’s icono-graphy matches that of the game but that their stories differ. This leaves the question whether the film’s plot structure has inherited video game ele-ments? 5.3.4. Plot Structure Prince of Persia starts with a voice-over narrator and pictures of a sun rising, a map of Persia, and a vast army. But the narrator is not the prince, as in the game. The narrator tells of Persia, its king, and his brother and how the king adopted a boy from the streets. The narrator is interrupted by a scene showcasing the athletic feats of the young Dastan. Six shots are used in

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overlapping editing to depict Dastan’s first jump. This aestheticises and ac-centuates the jump; the core feature of the platform game genre. This action intermission to the narrative early in the film signals to the viewer that this is a game-movie. After the initial setup, action takes over as the Persians invade Ala-mut. Narrative regains the upper hand after Dastan and Tamina flee because of the king’s murder. More back-story is revealed as the two grow closer and the action only consists of getaways until Dastan and Tamina decide to parry Nizam’s evil plans. After this point the sequences form a level-structure re-volving around the dagger. As is the case in adventure games, levels are end-ed by finishing off increasingly powerful opponents in boss battles. In Prince of Persia these bosses are the Hassansins; but it is not always Dastan who battles them and progression to the next level can also follow after the loss of the dagger at the end of a sequence/level. Table 3 shows how each sequence ends by battling a variant of the Hassansins.318 Table 3: Sequences as Levels in the Last Third of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.319

Sequence Ending Fight between: And:

Adversary beaten by:

Dagger ends in the hands of the:

Night attack by snakes

Dastan turns back time

Dastan

Zolm's snake

Dastan

Good

Returning the dagger to the guardian temple

Arrival of Gar-siv and attack of Hassansins

Dastan

Hassad the whip man

Garsiv †

Bad *

Retrieving the dagger from the high tower

Seso fights to get the dagger

Seso

Setam the porcupine

Seso † **

Good

Convincing Tus by demonstrating the dagger

Nizam kills Tus, sets Hassansin on Dastan

Dastan & Tamina

Ghazab with halberd

Dastan

Bad ***

Reaching the hourglass before Nizam

Zolm hinders Dastan

Dastan

Zolm the leader

Dastan

Bad

Trying to stop Nizam

Both go back in time

Dastan

Nizam

Dastan

Good

Confronting Nizam right after the battle

Nizam attacks Dastan

Dastan

Nizam

Tus

Good

* The dagger is taken by the Zolm’s snake. ** Seso, the Umbakka knife-thrower from Sheik Amar's gang, dies in his fight against the Hassansin Setam who shoots blades. *** Nizam takes the dagger from Dastan as Hassansin Ghazab holds him down.

318 The names and features of the Hassansins are explained in appendix 11. 319 My schematic representation of the sequences as levels in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Newell 2010).

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Comparing levels to filmic units shows that they correspond to sequences. The single ‘levels’ stretch over multiple scenes and cover the end of the se-cond act and beginning of the third. These sequences work like levels due to the serialized repetition Buckland describes. ‘The game play on the first level is going to be repeated on the next level with essentially the same charac-ters.’320 Each time Dastan has to fight a Hassansin to continue and finally battles the one who commands them, Nizam. Only in facing Setam, Dastan is replaced by Seso the knife-thrower. The rest of the action in the scenes is in service of retrieving the dagger either by our hero or his adversaries. Prince of Persia’s plot is further marked by time travel. 5.3.5. Space-Time Warps A second video game structure Buckland identifies, space-time warps, are the basis for the Prince of Persia story. The Proppian magical agent, the dag-ger of time, has the specific powers needed to complete the mission. In the film, Dastan needs it to prove his innocence after he is accused of murdering his father at the end of the first act. He succeeds by demonstrating the dag-gers power to Tus at the end of the second act. In the third act, the dagger must be returned for order to be restored. The way space-time warps, facili-tated by the dagger, affect plot structure is connected to the modes of narra-tion: repetition and pause-and-save functions. 5.3.6. Repetition The defeating of Hassansins is a repeated element that underscores the film’s video game lineage as it signals the how levels end. Dastan and Tamina are captured by Amar’s gang twice. In my opinion, this repetition has more to do with insertion of comedy at the right moments and providing help, than it has to do with coping with a situation again with gained knowledge. This is the case when Dastan goes back in time in the end and he has to cope with the same situation as before, but with knowledge of what Nizam is up to. The most obvious and literal repetitions are the short jumps back in time when the dagger is used. These second chances available via a short time-warp are the result of emulating the pause-and-save functions in the film. 5.3.7. Pause-and-Save Functions When Dastan releases sand from the dagger’s hilt, he can redo a moment where he failed the first time through. Table 4 shows the five times the dag-ger is used this way.

320 Buckland, 2002, 166.

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Table 4: Use of the Dagger in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.321 Use Used by Situation Location Moment before 1

Dastan

By accident

Camp after fleeing

Dastan is almost stabbed by Tamina

2

Dastan

Learns what it does

Camp after fleeing

Tamina slashed Dastan's tor-so

3

Dastan

Snake attack

Camp at oasis

Dastan is too late to fend off a snake

4

Tus

Dastan convinces Tus

Palace

Dastan stabbed himself so Tus will use the dagger

5

Nizam

Letting sand run out of the hourglass

Nizam beats Dastan

In the first two times the dagger is used, Dastan learns the rules of how the dagger works. He uses it again to save his life in the oasis during the snake attack. In a video game, the player can return to a save-point or save before dangerous tasks. Just like an avatar in a game, Dastan comes back to life at the push of a button after he stabs himself to convince his brother Tus who then uses the dagger. In the Sands of Time video game, the dagger was intro-duced as a new means to skip the pause-and-save menus and continue on playing after avatar death. Atkins describes how the dagger was integrated in the game’s logic. The developers had used the opening cut-scenes to establish not only

the narrative back-story that provides the basic context for the game’s hero, his quest, and the rationale for the game’s aesthetic look and feel, but also to establish a conceit for this in-game manipulation of time. The prince […] has acquired a magical weapon, the Dagger of Time, that acts as a container for the also magical Sands of Time, a renewable and expendable resource that may be gathered (like Mario’s coins) from the landscape, or from the corpses of slain NPC’s [non-player characters].322

Because the dagger was integrated in the game’s logic, it already was a key feature in the game’s narrative. Hence, it was adapted into the screenplay as a story element; an element that coincidently references the video game me-dium. Looking back, most of the translation of the pause-and-save function into the film already happened in the development of the video game where it was integrated into the Sands of Time narrative. What remains is that avatar death is a direct punishment. The second and third time Dastan uses the dagger’s power directly follow moments where he is punished for not being quick enough to save his life.

321 Data from Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Newell 2010). 322 Atkins, 2007, 243.

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5.3.8. Immediate Rewards and Punishments A structure Buckland also identifies in video games and movies based on them, are immediate rewards and punishments. They are treated here as a mode of narration, because they are closely linked to pause and save functions in video games. An example of direct reward is when Lara Croft gets some magical tea from the Buddhists after she escapes from the Cambodian temple with half of the magical triangle. The tea instantly heals her, just like the magical potions one collects in video games. The soldier chasing the young Dastan in Prince of Persia is an example of direct punishment. He falls through a roof because he is not vigilant enough. At other times, rewards are to live on and not to be cap-tured as when Dastan and Tamina escape through a gate in time. When Dastan kills the final Hassansin, Tamina rewards him with a kiss, although this is also the last moment they can kiss in the film before time is turned back. In video games, the next cut-scene is used as a reward for reaching the end of a level.323 In the film, Tamina and Dastan share the back-story of the dagger and that of Nizam as a sandstorm passes over. The flashback style used here resembles the intrusion of a cut-scene. Before this scene, Dastan has just taken the dagger back from Tamina. The sequence before that, he escapes the royal soldiers at his father’s funeral. Dastan is rewarded with an item, the dagger, at the begin-ning of the film, when he overpowers the horseman leaving Alamut. The preced-ing sequence when Dastan cunningly breaches the city gate, carries references to video game camera conventions. 5.3.9. Camera Positions The 3D video game image is rendered to match the point of view from a specific place in the video game space; the position of the virtual camera.324 Broadly speaking, the use of camera movements and angles in video games are depend-ent on whether the avatar is controlled by the player or is fixed in a cinematic. In the first case, the virtual camera has to follow the avatar in third-, or first-person perspective in long takes, using travel shots that would require dollies, cranes, and steady-cams to make in real life. The second category contains camera work that is edited into fixed scenes between levels that move the story along, or give insight into the space to be traversed in the upcoming level. In his discussion of Sands of Time, Atkins talks about ‘proleptic visions triggered at the save checkpoints, the cinematic flash-forwards that aid in the mapping of game-space’.325 Davidson describes how these are used in the video game.

323 Atkins, 2003, 38. 324 To alter the perspective even the details of lenses can be adjusted for the virtual camera. 325 Atkins, 2007, 245.

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Often there will be quick cinematic cuts when you perform exciting phys-ical feats: the camera launches out and gives you a dramatic view of the Prince in action (sometimes in slow motion as well). [And when you ap-proach an enemy] you get quick little cinematics of the enemy posturing that serves as an alert to the change from platforming to fighting.326

In these instances, more radical camera positions, such as close-ups or low an-gle shots, can be chosen and edited into cinematic scenes. When Dastan sets out to open Alamut’s gate, Prince of Persia references this kind of advance de-scription of the upcoming level. Dastan’s friend Bis explains the situation Das-tan has to traverse.

That’s our way in. There are two gates. The outer one is easy, it’s the in-ner gate that’s impossible. That gate mechanism is protected by two man guard towers.

During Bis’ explanation, the camera moves, with great speed, from their posi-tion on the wall to the first gate, then pans in a blur to the inner gate, and after that tilts up to reveal the gate’s mechanism. This kind of camera movement is possible without difficult rigging when using virtual cameras and sets for com-puter generated shots. These kinds of camera movements come more natural to video games that are built entirely out of CGI.

The orbit, or camera moving around the character in question, typical for video games, is also used in this sequence. To drop flaming tar in front of Ala-mut’s advancing soldiers, Dastan has to span a rope from the construction holding the tar to the gate’s counterweight. While Dastan stands on a protrud-ing beam, the camera moves 180 degrees around Dastan, in what appears to be one shot, ending on a tight medium shot as he decides to jump.327 When time is turned back at the end of the film, an orbit of 450 degrees around Dastan re-turns him to the moments after the battle. In the action sequences the film acknowledges its debt to the game by using these camera movements, but also moves one recognizes from the video game avatar. 5.3.10. Avatar Moves The action sequences in Prince of Persia carry the strongest visual references to the game. Many of the avatar moves, such as jumps, getting through gates in time, pulling up on a ridge, and sword fighting, are introduced in the bat-

326 Davidson, 2005, 7. 327 The beginning of the shot is probably all computer generated and uses a virtual cam-era. The second half probably contains a live action shot in front of a green screen that is placed into the virtual environment of the first half.

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tle for Alamut. The chase sequence that introduces the young Dastan already features, falling through a roof, jumping, rolling, and walking over beams stick-ing out of a Persian building. The jumping from pillar to pillar used in the game is referenced by Dastan hopping from pillar to pillar as he cuts the ropes from all the horses when he escapes Alamut with Tamina. The short scene is not re-ally necessary for the story, but it is inserted as a wink to the game. Acrobatics return when Dastan has to flee after the meeting with his uncle. The sequence includes typical platformer moves, such as hanging from a ledge, and lots of jumps. The sequence also includes walking on a wall for a few steps, a move first introduced in Sands of Time. In the sequence through the secret tunnels, Dastan is challenged even more by a strategy video games use to make their levels more difficult: environments that respond to avatar movement. This strat-egy was also emulated in the last ‘level’ of Lara Croft when the gigantic orrery starts to rotate. In Prince of Persia the floor drops away and Dastan is too late. He has to make a huge jump, the basic move of platformers, to save himself from the sand masses.

Arguably, such moves as walking on a wall for a few steps are also part of the iconography the film and games share. They are iconic for the Prince of Persia games in the sense that they directly represent visually what the game is about. Avatar moves are intrinsic to almost all video games. They are a form by which players perform the algorithm set by the game. The moves are needed to traverse the environments, which are specially designed to match these moves. Barry Atkins describes how the players decipher their surroundings.

[T]he player knows […] that the thin pillars that support the vaulted ceil-ing are placed just the right distance apart for the avatar to leap from one to another across the room […] and one of the most basic pleasures of such games rests in the player’s ability to decode the landscape accord-ing to the key provided by the available movements if the avatar.328

Because avatar moves are used to navigate through the game space, and hence the narrative, they also have to be considered as a mode of narration specific to video games. All the structures discussed as modes and customs of video games offer inspiration for ways of narration in film that simultaneously strengthen the fidelity to the source.

328 Atkins, 2007, 237-238.

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5.4. Concluding Thoughts: Easter Eggs in Game-Movies The game-fiction is no more ‘authorless’ than any other form of fiction, but this is the most ‘writable’ of texts.329

Barry Atkins

Barry Atkins states that films cannot be as ‘writerly’ as video games. However, they can be read against the grain or at least from a different perspective. One of those perspectives is to keep in mind the source medium and text in the case of adaptations. Finding references offers a pleasure akin to finding Easter eggs in video games. As Davidson describes them, ‘[e]aster eggs are little hidden se-crets that you can ferret out and often give you bonus material’.330 Instead of completing the task set, one can walk around in a game, find hidden rooms or lock Lady Croft’s butler in the freezer, for instance. These are ways of en-gaging with the text in an irregular fashion.331 As Atkins describes, ‘[a]n analogy might be found, perhaps, in the intertextual play of some contempo-rary fiction where recognition of an authorial reference to something outside the novel […] adds a further element of readerly experience’.332 What I have done in this analysis is point out what one can call the Easter eggs in this game-movie. These are not hidden rooms, but references to the source text, and emulations of structure from the source medium. One does not need to pick up these elements to understand the film. Spotting these references, es-pecially those to game play, provides a second reading to a scene; a reading by a different engagement with the text. Like the Easter eggs in games, spot-ting an intertextual reference rewards those who find them. This second layer of engagement is clearly readable for those initiated in the source game. Whereas novice viewers may still get pleasure from the same shots, due to recognition on a subconscious level, for initiated viewers, picking up refer-ences is part of the fun. To find these references to the source medium, I have followed my model that looks at the plot structures and modes of narra-tion specific to video games. Interactivity via video game interfaces and feedback via real time graphics is impossible for the linear medium that is cinema. But the structures underly-ing the algorithm a player has to master can be replicated. Through repetition and immediate rewards and punishments, the right avatar moves have to be found to complete the task. Just as film, video games have a moving image 329 Atkins, 2003, 43. 330 Davidson, 2005, 20. 331 On the other hand, the rooms were hidden by the developers, offering players a means of distinguishing themselves from others by finding all there is to find in a game. 332 Atkins, 2003, 46.

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mode of representation. For this, camera positions have to be chosen. The vir-tual camera offers possibilities and has conventions that are hard to achieve or unusual for film. A game also has the pause-and-save function. This makes branching narratives possible. If the first attempt or strategy fails, one can re-turn to saved point and try again, starting a new branch. Returning to the save point is generally caused by avatar death. Films based on this principle of going back to a previous point in time can also have characters surviving their own deaths.

Warren Buckland poses that ‘in today’s culture dominated by new me-dia, experiences are becoming increasingly ambiguous and fragmented; corre-spondingly, the stories that attempt to represent those experiences have become opaque and complex’.333 Films based on video games seem to be the obvious candidate for the overarching term ‘puzzle plot’ Buckland uses for these modern narratives that ‘are not simply interwoven [as Aristotle’s complex plot], but en-tangled’.334 Run Lola Run (Tykwer, 1998), for instance, is inspired by structures found in video games too, as Michael Wedel distils from the opening sequence: a 360-degree camera movement for instance, and of course Lola’s three ‘lives’.335 In contrast to films such as Run Lola Run the ‘replaying’ of the same sequence in Prince of Persia is brought about by a diegetic operation, instead of film form. The diegetic explanation makes the time-warp work as a classical reversal; a quality that, along with recognition, makes a simple plot into a complex plot ac-cording to Aristotle, as story lines are interwoven.336 In Prince of Persia the video game plot structure is emulated in the story because to have a true ‘puzzle plot’ would be too much of an art house element for a blockbuster movie. In Groundhog Day (Ramis, 1993), for example, the re-petitive structure already alludes to the trial and error approach of video games. It is also part of the diegesis because the protagonist is clearly aware of the rep-etition. Among others, Buckland also lists Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) and Vanilla Sky (Crowe, 2001) as puzzle films. These also explain the plot structure in the diegesis. As with The Sixth Sense (Shyamalan, 1999), first time viewers are kept ‘blind’ from the final twist, requiring them to rely on their reconstructive memory to understand, appreciate and ultimately enjoy the film. But the only thing that makes these twists at the end different from Aristotle’s classical re-versal is that both the protagonist and audiences are not aware of how the puz-zle is structured. Opposed to a suspense structure, they work as a surprise. Explaining the structure makes a film more accessible, but also makes the ‘puz-

333 Buckland, 2009, 1. 334 Buckland, 2009, 3. 335 Wedel, 2009, 130-131. 336 Aristotle, 2000, 15.

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zle’ more of a story element than an aspect of plot structure. If you know you are watching a game-movie, it is fun to notice if there is a level structured plot. Contemporary audiences are familiar with such structures from video games but also from films themselves. Films too, use increasing levels of dif-ficulty as the story progresses, but not based on algorithms. As Paul Ruven describes in Het Geheim van Hollywood (The secret to Hollywood, 2007), suc-cessful Hollywood productions have the protagonist try to achieve his goal five times with evermore drastic strategies, of which only the final one suc-ceeds.337 Video game inspired movies may choose to repeat more blatantly similar actions and character goals to reference algorithm.

Playing with time, which creates the puzzle in these films with the forked plots, relates to video games because these rely on repetition. Audi-ences have become accustomed to branching and repetitive plot structures. And with the abundance of hyperlinks in everyday life, their structure is as natu-ral to us as linear progression, as long as we know where they lead to. Time appears to be very malleable in video games and, hence, an inspiration for game-movies. The specific modes video games use to tell their stories can also function as inspiration, although cinematic equivalents have to be found.

This chapter has strived to find the methods of narration specific to video games and analysed specifically in which ways they return in the game-movie Prince of Persia. The upcoming analysis of ride adaptations shows where inspiration can come from if one takes the world, sketched out in the source, as a point of departure.

337 Ruven, 2007, 12.

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6. RIDE ADAPTATIONS There is less story material that has to be considered for adaptations to film in the case of comics, compared to most novels. Likewise, video games gener-ally have relatively simple back-stories. Finally, theme park attractions, or rides for short338, have little to no concrete stories at all. Does this mean that the reuse of visual elements is centred in the approach to adapting rides to film? And can film based on a ride without a story still be considered an ad-aptation?

The lack of distinct stories in rides may be the reason why so few are adapted to film. The best known example of a successful transition from ride to movie is the Pirates of the Caribbean (PotC) series. For this reason, this se-ries will be analysed in this chapter; in particular the first film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. (Verbinski, 2003. Hereafter referred to as Black Pearl.) Besides the prominent Pirates of the Caribbean, The Haunted Mansion (Minkoff, 2003) has also been made into a movie starring Eddie Murphy. Also Knott’s Ghost Town is rumoured to be up for adaptation into a film.339 Apart from these three, only two other feature films, The Coun-try Bears (Hastings, 2002) and Mission to Mars (De Palma, 2000) are based on attractions.340 A salient detail in this short list is that almost all the adapta-tions are based on Disney attractions, and that they are dark rides.341 Also called ghost trains, dark rides are indoor attractions in which visitors pass various scenes in guided vehicles.

338 The Pirates of the Caribbean attraction is a ride, but not all amusement park attrac-tions are rides technically speaking. In this thesis, the term rides is also used to differ-entiate it from attractions as in cinema of attractions. Arguably amusement park can be used instead of theme park, but most of the attractions here are from Disneyland, which is unified by the Disney theme. 339 McNary, Dave. ‘Ghost town tied up in Knott’s for film.’ 2009. 15-08-2011. The Internet Movie Database. ‘Untitled Knott's Ghost Town Project (2011).’ 2011. 15-08-2011. 340 The list could further be amended with Disney’s Tower of Terror; a television movie from 1997, based on a theme park attraction. It is hard to establish exactly how many theme rides are used as source materials for movies, because it does not yet seem to be a large enough phenomenon. The best indication is IMDb’s keywords “based on theme park attraction”. (The Internet Movie Database. ‘Best "Based On Theme Park Attraction" Titles.’ 2011. 23-08-2011.) 341 Except Mission to Mars, all films were produced by Disney. Mission to Mars was pro-duced by Touchstone Pictures, but distributed primarily by Buena Vista, owned by Dis-ney.

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6.1. The Relationship between Rides and Film When film is introduced in the late nineteenth century it is one of many vis-ual modes of entertainment like panorama’s and dark rides. The attraction of film is its lifelike motion. Some early films already appropriate the excitement of movement and are filmed from vehicles, as Dick Tomasovic describes.

The first films by Lumière, Gaumont, Edison or Biograph subjected their spectators of the turn of the century to a series of unusual visual experiments by taking as main topic and shooting device the railway vehicles, the trains or subways.342

Phantom rides are the cinematic equivalent of what scenic or pleasure rail-ways offer visitors in amusement parks at that time. Linda Williams points out that rides are becoming more cinematic and films more like rides.343 She uses the moment just before the ocean liner in the film Titanic (Cameron, 1997), plummets into the depths, as an example to point out how:

many films now set out, as a first order of business, to simulate the bodily thrills and visceral pleasures of attractions that not only beckon to us but to take us on a continuous ride punctuated by shocks and moments of speed-up and slow-down.344

The comparison between rides, notably roller coasters, and film start with Sergei Eisenstein’s, and later Tom Gunning’s, perspective on early cinema as a medium of ‘attractions’. With roller-coasters in mind,345 Eisenstein named the combination of units of impressions produced by art as the ‘montage of attractions’.346 Gunning uses Eisenstein’s units, attractions, to indicate the way both Eisenstein’s avant-garde practice and early film are inclined to ‘ex-hibitionist confrontation rather than diegetic absorption’.347 Gunning already makes the connection to films of the 1980s or ‘what might be called the Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of effects [as] reaffirm[ing] its roots into stimulus and carnival rides’.348

In her introduction to The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (2006) Wan-da Strauven states that the term Cinema of Attractions, intended to describe early cinema, has ‘proven to be adequate, or at least “attractive,” for the defi-nition of contemporary effect cinema as well’.349 Tomasovic, for instance,

342 Tomasovic, 2006, 315. 343 Williams, 2000, 358. 344 Williams, 2000, 357. 345 Barna, 1973, 59-60. 346 Eisenstein, 1970, 16-17. 347 Gunning, 2006, 384. 348 Gunning, 2006, 387. 349 Strauven, 2006, 11.

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looks for elements characteristic for the cinema of attractions in Spider-Man (Raimi, 2002) and Spider-Man 2 (Raimi, 2004) to indicate the return of attrac-tion in cinema. But to use Andrew Nelson’s words, it is not a cinema of at-tractions that is of interest here, but ‘a cinema from attractions’.350 Although the attractions model is used by many to describe the likeness spectacle in film has to amusement park attractions, I concur with Nelson that it is not so well suited to understand films based on actual rides; dark rides in particu-lar. According to Nelson:

[t]he attractions model risks misinterpreting [...] not only the degree to which moments of seemingly non-narrative material are motivated transtextually, but also the degree to which movie goers are aware of these operations.351

Nelson’s proposes that the way ride adaptations rework elements from their source is akin to how genre draws on pre-existing traditions of representa-tion. It is a provocative thought. In terms of staying true to the iconography, adaptation is similar to the dynamics of genre. In extension to this, the way genre works is also similar to how an adaptation can emulate the tradition of representation specific to the source medium. But what defines the medium of rides? The medium ride does not exist, as such. Rides are not carried by a sin-gle medium. They are an experience created by a mix of media at a specific loca-tion: soundtracks are played; programmed lights go on and off; fans producing wind are switched on, etc. Although rides address all of the senses, they are predominantly tactile because they place the visitor in the centre of the ac-tion. One’s stomach is turned in a rollercoaster and fog touches one’s skin in a dark ride. Sight and hearing are also called upon. Whereas film is always about a dramatic narration that evokes emotion, rides are conceived to elicit sensations.

When discussing the form of theme park attractions, there are quite a few variations in rides to be considered. The first distinction is between at-tractions that focus on thrill and those that effectuate immersion. The former category consists of thrill rides, such as roller coasters, water rides, and oth-er contraptions that throw visitors around to create disorientation and let them experience negative and positive G-forces. These rides offer a predomi-nantly corporal experience. The latter category is made up mostly of dark rides, descendent of the nineteenth century scenic railways, and ghost hous-

350 Nelson, 2008, 38. 351 Nelson, 2008, 40.

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es.352 Scenes in a dark ride are like the panels in a comic, in the sense that they also depict the essence of a scene at one moment. They differ from com-ics in that the puppets, or ‘audio-animatronics’353 as Disney call them, speak and move. The ride is dark, and the mechanised characters are specially lit to hide the mechanics and guide the spectator’s attention. Sound effects, music, and the course of the track add to the experience. Immersion can fur-ther be facilitated with tactile stimuli such as moving chairs, water drops, and wind.

Theme park attractions that are oriented towards immersion are natu-rally more suited for film adaptation, because they already use scenes, pos-sibly with returning characters, to create a ‘world’ or diegesis, the visitors can experience. Dark rides are primarily built on the conception of a world and secondarily on specific characters. If there is a narrative, it is usually in the form of a back-story to use as a backdrop for the scenes, because they are meant to give impressions, rather than tell stories. This back story can be used for the basis of an adaptation. But how does the form of rides relate to film?

Like films, rides are also a simulation of reality that is the same every time it is played. The obvious difference is, of course, that film is a two di-mensional projection and a dark ride takes place in three dimensions, on a specific location, in an actual space, live, in real time.354 Actual presence re-mains impossible for cinema to achieve. Film is never live, and the location shown is not the same as that of the viewer. But both the spaces depicted in rides and films are representations of a diegesis other than the actual space of the viewer: the amusement park or cinema. The three dimensional space of the ride is also the reason why the experience of each visitor is different. Spectators are fixed in guided vehicles but, opposed to film for example, they are invited to look around. They will focus on different elements and probably in a different sequence too. For film adaptations, it is impossible to recreate the sensory here and now sensation of rides. Failing that, what elements re-main for inspiration if there is little story to be considered? Themes and genre conventions offer clues for screenplays. Through this, one can adjust the film’s iconography to that of the source. Further-

352 I differentiate between thrill and immersion to filter out the kinds of rides suitable for adaptation. As far as I can tell, the distinction is not used in practice though, and it is not as strict as it might seem. Roller coasters, for example, are also using elements of dark rides to entertain waiting visitors and influence their mood. 353 ‘Disneyland From The Pirates of the Caribbean to The World of Tomorrow.’ Explana-tion of what audio-animatronics is (00:05:11 – 00:06:01). 354 To be correct, film takes place in three dimensions: width, height and time (though projected in depth). Rides use all four dimensions: depth, width, height and time.

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more, the plot structure of the ride, that is, the order of the scenes, can be used as the plot structure for the screenplay. To emulate the way one gets a chance to look around in a dark ride, a film can use long shots instead of close-ups or mediums and keep them on screen long enough so one’s eyes can wander. Likewise, thrill can be transposed to film. The sensations of fast and dangerous movements are aspects that can be recreated in the pacing of the film, as Williams describes, or by acrobatics of the main character, and the camera freely following the disorienting movements. But these approach-es do not recreate the sensation for the viewer that effectively. As thrill exists in the moment between fear and realising you are safe, shocking an audience may be better at reproducing thrill. In this case, the audience members themselves will be scared for a moment, before they remember it is just a film. The last option is to have more direct references to the source text by citing it. The upcoming analysis shows how the creators of Pirates of the Car-ibbean did just that: by integrating little scenes, or vignettes, from the dark ride in the film where they could. 6.2. Cases Study 3: Pirates of the Caribbean The Curse of the Black Pearl (Verbinski, 2003) Dead Man’s Chest (Verbinski, 2006) At World’s End (Verbinski, 2007) On Stranger Tides (Marshall, 2011) In 2003, the best known ride adaptation comes out. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl uses the world depicted in Disney’s dark ride as the backdrop for a whole new pirate adventure. The ride debuts in 1967, in Disneyland’s New Orleans Square section in California, and an abbreviated version appears in 1973 at Magic Kingdom in Florida’s Disney World. Disney-land Tokyo and Paris also have the attraction since their openings in 1983 and 1992, respectively. The later versions have no new scenes, but the order-ing and choice of scenes differ.355 All the PotC rides exist before the films are made, so the screenwriters could pick and choose from all four versions. Be-ing the first, the ride in Disneyland forms the original source. The ride in Disneyland starts with boarding at Laffite’s landing. After floating past bayou country, with its southern style houseboats, visitors re-ceive a warning from a skull in front of crossbones. The boat travels down two waterfalls and the theme song, ‘A Pirate’s Life for Me’, plays. One hears

355 Pirates of the Caribbean Wiki. ‘Pirates of the Caribbean (ride).’ n.d. 24-07-2011.

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an eerie voice say, ‘dead men tell no tales’ and sees a scene of stabbed pirate skeletons, followed by a scene with a skeletal pirate on a ship wrecked in a storm. More scenes with skeletal pirates follow, ending with the cursed treasure and voices saying:

No fear have ye of evil curses says you? Arrrgh... Properly be warned ye be, says I. Who knows when that evil curse will strike the greedy behold-ers of this bewitched treasure? Perhaps ye knows too much... Ye've seen the cursed treasure, you know where it be hidden. Now proceed at your own risk. These be the last 'friendly' words ye'll hear. Ye may not survive to pass this way again...356

Then visitors are led into a battle between a pirate ship and a fortress. After this, one enters the tumultuous events in a Caribbean town, overrun by pi-rates. The most notable figures are: the mayor dipped in the well, the bride auction, and women chasing pirates. The last big set shows, among other things, pirates singing next to a donkey, and a pirate among pigs, while the rest of the houses are burning. Then visitors pass a dungeon where inmates try to lure a dog holding the keys. Finally, one sees drunken pirates in the ammunition warehouse. The audience is rescued by exiting as they came: via a waterfall. But this time they travel up the waterfall. 6.2.1. Synopsis of the film The first version of the Black Pearl screenplay is based on the ride, but is re-jected by producer Jerry Bruckheimer because it is too much of a straight pirate story. A rewrite follows that is inspired by the ride’s opening narration, mentioning a cursed treasure.357 In this version, the pirates return the treas-ure, rather than find it. Conjointly, the story takes place after another staple element of pirate movies: the mutiny. The resulting film tells the story of Captain Jack Sparrow, who tries to get his ship the Black Pearl, back after a mutiny against him led by the current captain: Barbossa. Meanwhile, the crew is cursed by an Aztec treasure. To lift the curse, they have to return all the pieces, including the last medallion that has come into the possession of the governor’s daughter, Elizabeth Swan. She got it from her childhood friend, Will Turner. When Elizabeth is captured by the pirates for the medal-lion, Will is forced to engage in piracy with Jack Sparrow to rescue her. What he doesn’t know is that it is he who the pirates need to lift the curse. The first three films all have freedom as their main theme.

356 Transcription from the Pirates of the Caribbean Wiki. Pirates of the Caribbean Wiki. ‘Pirates of the Caribbean (ride).’ n.d. 24-07-2011. 357 Pirates of the Caribbean Wiki. ‘Pirates of the Caribbean (ride).’ n.d. 24-07-2011.

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Part two and three deal with the problem of the East India Trading company taking away the pirates’ freedom, for which they have fought. Jack’s freedom and life are also threatened by a debt he is due to Davy Jones, captain of the Flying Dutchman. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Stranger Tides), about finding the fountain of youth, has only just been released when Bruckheimer already confirms to be working on a fifth film for the series.358

When screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio are asked to write the first two sequels they have to resort to other nautical myths such as the Fly-ing Dutchman, the Kraken, and Calypso. The fourth part is based on Tim Power’s novel On Stranger Tides. The book-to-film adaptation ends up being a straight pirate movie; exactly that which Bruckheimer and the writers try to avoid with Black Pearl.359 Without a story in the ride, the writers primarily have to work with the tone, both funny and scary, and the setting or world, the ride created as basis for their script of Black Pearl. They need to stay true to an ‘established iconography and mythology’ as Nelson calls it. He contin-ues by saying that this is ‘the crux of the matter, as it is not enough to simp-ly pack a film with references to the source material’.360 Black Pearl has both, because it is also through the references to the source material that the my-thology and iconography are maintained. 6.2.2. Iconography The PotC ‘world’, or diegesis, is determined by elements from the ride, pirate iconography, and pirate movie genre conventions. As did the ride, the film uses typical pirate signifiers such as ships, skulls, treasure, a parrot, and rum, of course. But the PotC ‘world’ differentiates itself from other pirate sto-ries through the infusion of mythical and supernatural elements which re-vamped the dead pirate genre for the CGI era. Also, in Black Pearl the typical eye patch and wooden leg are avoided. Just as the ride’s mood, that of the film is balanced between scary and funny. Exaggerated characters, uncon-ventional fights, and witty dialogue lighten the ghost stories. The iconic im-age of the skeletal pirate drinking wine, for instance, is a comical note in an otherwise scary scene, revealing the curse. Black Pearl could easily tie into the universe created in the ride by re-using its most recognisable settings: the cave, a town, a fort, and of course, a ship. A quick look at the film’s

358 Lowe, 2011, 87. 359 It must be said, however, that the supernatural elements such as mermaids, zombies and the fountain of youth fit into the Pirates of the Caribbean supernatural universe. 360 Nelson, 2008, 39.

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opening scene shows that it has minimal pirate iconography, but sets the familiar mood from the ride. As with any film, the opening signals to the audience how to ‘read’ the film. The first scene neatly introduces most of the main characters and the central issues. It also integrates, in a subtle way, narrative elements from the ride. The film starts with the sound of wind and an eerie tune as the title en-ters and leaves the screen. Although the wind cannot actually be felt, the sounds in the dark have the same ritual function as they do in a ride; pre-paring the audience for something exciting. Then, in what looks like one long shot, a ship appears out of the mist. Again, the mist cannot be felt but it is often used in dark rides because of its ability to hide things. The ship func-tions as a substitute for the boat-shaped guided vehicle used in the ride. On the ship stands a young girl, Elisabeth, singing, ‘A Pirate’s Life for Me’. The catchy tune in the ride is turned into an eerie children’s song. A discussion ensues about pirates. Elisabeth thinks it would be rather exciting to meet one. Exciting and frightening, it turns out to be. The discussion ends in a funny allusion to the gallows. But the mood turns frightening again when the fog reveals a burning ship and an unconscious boy in the water. The fire ref-erences both the scene from the ride, with the fire in the ammunition ware-house, and foreshadows the pirates’ destructive power.361 The boy, Will, sud-denly grabs Elisabeth’s hand. The scare of sudden sound and movement is not only used in film, it is also one of the most effective ways to scare audi-ences in a dark ride. As first visual signifiers of the cursed pirates, Will’s golden medallion and a glimpse of a black ship with torn sails and a pirate flag are shown. The remainder of the analysis will not go into such fine detail of a scene. Rather, it looks at structures from the ride used in the film, start-ing with the sequence of scenes. 6.2.3. Plot Structure In terms of plot structure, the order of scenes in the ride can be used as a blueprint for the plot of the movie. On the level of entire sequences, in both the film and the ride, the pirate attack on the fort is followed by a town over-run by pirates. Many memorable moments from the ride are included as vi-gnettes in the movie, as shall be discussed shortly, but the order does not correspond to that of the ride. This is because of the way the makers ap-proached using ride references, as Bruckheimer explains:

361 The idea of ammunition is coupled to the burning ship via the remark that merchant vessels run heavily armed.

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The homages to the ride in the movie are a combination of what the writers added to the screenplay and what [director] Gore thought […] was inherent to the story. […] So when we found any instance that we could show you a piece of the ride and it yet worked for the characters and the story we tried to do it.362

Reusing the order of scenes from the ride can help get an adaptation started, but is not productive if one wants to make a new text that stands on its own. If one wants to acknowledge the source of an adaptation, however, in this case a ride, one might take inspiration from the ways the source medium us-es to convey the information. 6.2.4. Thrill Thrill is central to all kinds of rides as visitors look for controlled adventure in amusement parks. In film this can be emulated by shocking or scaring the audience; pacing the film with moments of rest in the action and through wild movement of characters. Black Pearl scares the audience with the sud-den appearance of the skeleton monkey, for instance, but this is no different than a scary surprise in a horror film. As to pacing, the ending of Black Pearl keeps forestalling the climatic action. At the moment the English marines start fighting back against the skeletal pirates, for example, the film cuts to Jack, Barbossa, and Will back in the cave. When they are halfway into a fight, the editors cut to Elisabeth boarding the empty Pearl to free Jack’s crew. The third strategy for thrill, via identification with a film character, can be found in varying degrees of success. Dick Tomasovic writes about the way attraction is used in contempo-rary blockbusters like Spider-Man.

Ride sequences [...] use effects of acceleration and losses of spatial marks. Their real purpose is to disturb the spectator’s perceptions, to give him the sensation of a vertiginous mobility.363

When Jack escapes from the soldiers on the dock after saving Elisabeth, he swings on a crane. A short shot from a camera, turning along with Jack, conveys the dizzying whirl, but when Jack next zips down a line the camera stays too distant to be thrilling. The feeling of a rollercoaster returns when Elisabeth finds out that that the pirates look like decaying skeletons in the moonlight. Elisabeth is grabbed by the skeletal pirates and tossed in the air with a sail, only to be caught by another pirate swinging on a rope. Pirates of

362 Bruckheimer. Audio commentary to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. 2003. (Chapter nine: Tortuga 00:00:00 - 00:00:28). 363 Tomasovic, 2006, 314.

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the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (Dead Man’s Chest) features the crew trapped in bone cages, reminiscent of fairground bungee-balls. The crew ends up tumbling down a hill in them. Repeating the disorientation is a three-way swordfight that takes place inside a giant free rolling waterwheel. The camera goes into the wheel and also turns on its axis next to the wheel, disorienting the audience as if they were in the contraption. In Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (World’s End) the biggest thrill of the ride, its wa-terfalls, are referenced as Barbossa, Elisabeth, and the crew topple over the edge of the world.364 Furthermore, the crew rocks the ship to turn it over. Although it is done from side to side instead of from bow to stern, it recalls the swinging ship attractions. To surpass all the preceding action, World’s End’s climax showcases a battle between two ships in an enormous whirl-pool.

Although thrill is an essential part of rides, it is not a way of narrating. Translating thrill as pacing or shocking the audience is not new to film, but they work as a means to emulate the ride experience. Along with this, the disorientation, caused by following characters fly around, mimics the roller-coaster experience. But these elements are not restricted to ride-movies. The spectacle of rides is returning to the cinema in action movies and 3D exhibi-tion. Stranger Tides turns the viewing experience into an attraction as well. Filmed and exhibited in 3D, it follows the new blockbuster model. Though 3D brings the film’s form closer to that of rides, the way of showing information as vignettes provides a stronger bond to the source. 6.2.5. Looking at Vignettes To maintain a relationship to the ride, even when the film tells a whole new story, the makers of Black Pearl integrate vignettes of memorable moments from the ride. In these vignettes that show short scenes or moments, a hint of a story is given. One sees characters in a situation and can imagine what happens beyond that. The use of vignettes in Black Pearl reuses the way rides tell little stories by showing just a short moment of the action. The camera work and editing facilitate a way of looking akin to that which one has in a dark ride, lingering on scenes in long shots just long enough to take them in. But these moments to look around, as in the port of Tortuga for in-

364 The moment they topple over the enormous waterfall is accentuated with a quote from the ride uttered by Barbossa, ‘you may not survive to pass this way again and these be the last friendly word you’ll hear’. As they fall, the screen goes black and one hears part of the ride’s theme song, a laugh, and ‘dead men tell no tales’ from the ride’s original audio. Both references are from the same moment in the ride just before the scene where pirates attack the fort from their ship. Not all the versions of the rides feature the waterfalls, though.

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stance, only happen during the vi-gnettes that homage the ride. The way viewers are free to look around in a ride can be recreated with exist-ing film techniques, but it is not at home in faster paced action movies or swashbucklers, for that matter.

Much of what happens in the ride is translated to the scenes in the pirate port of Tortuga. Some of the ride’s most memorable moments are of pirates raiding a Mexican town. This short scene captures the feeling of the ride and many of its characters are used to illustrate the pirate town as Jack introduces Will to Tortuga. The scene includes a man on the barrels and a second man drinking from the barrels, as well as the red-haired woman from the bride auction. The Gibbs charac-ter is reintroduced as the drunk sleeping with the pigs.365 These mo-ments that Nelson describes as seemingly non-narrative material do not only set the mood of a location but they actually help narrate in the way they did in the ride.366 For instance, when Will and Jack row into the cave with treas-ure, Will spots a skeleton stabbed in the back. This iconic image from the ride is the motivation for Will to start talking to Jack about loyalty among pi-rates. In the dungeons, the dog with the keys tells, in an instant and funny way, the predicament the captured captain Jack is in. At 26 minutes into the movie, this first obvious reference to the ride, as images 6 and 7 show, is rel-

365 However, some elements were cut out of the film for length. When the characters returned to Tortuga in Dead Man’s Chest, a short scene that was deleted in Black Pearl was inserted. Some pirates shoot a bottle off a man’s head and a man dressed in white stands trembling as he is tied in rope. A third shot shows the mayor being pulled out of the well. The original shot for Black Pearl has Will and Jack in the back-ground. Because Will was not in Tortuga for that scene in Dead Man’s Chest, the ed-itor had to use a different shot. I doubt the shot was redone as meticulously close to the one used in Black Pearl, compared to the one shown as a deleted scene on the Black Pearl DVD. My guess is that an outtake or test shot which was made in the production of Black Pearl was used. 366 Nelson, 2008, 40.

Image 6: Dungeon Scene in the Original Attraction. ‘Disneyland From The Pirates of the Caribbean to The World of Tomorrow.’ (00:16:38).

Image 7: Dungeon Scene in Black Pearl. Verbinski. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. (00:26:41).

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atively late, but it no longer hinders the story since it is already set in mo-tion.

The way of narrating with sketches of scenes is also used in the rest of the film. Jack’s line, ‘and then they made me their chief’,367 for instance, in-vites one to imagine a whole scene. Also Governor Swan fighting a skeletal hand could easily work as a vignette in the ride.

Screenwriter Ted Elliott explains one of the reasons why they wrote the vignettes into the film.

There was an intent [...] to create Easter eggs essentially. Things that if you pay attention, the more attention you pay to a movie the more you find in it. […] encourage the idea of the discussion of the movie being a community experience.368

Director Gore Verbinski has noticed that the ride references are not picked up by audiences in England, whereas the crowd goes mad in America be-cause they are familiar with what is cited.369 Meanwhile, DVD bonus material creates new initiates by supplying the knowledge to find the Easter eggs. As the series continues, the writers are running out of vignettes to reuse. In Stranger Tides, none of the original settings from the rides were used, but they did manage to insert a vignette of a skeleton reading on a luxurious bed. However, the ride hardly functions as a source text for the sequels. It has be-come one of multiple cultural objects to be referenced. 6.3. Concluding Thoughts: Sliding Sources and Pastiche All the end credits to PotC films state that they are ‘Based on Walt Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean’. The end credits to the sequels also state, ‘based on the characters created by [...]’ followed by the names of the four writers. In addition to this, the end credits to Stranger Tides mention the film is ‘sug-gested by’ the eponymous novel. Nevertheless, even though all the credits show that the films are based on the ride, can they actually be regarded as adaptations of it?

As the first incarnation of the Pirates of the Caribbean diegesis, the ride is arguably the source. But the rides and subsequent films are only part of a larger franchise with a tie-in series of young reader and adult books,

367 Verbinski. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Elisabeth falls from the fort (00:14:31). 368 Elliott & Rossio. Audio commentary to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. 2006. (00:55:36 – 00:56:10). 369 Verbinski. Audio commentary to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. 2003. (00:26:28 – 00:26:57).

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games, a prequel novel, and also a graphic novel. All these stories in various media use the universe created for the ride as a basis. Furthermore, the nov-els use characters from the films. In the entire franchise, the films and the rides have come alongside each other as source material. The chronological order of their release no longer dictates which text is the source and which is the target. After the success of Black Pearl, it becomes the new authorative text. All subsequent texts are made to accommodate the film’s characters. Even the ride has to adapt. Audio-animatronics of Jack and Barbossa are added to match the new franchise.370

All four films take place in the PotC diegesis which combines the early 18th century Caribbean pirates with supernatural elements. Black Pearl has a much stronger relation to the ride than the sequels and arguably works as an adaptation. Its strong relation to the ride is mainly due to its abundant use of vignettes that pay homage to the ride, and which form a very visual intertextuality. Not only are half the ride’s vignettes reused, Black Pearl was the only film that could and did reuse the theme of cursed treasure that ex-plained the skeletal pirates, the film’s primary visual feature. Concerning the story, there are the underlying themes that connect to Nelson’s concern with mythology, and the ideologem Reynolds sees as essential to adaptations.

With fewer vignettes and no reuse of the ride’s theme, the sequels are too different from the ride to be labelled adaptations of it. The first film, with which most viewers are familiar, becomes the source for intertextual refer-ences in the sequels. Call-backs such as, ‘Why is the rum always gone’,371 and, ‘You shall remember this day as …’372 make use of the audience appeal for catchphrases. At the end of World’s End, Elisabeth turns around Jack’s line from the end of Black Pearl to say goodbye: ‘Jack, it would never have worked between us.’373 Other call-backs repeat actions. Governor Swan breaking a lamp from the wall in Dead Man’s Chest calls back to Will doing the same in Swan’s manor in Black Pearl. Most impressing is how Jack makes his entrance in the same way he is introduced in Black Pearl. He stands atop a mast; but this time on that of the Black Pearl in Davy Jones’ locker instead of a small boat. And in Rossio’s opinion, one ‘can argue the entire [Indian] sequence as tribute to the improve line [...] and then they

370 ‘Dead Men Tell New Tales: Re-Imagineering the Attraction’ Bonus material to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. 2006. Disk 2. 371 Verbinski. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Jack is setting a course (00:12:37). 372 Verbinski. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Pirates leave Indian island (00:43:58). 373 Verbinski. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Elisabeth leaves the ship (02:25:28).

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made me their chief’374 from the first film. Furthermore, even popular knowledge about the production of the first film is referenced. For Black Pearl, Johnny Depp is not allowed to keep all the gold teeth he had put in for the character. In Stranger Tides he is introduced with a close-up of his smile, displaying many more gold teeth than he had in Black Pearl. Also Keith Rich-ards, on whom Depp based some of Jack’s traits, plays his father in World’s End and Stranger Tides. This case study of the PotC franchise shows how in-tertextuality surpasses adaptation. For franchises, the characters and world where the story takes place have become more important than the story it-self.

Keeping PotC in mind, let us recapitulate on adaptation. Adaptation, as a concept, is the starting point. In the framework of adaptation studies it equates to the following: retelling of the same story in a different medium. If the story of a target text is based on an existing story, it is regarded as an adaptation. When a target text is based on the universe of another text, it is also regarded as an adaptation if it reuses thematic elements of the story, even if it does not reuse the same plot structure. Creating a new story with the same characters, albeit also elements of the story, does not result in an adaptation, but a new story, a sequel or otherwise. Reusing plot structures and media specific modes of narration in the adaptation can be done, but they are not enough to make the result an adaptation.

When dealing with a new text that tells a story different to that of the text on which it is based, the term adaptation is useless if one considers the previous definition based on fidelity to the story. For a text to be considered an adaptation, it always requires a critical amount of the story to be reused. To use only style elements or modes of narration specific to the source medi-um results in no more than pastiches. According to Fredric Jameson:

[p]astiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyn-cratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulte-rior motives. 375

These ulterior motives of parody come down to that ‘it both legitimizes and subverts that which it parodies’ as Linda Hutcheon explains.376 Considering, for instance, the homages to the ride in Black Pearl one has to admit that they do not critique their source. According to Hutcheon:

374 Elliott & Rossio. Audio commentary to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. 2006. (00:25:01). 375 Jameson, 1991, 17. 376 Hutcheon, 1989, 101.

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[w]hat postmodern parody does is to evoke what reception theorists call the horizon of expectation of the spectator; a horizon formed by recog-nizable conventions of genre, style, or form of representation. This is then destabilized and dismantled step by step.377

As intertextual references, the examples in this thesis also connect to con-ventions of representation, but unlike parody, they do not dismantle these conventions. When considering modes of narration, such as avatar moves or graphic flourishes, alluding to comic book aesthetics, one recognizes that they function mainly for the fun of repetition and reuse the style from their source and its medium. These are traits of pastiche. Be they, vignettes, ava-tar moves, or the emulation of panels, such adaptations to film techniques manage to create references to the source text.

Again, the fact that individual elements are adapted does not make the resulting film an adaptation. Nevertheless, the terminology of the adaptation paradigm is very clear. Film producers still implicitly rely on the source/adaptation-relationship to sell their films.378 Source, target, and de-fining the new text as adaptation immediately state the position of a text. At the same time, it is exactly these positions that are contested by contempo-rary practices. Richard Berger proclaims that in ‘transmedia the differences between ‘source’ and ‘target’ become blurred to an extent where such terms no longer have currency’.379 When film and source text are released simulta-neously, chronology no longer defines the source as such. And in the case of true transmedia storytelling, there is no source and no adaptation, only one large story narrated across various media. When a text has multiple incarna-tions, such as the superman films Berger analyses, they:

are not adaptations in the accepted definition of the term. Rather, they are heteroglossic in that they are ‘shot through’ with the voices of the many artists, writers and adaptors of the comic books.380

There are only texts preferred over others by fans, and the choices made by makers, in the creation of new texts. Still, when a film, or other text, is based on another, the term ‘source’ is still useful. This is not to say that source and target are fixed positions. The original texts can, and are, also adapted, or at least altered, to match a work based on them; the new authorative text in the

377 Hutcheon, 1989, 114. 378 The new material must still resonate with its source, though, to be experienced as an adaptation. ‘And, in the end it is the audience who must experience the adapta-tion as an adaptation.’ (Hutcheon, 2006, 172.) 379 Berger, 2008, 99. 380 Berger, 2008, 90.

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franchise. And because transmedia texts are in dialogue with multiple (source) texts, they may not be experienced as an adaptation but as one of multiple incarnations.

Despite the issues with the term adaptation, I do not want to write it off just yet. In essence, adaptation is about making something fit in a new environment, and even if it is not the entire ‘text’ that is adapted, the adapta-tion process is also taking place in films based on another text. Whether one calls it translation, transposition, emulation, referencing or citation, a pro-cess of adaptation is always needed. Adaptation has lost its value as name for the end product, but it is apt to describe the process that results in inter-textual references.

Academically speaking, intertextuality is the more proper and equal way to refer to these interactions between texts, privileging neither. Even if the terminology and essence of adaptation are still applicable on a smaller scale, intertextuality offers a more fluid framework to understand the ele-ments that were adapted, and studied in this thesis. Using segments or themes of the story; plot structure; modes of narration, or just style from a source text, all constitute intertextual references. The peculiar part is that so many references are made to the same text. This creates a strong bond; a bond that has the appearance of what is generally referred to as an adapta-tion. The value of this reference is articulated in the text and its paratexts. I agree with Darlene Sadlier that in ‘one sense, every film adaptation can be understood as a type of intertextuality or pastiche, if only because the very process of adaptation involves the deliberate imitation of a prior work’.381 However, an adaptation is never a copy, but a rewriting due to forced altera-tions needed for transposition. Hutcheon describes its status very well.

It is not a copy in any mode of reproduction, mechanical or otherwise. It is repetition but without replication, bringing together the comfort of rit-ual and the recognition with the delight of surprise and novelty. As adap-tation, it involves both memory and change, persistence and variation.382

Have we entered the age of pastiche then? Looking at these, mainly

blockbuster movies, would lead us to believe that the parody so prevalent in the postmodern end of the last millennium is drying up. The ‘self’-referencing practices in these films are empty of irony. Then again, it is not favourable for new texts in transmedia franchises to critique their neighbouring texts.

Using modes of narration from other media is also becoming a matter of style. The influences of comics, games and rides are not only confined to 381 Sadlier, 2000, 192. 382 Hutcheon, 2006, 173.

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the films based on them. The modes of narration distinctive for the different media they come from are being integrated into the grammar and vocabulary of filmmaking. For example, the trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man (Webb, 2012) includes a long POV of running, jumping, and swinging.383 Not only does it remind contemporary audiences of a first-person shooter’s perspec-tive, the big jumps, drops, and swings, simulate the vertigo of a rollercoaster ride. The camera moves extremely free through the space. As was discussed in the Prince of Persia analysis, this is only possible with CGI and a style used in video games. In Scott Pilgrim, the influence of popular culture’s style in film is apparent in a more obvious manner. The comic book style is amended with video game elements such as boss battles, and also television is referenced. When Scott comes home from his date, the scene is introduced with the theme from Seinfeld (1990-1998) and each of Scott’s lines is followed by canned laughter. Director Edgar Wright got the idea from the line, ‘studio audience: oo000OOHHhhh’,384 to Scott kissing his new girlfriend Ramona in a panel from the previous scene in the comics.385 Also, Wright uses letterboxing for ratio changes common to action in anime. The comedy genre permits more hypermediacy because audiences are accustomed to exaggerations and improbable elements.

Techniques and approaches based on elements from other media are a useful resource for adaptations and are the result of an adaptation process. They can be used as intertextual reference to other media and text, but they are also stylistic possibilities for any film.

383 The shot starts 01:43 into the video. ‘The Amazing Spider-Man Trailer.’ n.d. 30-07-2011. 384 O’Malley, 2004, 152. 385 Topel, Fred. ‘Scott Pilgrim director Edgar Wright.’ 2010. 30-07-2011.

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PART III

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7. CONCLUSION: SPRINKLES ON TOP One of the primary sources of aesthetic innovation is adaptation from other media. [...] When a medium borrows an effect from other existing media, the borrowing medium often evolves and gains expressivity.386

Greg Smith Adaptation can provide an excuse for formal experimentation and the possi-bility to expand on cinematic techniques. Film makers seem to take the free-dom to make formal or narrative choices that would be odd in regular films, but which make sense in the context of an adaptation from a medium with different conventions. In the case of adaptations, the influence of the source medium on a film’s style adds a perspective to understand and enjoy the film. Of central interest to this thesis is the way that modes of narration can be referenced in film by using or amending film techniques. By looking at ad-aptations from comic books, video games, and rides, this thesis catalogues some of the techniques and approaches used to emulate the modes of narra-tion used in the various source media.

Iconography, plot, and its modes of narration, are used to understand how a measure of fidelity to the source is negotiated through the collection of intertextual references to the source text. The intertextual relationship the contemporary adaptations, discussed in this thesis, have to their source, and source media, makes one aware where the films come from. Referencing modes of narration, rather than story or text, is a way to negotiate the feeling of an adaptation for viewers initiated with the source text, whilst retaining accessi-bility to novice viewers. As Edgar Wright, director of Scott Pilgrim, said about his insertions of comic and video game elements into the film:

I would hope that all of the stylistic kind of flourishes are exactly that. They are flourishes. […] The scene is always about something else and this is just sprinkles on the top, really.387

To use a term from video games, these intertextual references work like East-er eggs: ‘hidden’ extra’s that people can ferret out to satisfy their encyclopae-dic impulse. These Easter eggs are often additions that are not necessary to understand the story. References in film form can enhance the experience for

386 Smith, 1999, 32. 387 Topel, Fred. ‘Scott Pilgrim director Edgar Wright.’ 2010. 30-07-2011.

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people familiar with the source and acknowledge this group of viewers. Fur-thermore, if insiders have a good response, it helps to get outsiders to come see the film.388 Recognizing references is fun, open to everyone with some knowledge of the source or its medium. And recognition is at the heart of ad-aptation because, as was mentioned in the introduction, we like to consume what we know; that is, what is similar or in line with previous experiences we like. Through the case studies in this thesis and the comparisons of film to comics, games, and rides as media, a number of techniques inspired by the source media are discerned. Elements of form in the source medium can be adopted by cinematic forms, but also in mise-en-scène or as a story element. All the adaptations investigated reuse much of the original iconography. In extension, the films make exact visual citations of moments from their sources. Black Pearl uses vignettes from the ride; Sin City ‘copied’ the graphic novel’s panels almost exactly, and Prince of Persia reused some of the games avatar moves. In all aspects of adaptation, addition and deletion are the tools to create a text that resonates with the source. An analysis of an adaptation should not ignore these deviations, because therein one can find the inten-tion of the specific film and its own character. Adaptations from comics, games, and rides also use different ways to reference their source media. The comic book aesthetic is characterised by its static panels with simplified drawings in limited colours and the use of sym-bolic expressions for sound. To translate this visually, filmmakers use special make-up so that actors resemble the comic book characters more closely and ‘cartooning’ in set design can be achieved by removing details and limiting the colour pallet. The ‘silent’ sound of comics can be translated to sound ef-fects, dialogue, and voice-overs. Also, onscreen onomatopoeias, in addition to sound effects, are an option. Visual effects and editing can emulate the comic look further through multiple-frame imagery, wipes, letterboxing, onscreen texts, and shout lines. In the case of Sin City, visual effects are used to rec-reate the graphic novels’ high contrast black and white look with selective colour. Video game adaptations have to deal with the repetitive plot structures of games. Pause-and-save functions are emulated in story elements that jus-tify the space-time warps. The dagger in Prince of Persia enabled its user to go back in time. The video game medium is further referenced by camera po-sitions and movements. By using virtual cameras in CGI, for instance,

388 Through paratexts, such as making-off documentaries, outsiders are given a chance to learn about the references and become insiders. Such openings for explo-ration gets audience members involved, binding them to the franchise.

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filmmakers can recreate camera movements common to games where the camera is not restricted to cranes, dollies, or other rigs. Lastly, avatar moves are displayed that also reference player activity and a game’s iconography. Other elements of the graphic user interface such as status bars can also be used in film, but such excessive references diminish a film’s immediacy and do not work with the action genre of the texts adapted. Adapting aspects of rides often proves impossible due to ontological differences to film. Rides share with film the use of thrill, but this does not reference rides in particular. In the Pirates of the Caribbean series, charac-ters find themselves in and on contraptions that roll them or require them to balance, sway and swing, as on amusement park attractions. But the film adaptations are closer related to dark rides with their own diegesis. To refer-ence the original ride directly and emulate its way of looking and storytelling, Black Pearl in particular has vignettes of the ride integrated into the film. The analysis of the PotC series also shows how sources slide. Film adaptations can also, in turn, influence their source material. After the success of Black Pearl, the ride incorporated characters from the movie. Black Pearl also be-came a basis for intertextual references in the sequels. In long running fran-chises a one-time adaptation may become a source for new incarnations. The fact that source and adaptation are no longer stable positions is one of the reasons why the adaptation paradigm is outdated. The adaptation approach’s use of semiotics also makes it incapable of explaining the transla-tion of formal elements. What is of interest is not about getting an exact rep-lica through translation, but a product so similar to the original that an au-dience will regard it as an adaptation. The tension between the source and the new text is also part of the charm of adaptations. In studying adapta-tions, I believe the terminology of source and adaptation is still useful, even if the interplay between media can be better understood with intertextual ap-proaches. The examples in the case studies come close to remediating tech-niques from their various source media, but because they fulfil different functions in the films, they are better understood as intertextual references. The fact that none of the films studied here state that they are adaptations also signals the waning of this approach in filmmaking. Films usually state that they are based on a certain text. Even Sin City does not mention adaptation, despite the high fidelity to the graphic novels. The label based on recognizes the ‘adap-tation’ as a whole new text, excusing it to deviate from the established story.

I believe that fidelity to a story is no longer the primary concern in this age of transmedia storytelling. Instead, continuity in iconography and recog-nisable bonds between texts, including references to a source medium’s modes of narration, offer audiences easy access to the new derivative texts.

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To give the films based on other visual media the ‘charm’ of an adaptation, emulating the source’s modes of narration, is a good starting point. As the telling makes half the story, the studying of a text should always consider its form. This half of the text may not be neglected in the study of adaptations. Outside of this thesis, this approach can be of use in a structural and textual analysis to find out when and how a film refers to the source, besides the story. This informs one about the relationship between the two texts and the way the film wants to tell the story.

The ambitious mission of this thesis is to chart how iconography and modes of narration can be adapted to film from visual source media. Besides the varying strategies to adapt these elements, these strategies are influ-enced by the different historical and ontological relations these three media have to film. This thesis is limited to focus on one film per medium. The at-tempt is made to find more ways to reference the source media by looking at a few more films superficially. Still, the inventory is not complete. Filmmak-ers will develop even more approaches and techniques that emulate other media, consequently enriching cinema’s vocabulary. More examples could enable us to draw more general conclusions about the adaptation of visual elements. Whether these references are mandatory for adaptations that are part of franchises, or are the result of a director’s vision and artistry is a question others will have to answer. Neither can I prove whether the refer-ences really have the desired effect of engaging audiences. In terms of possi-bilities for film to adapt iconography and modes of narration, comic books are the most interesting source. This could be the subject of an independent thesis with even deeper research and focus on that subject, but it is also an area for future research. Throughout, the intent of this thesis is to address that adaptation from visual media occurs both in story and style.

I want to conclude with the thought that studying adaptation is not about finding differences, or what is the same, but about the grey area in be-tween: that which is similar. Because in yearning for the ‘same’, that ‘same’ proves to be unobtainable. In contrast, the ‘similar’, when least expected, gives pleasure through recognition.

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The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Dir. Peter Jackson. New Line Cinema, 2003.

The Sixth Sense. Dir. M. Night Shyamalan. Buena Vista Pictures, 1999. Titanic. Dir. James Cameron. Paramount Pictures, 1997. Tower of Terror. Dir. D.J. MacHale. American Broadcasting Company, 1997. Vanilla Sky. Dir. Cameron Crowe. Paramount Pictures, 2001. V for Vendetta. Dir. James McTeigue. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2006. X-Men. Dir. Bryan Singer. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 2000. Television Series Batman. Twentieth Century Fox Television. 1966-1968. Seinfeld. NBC. 1990-1998. The Incredible Hulk. CBS. 1978-1982. Video Games Hitman: Codename 47. Eidos Interactive, 2000. Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. Eidos Interactive, 2002. Hitman: Contracts. Eidos Interactive, 2004. Hitman: Blood Money. Eido, 2006. Pac-Man. Designed by Tohru Iwatani. Namco, 1980. Prince of Persia. Designed by Jordan Mechner. Brøderbund Software, 1989. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. Designed by Thomas Simon. Ubisoft,

2010. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Designed by Jordan Mechner. Ubisoft,

2003. Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. Designed by Kevin Guillemette. Ubisoft, 2005. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Designed by Kevin Guillemette. Ubisoft, 2004. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Designed by Howard Scott Warshaw. Atari, 1981. Spacewar. Designed by Steve Russell, Martin Greatz and Wayne Witaenem,

1961. Tetris. Designed by Alexey Pazhitnov, Nintendo, 1984. Tomb Raider. Designed by Toby Gard and Philip Campbell. Core Design, 1996. Tomb Raider: Legend. Designed by Riley Cooper. Crystal Dynamics, 2006. Amusement park attractions Ghost Town, Designed by Walter Knott. Buena Park: Knott’s Berry

Farm,1940. Mission to Mars, Designed by WED Enterprises. Anaheim: Disneyland, 1975. Country Bear Jamboree. Designed by WED Enterprises. Lake Buena Vista:

Magic Kingdom, 1971.

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The Haunted Mansion. Designed by WED Enterprises. Lake Buena Vista: Magic Kingdom, 1971.

The Pirates of the Caribbean. Designed by WED Enterprises. Anaheim: Disneyland, 1967.

The Pirates of the Caribbean. Designed by WED Enterprises. Lake Buena Vista: Magic Kingdom, 1973.

The Pirates of the Caribbean. Designed by WED Enterprises. Tokyo: Tokyo Disneyland, 1983.

The Pirates of the Caribbean. Designed by WED Enterprises. Paris: Disneyland Paris, 1992.

The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. Designed by Walt Disney Imagineering. Orlando: Disney’s Hollywood Studios, 1994.

Other Audiovisual Sources ‘ALL IS WELL.’ Deleted scene from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the

Black Pearl. Dir. Gore Verbinski. Disney, 2003. DVD Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2004. Disk 2.

‘Disneyland-Pirates Caribbean. 1991.’ YouTube. 30-08-2010. 27-07-2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt9q1sZp2to>.

‘Disneyland-Pirates of the Caribbean. The Whole Ride. Sept. 1990.’ YouTube. 13-08-2010. 27-07-2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkaEFkaMkcI>.

‘Hitman 3 - Contracts - Walkthrough - Mission 1 - Asylum After Math – PRO/SA.’ Youtube. 02-05-2009. 20-07-2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rLmZ_c0Foo>.

‘Hitman: Blood Money Walkthrough.’ YouTube. n.d. 20-07-2011. <http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB9DA6997C3BA8A43>.

‘HITMAN-Codename 47(Hitman 1).’ YouTube. n.d. 20-07-2011. <http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE2D85BCE44609A9E>.

‘Hulk End Credits Soundtrack – Danny Elfman.’ YouTube. 26-06-2008. 23-04-2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YZ_YduYWuM>.

‘Prince of Persia 1989 Playthrough; Level 1 – Intro.’ YouTube. 17-01-2010. 22-06-2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY1-tAqBT_o>.

‘Prince Of Persia Sands Of Time Walkthrough part 1.’ YouTube. 27-04-2009. 22-06-2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M87yuBzpUDw>.

‘Pirates Of The Caribbean Ride (HD Complete Experience) Front Seat Disneyland California.’ YouTube. 10-04-2011. 27-07-2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUatd07d960>.

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‘The Amazing Spider-Man Trailer.’ The Internet Movie Database. n.d. 30-07-2011. <http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi2647890969/>.

‘THE INCREDIBLE HULK (1978) Soundtrack Score Suite (Joe Harnell).’ YouTube. 02-02-2010. 23-04-2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlK89pbyaZ4>.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Images lmage 1: Development of Hartigan’s suicide. Rodriguez, Robert, and Frank

Miller. Frank Miller's Sin City: The Making of the Movie. Austin: Troublemaker Publishers, 2005. 19.

Image 2: Ang Lee. Hulk. Marvel animation (00:00:27). Image 3: Ang Lee. Hulk. Hulk end credits (02:07:31). Image 4: Edgar Wright. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Scott grabs 1-up

(01:24:30). Image 5: Xavier Gens. Hitman. Agent 47 walks in restaurant corridor (00:53:13). Image 6: Hamilton S. Luske. Disneyland From The Pirates of the Caribbean to

The World of Tomorrow. Dungeon scene in the original attraction (00:16:38). Image 7: Gore Verbinski. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.

Dungeon Scene (00:26:41). Image 8: Ang Lee. Hulk. David’s wife says she is pregnant (00:04:54). Image 9: Ang Lee. Hulk. Helicopter transport (01:08:37). Image 10: Ang Lee. Hulk. General Ross calls Betty (02:04:32). Image 11: Ang Lee. Hulk. Enzyme extraction (01:28:41). Image 12: Ang Lee. Hulk. Mosaic during the hulk’s escape (01:30:50). Image 13: Ang Lee. Hulk. General Ross talks to the president (01:36:20). Image 14: Ang Lee. Hulk. Hulk hops through three frames (01:37:28). Image 15: Ang Lee. Hulk. Wipe transition around David’s face (00:25:56). Image 16: Ang Lee. Hulk. Wipe as Bruce opens blinds (00:52:51). Graphs Graph 1: Number of Films Based on Comics, Games and Rides per Decade.

The Internet Movie Database. ‘Earliest "Based On Comic Book" Titles.’ IMDb.com. 2011. 17-04-2011. <http://www.imdb.com/keyword/based-on- comic-book/?sort=release_date>. The Internet Movie Database. ‘Earliest "Based On Video Game" Titles.’ IMDb.com. 2011. 17-04-2011. <http://www.imdb.com/keyword/based-on- video-game/?sort=release_date>. The Internet Movie Database. ‘Earliest "Based On Theme Park Attraction" Titles.’ IMDb.com. 2011. 17-04-2011. <http://www.imdb.com/keyword/- based-on-theme-park-attraction/?sort=release_date>.

Graph 2: Number of Film and Television Adaptations per Decade in 2011.The Internet Movie Database. ‘Earliest "Based On Comic Book" Titles.’ IMDb.com. 2011. 17-04-2011. <http://www.imdb.com/keyword/based-on-comic-

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book/?sort=release_date>. Graph 3: Film Adaptations in Percentage per Decade. The Internet Movie Data

base. ‘Earliest "Based On Comic Book" Titles.’ 2011. 17-04-2011. IMDb.com. 2011. 17-04-2011. <http://www.imdb.com/keyword/based-on-comic-book/ ?sort=release_date>.

Graph 4: Television Adaptations in Percentage per Decade. The Internet Movie Database. ‘Earliest "Based On Comic Book" Titles.’ IMDb.com. 2011. 17-04-2011.<http://www.imdb.com/keyword/based-on-comic-book/ ?sort=release_date>.

Graph 5: Number of Film and Television Adaptations per Year. The Internet Movie Database. ‘Earliest "Based On Comic Book" Titles.’ IMDb.com. 2011. 17-04-2011.<http://www.imdb.com/keyword/based-on-comic-book/ ?sort=release_date>.

Tables Table 1: The Crossing of Substance and Form with the Signified and Signifier.

Schematic representation of Metz’s distinction. Metz, Christian. ‘Methodological Propositions for the Analysis of Film.’ Screen Reader 2: Cinema and Semiotics. Eds. Mick Eaton and Steven Neale. London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1981: 86-87.

Table 2: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider Plot Structure as Levels. My schematic representation of the sequences in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (West, 2001) and their video game equivalent.

Table 3: Sequences as Levels in the Last Third of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. My schematic representation of the sequences as levels in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Newell, 2010).

Table 4: Use of the Dagger in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Data from Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Newell, 2010).

Table 5: Names and Features of the Main Hassansins. Brickipedia. ‘Hassansin.’ Wikia Entertainment. n.d. 02-07-2011. <http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/Hassansin>. Prince of Persia Wiki. ‘Hassansins.’ Wikia Entertainment. n.d. 02-07-2011. <http://princeofpersia.wikia.com/wiki/Hassansins>.

Schemas Schema 1: Intertextual References between Source and Target Texts. My

schematic representation of my argument. Schema 2: Media and their Neighbours. Schematic representation of my idea. Schema 3: Senses and Media on a Scale from Familiarity to Abstraction. My

schematic representation of my idea.

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APPENDIX 1) Although the numbers vary in the different accounts, adaptations make up a substantial part of Hollywood movie production; be it films based on lit-erature, comics, games, television, newspaper articles, and biographies or in the form of sequels and remakes. Especially Victorian novels are often adapted and the object of literature-to-film adaptation studies. To hint at the amount of adaptations, Wikipedia has 218 pages with “list of films based on”389 and The Internet Movie Database (IMDb), lists about 180 categories that start with based on.390 The most important are: 28894 films based on novels, 12492 based on plays and 2283 films based on true stories. And those are only the ones that are tagged with that label. With 1941 titles, films based on comics make up a relatively small group. IMDb currently [05-01-2012] lists 268,172 feature films.391 2) These are the sources used to find out what elements are in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. • A documentary made by Disney for the opening of the ride shows most of the

scenes from the ride in their original condition. ‘Disneyland From The Pirates of the Caribbean to The World of Tomorrow.’ Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. NBC. 21-01-1968. DVD Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl Special Edition. Walt Disney Pictures, 2004, disk 2.

• A ride-through video of the original Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at Disneyland California with characters from the films added: ‘Pirates Of The Caribbean Ride (HD Complete Experience) Front Seat Disneyland California’ YouTube. 10-04-2011. 27-07-2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUatd07d960>.

• A ride-through of the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at Disneyland Cali-fornia before the changes shot in 1990: ‘Disneyland-Pirates of the Caribbe-an. The Whole Ride. Sept. 1990.’ YouTube. 13-08-2010. 27-07-2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkaEFkaMkcI>.

389 Wikipedia. ‘Search Results.’ Wikimedia foundation 2012. 05-01-2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=default&search=%22list+of+films+based+on%22&fulltext=Search>. 390 The Internet Movie Database. ‘Keywords.’ IMDb.com. 2012. 05-01-2012. <http://www.imdb.com/find?q=based+on&s=kw>. 391 The Internet Movie Database. ‘IMDb Database Statistics.’ IMDb.com. 2012. 05-01-2012. <http://www.imdb.com/stats>.

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• And a version from Disneyland in 1991: ‘Disneyland-Pirates Caribbean. 1991.’ YouTube. 30-08-2010. 27-07-2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt9q1sZp2to>.

• A written description of the rides on a fan wiki for The Pirates of the Carib-bean world: Pirates of the Caribbean Wiki. ‘Pirates of the Caribbean (ride).’ Wikia Entertainment. n.d. 27-07-2011. <http://pirates.wikia.com/wiki/Pirates_of_the_Caribbean_%28ride%29>.

3) These are the sources used to get an impression of the Prince of Persia video game. To trace the history of the game the film is based on and the game’s posi-tion in the Sands of Time trilogy I consulted a fan website, a Wikipedia article and the game developer’s website. • Prince of Persia Wiki. n.d. Wikia Entertainment. 22-06-2011.

<http://princeofpersia.wikia.com/wiki/Prince_of_Persia_Wiki>. • Wikipedia. ‘Prince of Persia.’ Wikimedia Foundation. 2011. 22-06-2011.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Persia>. • ‘Prince of Persia: Master Timeline.’ Ubisoft. 2010. Ubisoft Entertainment. 22-

06-2011. <http://prince-of-persia.uk.ubi.com/universe.php>. Below are the best walk-through I found for The Sands of Time and the original Prince of Persia from 1989. • ‘Prince Of Persia Sands Of Time Walkthrough part 1.’ YouTube. 27-04-2009.

22-06-2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M87yuBzpUDw>. • ‘Prince of Persia 1989 Playthrough; Level 1 – Intro.’ YouTube. 17-01-2010.

22-06-2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY1-tAqBT_o>. 4) As media share some of their traits one can imagine their multiple neigh-bours who in turn have multiple neighbours. The best way to depict such a structure is to imagine them as patches on a ball. I have ordered the media considered in this thesis and their neighbours in schema 2.

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Schema 2: Media and their Neighbours.392

5) Schema 3 is a representation of mine that depicts the senses, and some of the arts and media that use these senses, on a scale from familiarity to ab-straction on the x-axis. Time is depicted in the y-axis. Schema 3: Senses and Media on a Scale from Familiarity to Abstraction.393

392 My schematic representation of my idea. 393 My schematic representation of my idea.

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6) In the nineteen sixties DC comics is doing badly and so were the studio’s. Warner bought DC and decided to make a TV show of batman. The characters looked much like they did in the comics. ‘It held a vast nostalgic appeal for adults who, as youngsters, had grown up with Batman during the 1940s. And for the new generation who had never heard of Batman, the show became an instant favourite.’394 At the time comics are condemned for their violence and isolating particularly young boys, much in the way games are disapproved of now. The show was made to be satirical of the original to make sure that it was ‘good clean fun’ for everyone in order to be fit as a family show.395 One way the TV-series was satirical was by using comic book-style speech bubbles filled with onomatopoeia of the exaggerated Foley sounds accompanying the hits and punches. These moments of hypermediacy created distance from the already overacted violence. Original creator of the comic, Bob Kane, was not amused by what had been done with his character, but the show revived the comic book industry. 7) Here is a miniature history of comics intentionally limited to full decades to create a simple overview. 1890 – 1910 Comics appear regularly in newspapers. 1910 – 1930 Comics are identified by characters that return in every episode. 1930 – 1960 The golden age: comics are sold in autonomous magazines by spe-

cialized publishers. 1960 – 1970 Comics are threatened by television. Marvel editor Stan Lee writes

some of the best known comics adapted today. 1970 – 1980 Renewed attention for comics due to television series and film ad-

aptations. First serious writing on comics. 1980 – 2000 Post-modernism makes comics an acceptable form of art and wor-

thy of academic interest. 2000 – Now CGI and the Marvel take-over lead to the exploitation of intellectu-

al property by means of superhero movies. 8) To quantify the increase of comic book adaptations I have looked at all the entries to the Internet Movie Database tagged with ‘based on comic book’.396 Although there are more comic book adaptations in the early years of cinema,

394 Crawford, 1978, 25. 395 Crawford, 1978, 25. 396 The Internet Movie Database. ‘Earliest "Based On Comic Book" Titles.’ IMDb.com. 2011. 17-04-2011. <http://www.imdb.com/keyword/based-on-comic-book/?sort=release_date>.

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even before 1927, they are not listed on the internet movie database. These films are not popular enough that people will tag them as ‘based on comic book’. However, the data is representative of the last decades and of the perception in society that there are ever more comic book adaptations. The category ‘film’ in-cludes features, shorts, and videos; ‘television’ includes series/shows and TV-movies. Video games, video clips, and documentaries are not included. The following graph shows the number of film and television adaptations of comic books per year. They are only counted up until 2011, as is the case with the graph showing the number of adaptations per decade that is in the main document. IMDb keyword searches were also used to find the number of films based on video games and rides.397 For the number of video game adapta-tions all kinds of productions are counted.

397 The Internet Movie Database. ‘Earliest "Based On Video Game" Titles.’ IMDb.com. 2011. 17-04-2011. <http://www.imdb.com/keyword/based-on-video-game/?sort=release_date>. The Internet Movie Database. ‘Earliest "Based On Theme Park Attraction" Titles.’ IMDb.com. 2011. 17-04-2011. <http://www.imdb.com/keyword/based-on-theme-park-attraction/?sort=release_date>.

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Graph 5: Number of Film and Television Adaptations of per Year.398

398 Data collected from IMDb. The Internet Movie Database. ‘Earliest "Based On Comic Book" Titles.’ 2011. 17-04-2011.

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40

2011200920072005200320011999199719951993199119891987198519831981197919771975197319711969196719651963196119591957195519531951194919471945194319411939193719351933193119291927

Film adaptations Television adaptations

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9) Hulk The story of Ang Lee’s Hulk is about the scientist Bruce Banner who turns into a big green brute when he is made angry: the hulk. In the film he ob-tains this ability from the combination of two things. First, inheriting the ability to regenerate very quickly due to self-experiments his father did. Se-cond, an accidental exposure to gamma rays in his lab. Much of the film con-sists of the army tracking him down and locking him up. After a failed exper-iment on him he turns into the hulk again and escapes the complex. He is finally recaptured in San Francisco. When Bruce’s ex-girlfriend, Betty, con-vinces her father, general Ross, that firing at the hulk only makes him stronger, she calms him down. The end of the film connects to the second story line, that of Bruce’s father, David Banner. David is obsessed with his work and was locked away for thirty years after he ran amok when he was taken of his project for doing experiments on humans, and killing his wife. The second story line deals with how David tries to get hold of his son’s pow-er for himself. In the end of the film David is able to absorb the energy from around him. He battles Bruce for his power but both are blown up by the general. Bruce survives but no one knows, leaving room for a sequel.

By and large the film is a regular action movie and it was marketed as a mainstream film. There is a lot of action, a hero, and a princess in the sense of Vladimir Propp’s morphology. Bruce’s father is both the Proppian donor and villain. But it is not as straight forward as a regular action movie. It has many traits of an art house film. The film is just over two hours long and there is no clear objective for the protagonist. The love story is relatively thin; the relationship is already over. And although the hulk saves Betty from mutated dogs, Betty has to save Bruce from her father, the general, and ul-timately from himself, the hulk. Also the message that love is stronger than guns is not the usual message of action movies. Furthermore, the film has many dream or memory sequences and an intricate psychological back-ground for the protagonist. The film has the usual oedipal trajectory though. Bruce finds a replacement for his mother in the form of Betty, who also has dark hair and brown eyes. Banner spends most of the film battling fathers: his own father, Betty’s father, and the army as metaphor for the patriarchal power. Furthermore, the story focuses on trauma and repressed memories. On the level of psycho analysis a door becomes the way back into recurring visions of a repressed past that unlock the psychological wounds that trigger Bruce’s green anger. Ang Lee saw the film as a psychodrama.399 But accord-ing to Neil Smith, writing for Total Film, it resulted in ‘one big arthouse head-

399 Smith, 2011, 88.

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scratcher’.400 Though all said elements can be the focus of analysis, this the-sis is interested in Hulk’s visual style.

Visually, Lee’s editor has brought Hulk to a higher level. Choosing to make extensive use of split-screen re-images the comic book aesthetic. Fur-thermore, the playful use of visual means is aided by sound effects and obvious camera movements. This excess of movement is actually contradictory to the ontology of the comic book, which needs to convey movement thorough stills. A selection of exemplary scenes is discussed here in terms of their use of split-screen to cover the various ways the technique is applied. The division of the screen can be done in three ways that all refer to the comic book aesthetic. 1) The basic split-screen into two images. This technique also comes in the form of keyed or matted shots where a single element of the one shot, usually a face, is placed over the second shot. 2) Multiple-frame imagery is used in the form of a mosaic screen or as moving panels on the screen. 3) The transition between shots done by wipes combines, for a brief moment, two shots on the same screen. Even a simple wipe is an obtrusive shot transition, but editor Tim Squyres has embraced the technique. He uses it in many ways including graphic wipes that uses a graphic element from one of the shots to make the transition. In general the editing of Hulk displays many editing tricks such as, dissolves, twirls, all kinds of wipes, zooms, and blurs, and even cube flips that are usually not taken seriously. As allusion to a comic book aesthetic they become respectable means of creating hypermediacy. But wipes are not as distracting as split-screens. Especially when elucidated by sound effects wipes between scenes are relatively easy to digest for viewers concerned with the narrative. Splits-screen, however, demand viewers to choose where to look. Split-screen The first split-screen is relatively subtle when David Banner’s wife tells him, ‘I’m gonna have a baby.’401 Both the shot and reverse shot of David and his wife are wiped in over the preceding shot. On the right David is wiped in from the bottom up and his wife on the left comes down from the top. The shot mixes the close-ups of David and his wife to bring their faces in one shot even though they are on the opposite sides of the kitchen. Once in place, it is not an obvious split-screen because the two shots layered over each other without a seam in between. As image 8 shows, there are multiple images but no frames. The result is that David does not look at his wife in the resulting shot; it creates an impossible space. This compression of space is no problem 400 Smith, 2011, 89. 401 Hulk, Lee, 2003.

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in comics, but surprising, and a little alienating, in film. It gives the moment more impact. This is the cataclysmic event of the film. It is the creation of Bruce who will become the hulk and the beginning of the battle between him and his fa-ther. Bruce’s mother even forms a stand in for Bruce here. This can only be seen in retrospect because Bruce grows up to have the same dark hair and eyes like his mother. And it is no coinci-dence that his mother wears green. The image summarizes the film.

The last split-screen in the movie returns to the primal application of the technique: the phone call. Betty is called by her father who asks her about Bruce. All phone calls between the main characters in Hulk are told with split-screen. The faces of the two characters are both on the screen, though not always in the same size. This way one can follow the emotion of the two while talking and while listen-ing.

Split-screens usually have a black line between the two images. Many split-screen shots in Hulk, however, use graphic elements of the image to di-vide the frame. The rotor blades of a helicopter are used in image 9 for in-stance. Also Betty’s face is often placed in the foreground while the back-ground is keyed out and replaced with either a mismatching background or a second person as in image 10.

Image 8: First Split-screen. Lee. Hulk. (00:04:54).

Image 9: Rotor Blades as Edge of Wipe. Lee. Hulk. (01:08:37).

Image 10: General Ross calls Betty. Lee. Hulk. (02:04:32).

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Mosaics The use of a mosaic screens is mostly used in Hulk as a momentary combina-tion of an image inside a scene. The technique is also used throughout entire scenes where mosaic screens alter their compositions as the scene progress-es. In the beginning of the film these mosaics are generally reserved for scenes with scientific experiments. In the second half of the film they are used in military scenes with a lot of action. The limited type of scenes using this technique may be due to the facts that the lab and military scenes have a lot of footage to start with and that the material needs little attention be-cause it holds no vital information for the story in itself. Mosaics offer a way to show what one can call ambient images simul-taneously as addition to images of more interest for the narrative such as the faces of characters. In the case of experiments, ambient images show the in-formation on the monitors. In case of the military scenes, ambient images can consist of anonymous soldiers and personnel. In watching such a page one can hop from image to image like one would from panel to panel, sensing the mood of the scene. Due to the movement in the images, however, one’s attention is often drawn to a specific image. The editor is able to guide our view from image to image by using size, placing and the movement of the im-ages. The best way to draw attention is the order the images are introduced, making the newest image the most important to watch. Between the panels of a com-ic book page is a border that is un-printed leaving it white. In film, that which is ‘unprinted’ is black. Most of the time the border of an image in a mosaic is black but when more contrast is needed they are given a white border. In the scene where Bruce is in a large water tank, de-picted in image 11 the borders are purple to match the hue of the im-age. The way one’s eye skims over the comic book page is referenced when the hulk breaks free. As im-age 12 shows the images are not only placed alongside each other but they tilt towards the virtual camera as it moves flies past the

Image 11: Purple Borders during the Enzyme Extraction Scene. Lee. Hulk. (01:28:41).

Image 12: Mosaic Overview Lee. Hulk. (01:30:50).

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images to an image of General Ross. The escape sequence is told from the General’s perspective. To illustrate the confusion it is told with mosaics of images that are very similar. They are repeatedly com-posed of shots with General Ross in differ-ent poses from various angles and aspect ratio’s. The shapes are further varied dur-ing a telephone conversation the General has with the president, depicted in image 13. Images of the president, his secretary and a map are layered over a full frame image of the general. Finally a specifically artful use of mosaic shows the hulk hop-ping through three parts of the same landscape all framed individually. The discrepancies between the individual im-ages makes them feel like autonomous images. As one can see in image 14 the clouds do not match. But the hulk jumps from one to the other making it one space; just as a comic reader connects the sepa-rate panels. Wipes and graphic wipes Wipes are a very obtrusive way of connect-ing shots; one shot is pushed away by the other. This can be done with shapes or a simple line that crosses the screen hori-zontally. They generally signal the passing of a short time and hence the transition to a new scene. In Hulk simple wipes are mostly used inside the individual frames of a multiple-frame setup or between the images of a split-screen setup to orches-trate the attention between the ‘panels’ as the action progresses. In between scenes, fairly experimental wipes and combina-tions with fades and spit-screen are used. For instance, as image 15 shows, David

Image 13: Frame Shapes during Call with the President. Lee. Hulk. (01:36:20).

Image 14: Hulk Hops through Three Frames. Lee. Hulk. (01:37:28).

Image 15: Wipe Transition around Da-vid’s Face. Lee. Hulk. (00:25:56).

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Banner’s face is framed by a door post as the walls on either side are wiped in. Not only does this reference the way comics are drawn it also plays with aspect ratio.

Their showy presence makes wipes useful for a film that seeks cine-matic means to decrease its immediacy. Shot transitions are also accentuat-ed by motion blurred replacements. The first shot shoots out of the frame on one side while the next is inserted via the other side simultaneously. The transition is blurred, fast and emphasized by a sound effect like a whoosh. In comics the transitions between panels have no sound, this is a cinematic convention. The exaggeration of shot transitions is a place where cinema can recreate the larger-than-life aesthetic of comics.

The editing of Hulk also makes frequent use of a technique that is on the cross-section of multiple-frame imagery and wipes: graphic wipes. These are used between scenes. A relatively simple example is right after David’s wife has told him she is pregnant. Between their two heads a circle appears with a thin black outline. Inside we see Bruce’s mother’s face as she gives birth to him. The circle grows and fills the entire screen. This split-screen technique becomes a wipe in a particular shape when it eventually fills the entire screen. Shortly after this a plant sprouts over the image creating a graphic wipe. The shape of the plant is introduced first and the rest of the image is faded in later, introducing the next scene. The same technique is used a few times with blinds. Image 16 is an example of this technique that replaces the space that was previously occupied by the blinds with the new image. Any object can be used to wipe into a previous shot. The technique plays with the concept of borders which are an expres-sive tools in comics but considered fixed in cinema. 10) In his extensive categorization of video games Mark Wolf defines platform games in the following manner.

Platform Games [are games] in which the primary objective requires movement through a series of levels, by way of running, climbing, jump-ing, and other means of locomotion. Characters and settings are seen in

Image 16: Wipe as Bruce Opens Blinds. Lee. Hulk. (00:52:51).

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side view as opposed to top view, thus creating a graphical sense of ‘‘up’’ and ‘‘down’’ as is implied in ‘‘Platform.’’ These games often also can in-volve the avoidance of dropped or falling objects, conflict with (or naviga-tion around) computer-controlled characters, and often some character, object, or reward at the top of the climb which provides narrative motiva-tion. This term should not be used for games which do not involve as-cending heights or advancement through a series of levels (see Adven-ture), nor for games which involve little more than traversing a path of obstacles (see Obstacle Course).402

Although the side view is lost in contemporary 3D games and more adventure elements are added, platform games still require the player to accurately navi-gate across the game space. Wolf also has a clear definition for adventure games.

Games which are set in a ‘‘world’’ usually made up of multiple connected rooms, locations, or screens, involving an objective which is more com-plex than simply catching, shooting, capturing, or escaping, although completion of the objective may involve several or all of these. Objectives usually must be completed in several steps, for example, finding keys and unlocking doors to other areas to retrieve objects needed elsewhere in the game. Characters are usually able to carry objects, such as weap-ons, keys, tools, and so on. Settings often evoke a particular historical time period and place, such as the Middle Ages or Arthurian England, or are thematically related to content-based genres such as science fiction, fantasy, or espionage.403

11) The Hassansins in the film Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Newell, 2010) are not in the original game. They are based on the medieval order of Per-sian warriors Hashshansins whose name is derived from the drug hashish they used. This is also referenced in the film by Nizam who commands them. Accord-ing to the Hassansin leader the use of drugs lets them see into the future. In the game, though, it is the player who can see into the future. As Davidson de-scribes the save points, ‘[w]hen you walk into the column you see another vision of the future ahead of you.’404

Surrounded by myths, the order offers the writers of the film a chance to create a diverse bunch of scary adversaries. Their traits are displayed in the scene when Nizam orders them to go after Dastan. In video games the traits of bosses are usually displayed just before the start of a boss battle that completes

402 Wolf, 2008b, 270.

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a video game’s level. In the film this would obstruct the flow of the action. Table 5 lists the names and features of the main Hassansins. Table 5: Names and Features of the Main Hassansins. Name Distinguishing feature Killed by In which location Zolm - The leader Controls snakes Dastan The hourglass Ghazab Double bladed halberd Dastan The Alamut palace Setam - Porcupine Shoots blades Seso The sacred temple Gool Giant scimitar Seso The sacred temple Tamah Razor Glove Dastan The sacred temple Hassad Whip blade Garsiv The sacred temple Nefrat Grenades Dastan The sacred temple

Because the Hassansins are not named in the film I gathered the information about them from the following websites: • Brickipedia. ‘Hassansin.’ Wikia Entertainment. n.d. 02-07-2011.

<http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/Hassansin>. • Prince of Persia Wiki. ‘Hassansins.’ Wikia Entertainment. n.d. 02-07-2011.

<http://princeofpersia.wikia.com/wiki/Hassansins>.

403 Wolf, 2008a, 81. 404 Davidson, 2005, 13.