Studies in French Cinema

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Adaptability: literature and cinema redux

Jean-Louis Jeannelle

To cite this article: Jean-Louis Jeannelle (2016) Adaptability: literature and cinema redux,
Studies in French Cinema, 16:2, 95-105, DOI: 10.1080/14715880.2016.1164422

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14715880.2016.1164422

Published online: 08 Jun 2016.

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 Studies in French Cinema, 2016
VOL. 16, NO. 2, 95–105
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14715880.2016.1164422

Adaptability: literature and cinema redux

Jean-Louis Jeannelle
Centre d’Études et de Recherche Éditer/Interpréter, UFR Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Université de Rouen,
1 rue Thomas Becket, 76821 Mont-Saint-Aignan Cedex, France
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ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article opposes the notions of adaptation and adaptability, the Adaptability; adaptation;
latter understood here as a complex commercial, screenwriting and inadaptation; poetics;
Simone Murray
critical process. Following the sociological methods endorsed by
Simone Murray in The Adaptation Industry, the author studies the
concrete aspects of this process of evaluation, development and use
of the adaptability of literary works through an examination of the
case of a French company: Best Seller to Box Office, a company created
to identify the ‘adaptability quotient’ of contemporary fiction and
non-fiction works. The composition of adaptation spec sheets, with
the purpose of measuring and highlighting adaptability potential,
makes up one of the essential elements of this business, which is
relatively new to France. This article examines the particular nature
of the business, especially the interface between different facets of
the adaptation process.

Introduction
In both the French and Anglo-Saxon critical worlds, the renewal of adaptation as a field of
study has come about through the extension of the field in question. This extension has now
far exceeded the simple confrontation of the source text and the cinematographic or audio-
visual version(s) based upon it. In France, scholars have privileged either poetics, following
the work of Gérard Genette on the five main forms of transtextuality, in particular intertex-
tuality and hypertextuality (Genette 1982), or semiotics, which illustrates the taxonomy of
all possible circulations between genres and media, including translation and staging, as
proposed by Gérard-Denis Farcy (Farcy 1993). The more pragmatic1 Anglo-Saxon route has
followed Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation (Hutcheon 2006) in considering adapta-
tion to be a phenomenon of limitless transformations. Such transformations mix the most
high- and low-brow cultural practices, from opera, ballet and cinema, to television mini-
series, musical comedy, comics, theme parks and video games.2 The most radical re-evaluation
of adaptation, however, has come from the sociological turn undertaken several years ago
by Simone Murray in The Adaptation Industry (Murray 2011). In this account of adaptation,
the analysis of a powerful cultural economy, in particular its major agents (the author, literary

CONTACT  Jean-Louis Jeannelle  jeannelle@fabula.org

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 96    J.-L. Jeannelle

agents, editors, festival directors, literary prize juries, screenwriters, producers and directors),
replaces narrowly focused comparisons of source and adapted texts. Still other developments
in the field have taken place since the 1980s, in particular the concentration of the culture
and entertainment industries, the digital revolution, as well as the extension of the market
for adaptation rights to all sorts of new vectors.
The conceptual displacement wrought by Simone Murray has not, however, resulted in
the hoped-for effects, particularly because it has not led to a re-examination of concepts
currently in use. Of course, it has been essential to replace adaptation within the questioning
of the institutional, social and economic forces that govern the logic of production. Yet the
theoretical, and more precisely poetic, consequences remain to be explored, that is to say,
reconsidering adaptation no longer as an end product but as a process bringing together
multiple agents with diverging interests. In this article, I propose to substitute the notion of
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adaptability for that of adaptation. Adaptability will here be understood to have several
interdependent meanings, given that the main concern of this concept is to address different
phases of the adaptation process. In other words, I want to take into account phenomena
that are at once commercial, script-related and critical. The composition of several versions
for screen is justified by the market for audiovisual rights. It follows its own logic, which is
largely hidden by the limited number of projects actually made and are typically the only
ones historians or theoreticians of cinema take into account. From a critical perspective,
adaptation is also the object of multiple discourses, from the immediate reception of works
through to their scholarly examination. Each of these three areas (commercial, script-related
and critical) articulates one of the principal facets of the complex process I will consider as
part of the term adaptability.
My goal here is thus to pursue the consequences for poetics of the movement towards
thinking about adaptation under combined economic, technical and aesthetic angles. This
central praxis mobilizes numerous agents in both the literary and cinematographic spheres,
and does so no longer as a simple second-hand creation, marginalized in relationship to the
production of original works, but as an equally valid creation in its own right.

Market-oriented adaptability
Most of the problems encountered by adaptation theory come from never taking into
account the ‘operal’ uniqueness of films, whose specificity is to exceed their immanent mode
of existence, which is to say, the material conditions of cinema, an organized flux of sounds
and moving images.3 Cinema, like theatre or music, originates a priori in the category of
two-phase arts, where the first phase prescribes that which the second more or less directly
and more or less exactly executes. Nonetheless, it is more precise and more respectful of
film’s production dynamics to say that film consists of four distinct phases: development,
production, shooting and finally post-production. Each of these phases is decisive in the
outcome and the form of the work, each according to a different logic. It is important to
think of the cinema as an art of successive phases, because in the case of adaptation, the
process obeys criteria that vary according to the phase in question. As a result, there are
variations in what we should think of as adaptability at each point.
In The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made, Chris Gore notes that out of the 42,000 spec scripts
registered each year by the Writers Guild of America, nearly 3000 are bought and either
developed or shunted into a holding pattern of the Hollywood machine, while fewer than
 Studies in French Cinema   97

50 are actually made into films (1999, 2). Therefore, while it is difficult to establish precise
statistics in this area, it is safe to say that most scripts that are written are never made into
movies. This point, at first glance trivial, is in reality crucial. As a document that serves to
evaluate the interest of a story, the price of its production, the staffing combinations con-
nected to its eventual shooting (which director? which stars? which DP?), or the risk of
censorship, each script has multiple possible reasons that might prevent it from being made
embedded in its parameters. Most of the time, the process halts at the end of a relatively
long phase of development, sometimes after production starts, or even during shooting
(though this latter situation is less frequent, owing to the financial stakes). In the case of a
film project based on a pre-existing work, the entire phase of preparation consists of meas-
uring the adaptability value (in the practical and commercial senses) of the work – a calcu-
lation that will be confirmed or not by the film’s box-office performance. In this first sense,
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then, adaptability corresponds quite concretely to both the feasibility of a screen adaptation
project and the profitability that the producer can expect. Profitability is nourished by the
desire of a book’s readership – whether it is a question of a classic or of a contemporary
bestseller – to prolong their experience of the original textual universe through another
medium. Such desires play an essential but often ignored role in the process of adaptation.
Typically, in fact, text-centred literary theory considers re-reading as the only possible exten-
sion of the first, discovery reading, when in reality, adaptation is one of the principal exten-
sions of reading. In fact, adaptation often substitutes for that first reading, according to a
model adroitly proposed through the extremely productive non-readings studied by Pierre
Bayard in Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? (2006). Producers thus do nothing
more than speculate on the attractiveness of such operal extensions whose forms (as is
widely recognized) are extremely varied, although the transfer from literature to cinema is
still today the most highly culturally valued.

In search of the adaptability quotient

To market-oriented adaptability, I would add an adaptability of a more formal nature: the
transposition of a work from one semiotic system to another by a screenwriter. Because of
the statistically slim chances of a script becoming a film and because of the possibility that
even if it does become a film, the final result will, in the course of shooting or editing, more
or less completely deviate from the ‘work’ that was projected in the script stage, one can
speak in this case of adaptability in a more technical sense. Firstly, the source text remains
available in the case of a failed project, such that successive adaptation projects can accu-
mulate over the years. Secondly, since the written versions vary (sometimes greatly) from
completed projects as constituted by the film, the succession of script variants becomes the
tangible proof of what we can call the adaptability quotient of the source text. That is to say:
both its availability for rewriting for screen and its plasticity, as demonstrated by the gaps
between different versions in the case of non-completion. At this point, to refer to such
aborted scripts, I would like to propose the term inadaptations. By this, I mean script versions,
regardless of their degree of completion from a dramaturgical point of view, that have not
resulted in a completed film, yet still exist, for lack of having been absorbed in a continuum
of sounds and animated images, as simple documents, without precise operal purpose.
These inadaptations prove to be very interesting, sometimes even more interesting than
completed and distributed films. It is precisely the failure of such inadaptations that
 98    J.-L. Jeannelle

relaunches the adaptation enterprise, and thereby elicits a further network of versions, hence
revealing the potential ‘rewritability’ of the primary source text. In other words, rewritability
consists of the capacity of the source text to be reconfigured following screenwriting norms
and constantly changing social, cultural and ideological expectations, such that each instance
can be considered as a plausible and potentially satisfactory equivalent of the original text.
From this point of view, the multiple versions of André Malraux’s La Condition humaine
written for screen represent an exceptional case of inadaptation, studied in Films sans images
(Jeannelle 2015b). The case of Malraux’s novel is particularly interesting for several reasons.
First, the novel’s cinematographic qualities have often been praised. Second, more than 80
years have passed since the publication of the original text, from 1933 to the present – thus,
a relatively vast period of time. Third, the project has over some 80 years attracted a signifi-
cant number of attempted adaptations, by an extremely prestigious collection of screen-
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writers and directors. To whit: immediately after the novel’s publication Malraux himself, in
collaboration with Eisenstein in a mad attempt to satisfy Stalinist orthodoxy; next, James
Agee, who had no other motivation than the pleasure of adapting the novel’s famous final
scene, which he found fascinating; then Han Suyin (following Jean Cau and John McGrath,
whose proposals did not convince producers), for a film that Fred Zinnemann would have
shot for MGM, except that the studio pulled the plug at the last minute; and finally, Laurence
Hauben, who took on a resolutely Maoist point of view in a script that Costa-Gavras would
have made as the first film shot in China after the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao.
These are of course only the scripts currently available, since the story continued with Michael
Cimino (whose script is one of the most ambitious) and has been rebooted again today, after
countless other attempts, by the Chinese Lou Ye. The examination of all of these variants
does not lead to the conclusion that La Condition humaine is cursed, but on the contrary,
such repeated variation shows how malleable the novel is, demonstrating its capacity to
speak to current screenwriting norms and the corresponding ideological constraints and
expectations, as well as to the preoccupations of the directors and screenwriters involved.
From Eisenstein to Cimino, the series of inadaptations of La Condition humaine (several of
which are still, and may always be, hidden from view) form a secret, virtual, stippled history.
The rediscovery of these inadaptations belongs to another potential temporality, that of the
cinema. In the era of a common antifascist front, Eisenstein explores the revolutionary myth
created by Malraux. Agee derives a scene of unequalled visionary force from the final sacrifice
of the Chinese revolutionaries. With MGM’s vast resources, Suyin and Zinnemann would
stage an epic fresco, strangely contemporary and anachronistic. Hauben and Costa-Gavras
give the novel back the political import that had been leached from it, but this time in the
context of communism’s decline. And so on, in a long line of mobile reconfigurations, con-
stantly redeployed as a function of historical circumstances. The repeated updating of this
phantom filmography grants the possibility of entirely re-evaluating La Condition humaine,
of measuring its indissolubly literary and cinematographic ramifications at each step of its
reception. Malraux’s most famous novel thus enjoys a sort of shared posterity whose possi-
bilities, though they remain potential, have opened onto extraordinary combinations.

The topic of in/adaptability

I now arrive at my third category: critical adaptability. Critical adaptability encompasses, but
also exceeds, a film’s final phase of production. This involves first distribution, then audience
 Studies in French Cinema   99

reception. Reception can be charted both in various traditional media, new and social media,
as well as in scholarly response, all of which will establish various aspects of the film’s value.
Indeed, the desire to see a successful novel transposed to the screen has the paradoxical
but logical effect that each delayed or aborted adaptation attempt (the press regularly covers
such failures, particularly when great classics are the subject) renders ipso facto the realiza-
tion of said project at the same time harder and more desirable. Or rather, harder to realize
the more desirable it is, and more desirable to realize the harder it is. This is because over
time, the literary work gains the reputation for being ‘un-adaptable’ from the ‘failure’ of suc-
cessive adaptation projects. Thus, the rather inflammatory aura of the work has the effect
of inciting further desire to see the project realized, and therefore, additional scripts accu-
mulate even when a film has been completed.
What is essential here lies therefore in the reversibility of arguments made in one direction
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or another. This third level of adaptability is no longer financial or formal, but of a purely
discursive nature. It corresponds to a topic that unfolds in the form of recurrent and
re-arrangeable arguments about the supposed adaptability or inadaptability of the text in
question. Examples here run the gamut, and we can think of statements made, and that
people continue to make, about literary works that for a long time have remained without
filmed extensions. This also applies to those that are a priori the most open to the transfer
to big screen, such as Et mon dernier est un homme by Boileau-Narcejac, and the Blake and
Mortimer comic book La Marque jaune (Jacobs 1956), or those most resistant to adaptation,
such as Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu or Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au
bout de la nuit. From a certain point of view, the failure of a screen adaptation is never the
proof of impossibility that would be inherent to the text itself. Such a failure arises from a
confluence of events, because it is connected to the vagaries of a production. It is not a
structural issue – failures can always be compensated for, or passed on to a future project
with different producers and different conditions. By the same token, the successful realiza-
tion of a long-awaited film is never enough to automatically validate such an undertaking.
This was the case of Volker Schlöndorff’s 1984 Un amour de Swann/Swann in Love, which
followed on the heels of the resounding abandonments of Luchino Visconti and Joseph
Losey, and whose critical reception is well known to have been disastrous. This level of adapt-
ability functions like a series of shared and contradictory spaces, continually exchanged without
it being possible to halt debate by identifying strict scientific criteria. I insist on this latter point,
because studies of adaptation have for a long time sought to establish formal correspondences
between the two media, in particular on the basis of Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘cinematism’.4 Such efforts
favour an ensemble of direct translations and by consequence a greater or lesser availability of
texts, without there being anything else there but simple critical metaphors (the famous tracking
shots or cross-cutting in Malraux’s novels, for example). 5 In other words: a theoretical delusion.
The current topic, in contrast, is characterized by the extreme solidarity (invisible even to its users)
between the two antithetical poles of adaptability and inadaptability. On the one hand, the very
possibility of discussing a work’s adaptability implies, in effect, that one can reduce every text to
its actantial kernel.6 On the other hand, followed to its logical conclusion, this hyper-adaptability
reverses itself because in reducing works to their story, it highlights the impasse made up of all
sorts of other factors judged consubstantial to the primary text7 and thus facilitating the hypoth-
esis of the text’s inadaptability. This inadaptability is not de facto (few texts escape from this
process and any example cited could be invalidated in the future), but de jure, in the sense that
the transfer does not take into account the fundamental discontinuity between the two media
 100    J.-L. Jeannelle

and automatically impoverishes the source work. Here is a real theoretical turning point. In
fact, in radicalizing, the argument of a solution of radical continuity between media is in its
turn reversed. If we consider that every transposed literary work automatically loses that
which makes its semiotic singularity and its hermeneutic range and force, then we must
admit the legitimacy of the process, adaptation presupposing in principal that there is not
strict equivalence between the source and derived works.
We can thus see that the validity of an adaptation is never a question that can be resolved
on a case-by-case basis, relying on verifiably objective criteria. The validity of an adaptation
is a function of the discourse on in/adaptability constituted as a topic, operating as a regu-
latory framework of both the immediate (critical) and deferred (scholarly) receptions of the
adapted works.
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Beyond the text–film confrontation

Admittedly, one might criticize the absence of a simple and unified definition of the concept
of adaptability. Elsewhere I have described it as ‘desire that precedes (and then accompanies)
the transfer from one format to another, as a doubled testing (of the consistency of the
primary text and of its potential reconfiguration […]), and as the pleasure taken from the
distribution of this particular form of operal extension’ (Jeannelle 2013, 623). But there are
several reasons for this complexity. First, the fact that the transfer from one work to another
corresponds to a process whose phases succeed each other. Second, this process can be
interrupted at each and any of these phases, giving birth to unrealized scripts whose operal
status remains intermediary (some of them may be completed in terms of dramatic structure,
without having been shot as the film which would have reabsorbed their existence). These
unrealized scripts accumulate in a network of script variants, whether the source text ever
makes it to the screen or whether it does several times over in the form of new versions that
are both adaptations and remakes. Finally, we have the fact that several different facets
(commercial, technical and critical) mix. At first glance, these would seem to correspond to
the phases of production of a film, but they are in fact continually interwoven with each
other. In fact, the financial evaluation of an adaptation project is not limited to the sale of
audiovisual rights but depends equally on the film’s reception. The exchange articulated (in
ordinary conversation or in scholarly discourse) about the sheer possibility of an adaptation
being made conditions in its turn the attractiveness of a literary work in the eyes of producers
and the search for new script solutions in both the case of inadaptations and that of multiple
re-adaptations (it is well known that there are quite a few adaptations of certain
nineteenth-century classics, with authors like Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo topping
the list in France).8
The notion of adaptability that I am proposing here seeks to take into account this phe-
nomenon in all its complexity. It is a question of a postulation concerning most available
fictional texts, for which the reader’s pleasure very often elicits the desire for an extension
through an alternative but equivalent form. This postulation proves to be inseparable from
its contrary: the impossibility or the illegitimacy of such a transfer. An incredibly vast, but
almost completely ignored, domain of script production corresponds to this postulation.
These scripts are ignored in part because the texts that do not result in a film (that is to say
the overwhelming majority, as discussed above) remain protected by copyright laws.9 They
are also ignored because even in the case of a completed film, neither literature nor cinema
 Studies in French Cinema   101

specialists consider the script as a stand-alone work. This is true even though the cascade
of rewritings, whether they are inadaptations or box-office successes, allows us concretely
to experience the operal consistence of the original work, that is to say, its capacity to be
carried over into other formats. As an indirect consequence, a broad collection of documents
is generated by the publishing and film industries (press releases, interviews, publicity mate-
rials etc.) as well as by the targeted publics (mainstream viewers, journalists or scholars),
whose discussions feed this vast topic. Thanks to this discursive space I would defend both
the idea of unlimited adaptability (each and any work may be translated into a story) and
its opposite (insofar as the cinema necessarily fails to capture the essential part of a text: its
narrative or its style, for example).
It seems the only possible escape from the discourse of fidelity lies in taking into account
all the complexities of adaptation, namely through the interaction of the different facets of
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adaptability that I have discussed above: commercial strategies, screenwriting techniques

and the topic of discourse on adaptation. Where criticism has long remained locked in the
back and forth between a text and its filmed equivalent, we now can capture a dynamic
relationship where numerous agents and processes collaborate, often without their own
knowledge of that collaboration.

At the interface of publishing and film production

The sociological turn of recent years has, in a certain way, brought us to consider adaptation
as a field of tensions between several superimposed logics, both diachronic (certain projects
can take at least a few years and may take decades, as in the case of La Condition humaine)
and synchronic (these logics converge as often as they compete). In France, under the influ-
ence of Anglo-American modes of production, several structures have appeared whose
precise function is situated at the interface between the processes of transfer and whose
purpose is to facilitate the selection of works with strong adaptation potential. This strategy
was, of course, initially taken on by several large publishing houses such as Gallimard that
were no longer satisfied by the work done by the few agents in charge of the company’s
catalogue. Gallimard felt the need to create a proper audiovisual department whose job was
not only the negotiation of rights, but also the promotion of their most ‘adaptable’ texts,
working to contact producers, directors or actors likely to be interested. Directed for a long
time by Prune Berge, who played an important role in this area, the department is today run
by Frédérique Massart, who every month organizes a meeting during which her collaborators
orally present a small number of works that have caught their attention.10 At these meetings,
main storylines, remarkable characters, possible avenues of adaptation and, above all, tar-
geted interlocutors in the film industry are pitched. All of the house’s publications are con-
sidered – the backlist is regularly (though less urgently) revisited as well. The focus is on
fiction, but non-fiction (biographies, investigative texts, memoirs…) is also taken into
account. Since Gallimard’s decision, other publishers such as Albin Michel and Flammarion
have developed their own audiovisual departments. Meanwhile, organizations dedicated
to the promotion of the book industry such as the SCELF (Société Civile des Éditeurs de
Langue Française) and the BIEF (Bureau International de l’Édition Française) have responded
to this development in publishing houses by developing initiatives dedicated to handling
the market for adaptation, currently dominated by Anglo-American companies.11 One such
initiative is the ‘Rencontres SCELF de l’audiovisuel’, a forum whereby French publishers can
 102    J.-L. Jeannelle

propose a selection of high adaptation-potential texts to film and television producers during
the annual Salon du Livre in Paris.
Because of its independence from both publishers and producers, and therefore its focus
on the process of adaptation itself, ‘BS2BO’ (Best Seller to Box Office) is an even more inter-
esting structure.12 This small company, created in the autumn of 2007 by sisters Nathalie
and Laure Kniazeff, is unique in France, where, as we have seen, only large publishing houses
have audiovisual departments. Moreover, the company has no equivalent in the Anglophone
world, where the market for audiovisual rights is decidedly more active and well developed,
but where negotiations are undertaken by agents hired by writers to serve as go-betweens
for the publisher and their various partners, or scouts often affiliated with publishing houses
or production companies. Situated halfway between book publishing and film production,
BS2BO maintains an online platform that offers a catalogue of adaptable books. Its purpose
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is not at all to sell rights (held by the publishers), nor to initiate negotiations. Instead, its task
is simply to help producers evaluate, in the most efficient way, the adaptation potential13 of
a work, if applicable, to help verify the availability of rights, and ultimately to furnish the
necessary contacts to those seeking to make a deal. The company is financed by subscriptions
(at four different levels) from publishers and producers to the online platform. In exchange,
the subscriber gains access to various services, in particular two different evaluation tools.
First, the company offers reader reports of one to two pages, presenting the author, the story
pitch, a more detailed summary and finally commentaries on the most adaptable parts of
the work (or, on the contrary, the obstacles presented by the work and what kind of reor-
ganization might be necessary). Second, at the specific request of producers to verify the
potential of a text, to get another opinion of a work the rights to which they have already
purchased, or even to evaluate a first script, a decidedly more developed document called
an ‘adaptation spec sheet’ can be generated. The adaptation specification sheet comprises
a pitch, a reconstitution of the main and secondary storylines, a list of primary and secondary
characters along with their main characteristics. It also includes information on a series of
noteworthy scenes, on the structure of the work, on its dramatic density, the nature of its
dialogues, a list of possible accommodations and a list of comparable films that might serve
as reference, in short its adaptability.

Adaptability: a quid pro quo

The interest of the work carried out by a company like BS2BO is precisely that it exposes the
tensions that exist between different stages of the adaptation process – tensions often
hidden by studies focused only on the confrontation between the original text and the film
or films adapted from it. BS2BO undertakes to present a very large selection to producers.
Valentine Spinelli of the Cristina De Stefano Literary Scouting agency, who regularly works
with the Kniazeffs, points out that of 50 works read in a given week, she only passes on five
to different foreign clients through her agency, whereas she forwards about 40 to BS2BO,
for whom she also writes reader reports and/or adaptation spec sheets.14
Two of the possible meanings of adaptability combine here. The first consists of taking into
account each work without generic limits, because more and more documents (investigative
journalism, biographies, personal narratives) are now being adapted. This generic broadening
serves to expose new, and sometimes difficult to discern, story sources. For instance, Philippe
Pozzo di Borgo’s Le Second Souffle came out with Bayard to no fanfare – containing nothing more
 Studies in French Cinema   103

than one chapter on the author’s healthcare assistant. It was after having seen that assistant on
television that the filmmakers became interested in the story, eventually adapting it as the run-
away hit Intouchables/The Intouchables (Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, 2011). The task at this
point in the adaptation process is to identify a minimal level of potential of a purely diegetic
order, not taking into account script-writing concerns. By contrast, the second meaning, addressed
by the adaptation spec sheet, answers to stringent technical constraints: the spec sheet does not
involve writing a script, but it does explicitly evaluate a text in terms of an ideal of screenwriting
in order to let a producer anticipate as much as possible what the work of adaption will entail,
the costs in terms of development and the risks taken in using a format that might involve sig-
nificant accommodation to the new format.
The take-home point here is that in BS2BO spec sheets, the original work is imagined
exclusively as a function of producer needs and expectations. Commentary from another
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BS2BO collaborator is illuminating here. Jérôme Bloch (former École Supérieure de Réalisation
Audiovisuelle student and screenwriting instructor at the University of Paris III-Sorbonne-
Nouvelle) is well suited to the Anglo-American-inspired approach. Bloch applies what he
calls Aristotelian rules to the works whose potential he evaluates.15 These rules may often
be violently criticized for their rigidity but Bloch considers them indispensable for the con-
struction of a successful script. It is striking to see that for him, the rules to be applied are
the same, whether it is a question of an original script or of an adaptation. Back in 1981,
Tudor Eliad published a manual entitled Les Secrets de l’adaptation, in which he stated from
the outset that the technical work of a screenwriter is exactly the same, ‘whether he starts
from an original idea or from an already written book’ (1981, 11). This is a way of indicating
that the adaptor needs to be less worried about the book than the internal coherence of the
adapted script, which must strictly obey the same laws as an original script. Anticipating the
methods used by BS2BO, Eliad recommended that a ‘literary découpage’ first be established,
a breakdown of the work’s principal elements: actions, characters, secondary storylines etc.
Then the elements to be carried over into the adaptation need to be subjected to the rules
of dramatic composition (broken into three parts, of course). This point is essential, because
it shows that screenwriters assigned to think about the potential of a literary work (and not
directly to write the script themselves) do so expressly as a function of film production
constraints. Literary texts matter only in proportion to their adaptability to these specific,
technical constraints. Thus, in the case where the literary characteristics of the work in ques-
tion deviate too far from these constraints, Bloch takes care either to indicate how to adjust
the story to a more conventional mode, or to warn the client, proposing a structure closer
to the spirit of the book but shy of expectations for a film targeting a mass market.
By this point it is clear what distinguishes such an approach to adaptability from adapt-
ability as conceived of by literary specialists, as well as the misunderstandings that can arise
from the gap between the two. Adaptation professionals think of the process as always
working towards the film. Meanwhile, the dominant analytical framework used until now
has insisted upon thinking of adaptation in terms of the book, or at the very least, as a fruitful
dialectic between the two extreme ends of the process, without taking into account the
constraints imposed upon the agents implied in each of the adaptation’s phases.
Considering the role played by a company like BS2BO is only one of the possible directions
in what is today a very open field of research. This example leads to examining the often
complex dialectic between the different phases of the adaptation process where the adapt-
ability of literary works comes into play. It is a more important issue for cinema than for other
 104    J.-L. Jeannelle

arts because the number of people and the hoped-for symbolic capital and financial returns
are (for the moment) greater than in the case of other transfers from medium to medium.
For this reason, adaptation theory, as it essentially stems from the seminal texts of Eisenstein,
must be re-examined in light of the tensions born from this confrontation of phases. The
adaptability of a work thereby becomes a negotiation between the quest for profits, the
evaluation of textual responsiveness to a series of script-writing expectations, and finally
the legitimate attempt to equal the source text, as judged by audiences, critics and historians
of literature and cinema.
Translated by Margaret C. Flinn, The Ohio State University

Notes
1.  Even if the poetic perspective plays an important role, notably for Robert Stam (1989), who
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re-envisions intertextuality as Baktinian dialogism.

2.  Among others, see Sarah Cardwell (2002) and Thomas Leitch (2007).
3.  The term ‘operal’ is used for opéral in French in the English translation of Genette’s work (1997,
162).
4.  See Albera (2009, 11–15) and Bourget and Nacache (2012).
5.  See Jeannelle (2015a).
6.  At least as far as narrative works are concerned – those organized around a story whose actantial
structure can always be transposed, at the cost of more or less major adjustments – the case
of strictly non-narrative works, such as philosophical texts, remains a challenge. See Greimas
(1987 [1973])
7.  In the case of a novel, this chaotically includes the complexity of the plot, the treatment of
time, capturing the flux of consciousness, the singularity of style etc.
8.  See Serceau and Protopopoff (1989).
9.  On this question, see Christophe Caron (2012), as well as the website of the SACD (Société des
Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques), http://www.sacd.fr/Principes-generaux.198.0.html.
Accessed October 1 2015.
10. The team generously allowed me to attend one of their meetings in June 2014, to observe
the process.
11.  It was only in 2009 that SCELF, at the time directed by Roland Neidhard, opened an audiovisual
rights market at the Paris Salon du Livre. This was a moment when various large publishing
houses were attempting to impose a ‘unified contract’ on producers (and agents), such that
percentages earned would be calculated on the basis of the producers’ gross (and not net)
profits. Additionally, the amount paid on account would be indexed on the budget of the film
and the adaptation (and re-adaptation) rights would be ceded for the more or less long term.
A study on the French adaptation market carried out by the SCELF in 2014 is available online at
http://www.scelf.fr/etudes. Accessed October 1 2015.
12. See http://www.bs2bo.com/2/frontprodv2.3 Accessed October 1 2015.
13. Nathalie and Laure Kniazeff use this term rather than ‘adaptability’.
14. Interview with the author, January 2014.
15. Interview with the author, January 2014.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
 Studies in French Cinema   105

Notes on contributor
Jean-Louis Jeannelle is a Professor at the Université de Rouen and a member of the IUF (Institut
Universitaire de France). He is the author of Malraux, mémoire et métamorphose (Gallimard, 2006), Écrire
ses Mémoires au XXe siècle: déclin et renouveau (Gallimard/Bibliothèque des idées, 2008), Résistances du
roman: genèse de ‘Non’ d’André Malraux (CNRS Éditions, 2013), Films sans images: une histoire des scénarios
non-réalisés de ‘La Condition humaine’ (Seuil/Poétique, 2015) and Cinémalraux: essai sur l’œuvre d’André
Malraux au cinéma (Hermann, 2015). He is the co-editor, with Éliane Lecarme-Tabone, of the Cahier de
l’Herne ‘Simone de Beauvoir’ (2012) and is the Editor-in-Chief of the online journal Fabula-LHT (http://
www.fabula.org/lht).

Filmography
Intouchables, 2011, Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, France.
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Un amour de Swann, 1984, Volker Schlöndorff, Germany, France.

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