I have long pined for the day when I can integrate films into my English classrooms. Pining might be too strong a word, but I have at least wanted to since I imagined becoming a teacher. Film adaptations can accomplish a few goals. I will focus on three: Explaining the text and its features (like humor, for example), creating an alternate text with altered/tweaked themes, or moving the action to a new place and time to say something a bit different about society.
Of course, we'll start at the very beginning (a very good place to start, Maria would say). I think film adaptations can help explain what exactly is going on in a difficult text, and I expect to utilize such scaffolding when I teach Shakespeare. Specifically, I would use this to clear up much of the humor (such as Act II, Scene 1 of The Tempest, which is loaded with footnotes about how it is supposed to be funny). Also, I think hearing Shakespeare spoken clears up many confusions, and the advantage of such clarification outweighs the risk that a line is likely misinterpreted or stretched too far. Rarely would I want to present the entire film version, but specific scenes would be useful to show in class.
Second, I present the recent film adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo (2002), which is wonderful in its way but vastly divergent from Dumas' novel. It maintains the time setting and the characters, but it takes Edmund on such a shorter, less-complicated journey (and adds the King of the Moment bit that I just love) that it can't really be fairly compared to Dumas' work. What I have not seen is the much earlier 1934 film adaptation (which V likes so much in V for Vendetta). Showing portions of both films could be fruitful in illustrating how differently a director/writer can choose to adapt a text to the screen. Also, the themes of friendship/betrayal/family and all that are presented slightly differently, and it could be a valuable experience for students to compare the subtleties in each.
Finally, I generally enjoy the time/setting shift that some films will do, even under a new name. Shakespeare would be an easy fit here (such as Ten Things I Hate About You (1999) as a foil for The Taming of the Shrew), but there are many other worthy examples. Apocalypse Now (1979) comes to mind, and simply from my own memory of how boggling Heart of Darkness by Conrad was to me, viewing portions of the classic film could really shed light on the themes of both (and it would be a good lesson in history repeating itself).
All this would be made easier if I was able to spend time discussing film's divergence from print texts in aspects such as audience, purpose, authorship, politics and so on. We did a bit of this during Intersession, as we compared text, film and musical versions of Cinderella, though if given time I would have loved to talk more about each genre.
As far as full-on adaptations, that can get really tricky in terms of time. I would nearly always offer it as an option to students, but depending on technology access and film-making skill, outside a film class I would not require students to create such projects. But it certainly can be done, and I remember doing so a couple times in high school, specifically with Frankenstein, which some friends and I placed in a modern setting (2001, that is) and trimmed down to 35 minutes. But that took a lot of time (it probably should have taken more, because the film is weighed down by long speeches … but I digress) and it so happened that we had some experience with video production. Anyhow, to reiterate: I think it is a valuable activity, creating film adaptations, but the scaffolding for doing it well would not fit within the confines of an English classroom, so I do not expect I would require it any time soon.
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