ADAPTATION IN THE SILENT PERIOD
The earliest narrative films were rarely more than three to
five minutes long, gradually extending to approximately
twenty minutes by 1910, and then increasing steadily to
a standard feature length of ninety to one hundred
twenty minutes by the end of the silent era. Partly to
avoid copyright payments and partly to exploit audience
familiarity with already existing subject matter at a time
when a coherent story could rarely be told on film without the use of copious intertitles or the services of a
lecturer within the auditorium to explain the plot, the
first adaptations were almost invariably taken from classic
authors such as Shakespeare, Dickens, George Eliot
(1819–1880), and Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) in
Britain, and, on the Continent, E´mile Zola (1840–
1902), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832),
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Alexander Pushkin (1799–
1837), and others. The sheer length of most of these
works, however, prohibited any attempt at completeness,
and standard practice was to choose well-known extracts
or scenes that were relatively self-sufficient, such as the
‘‘Dotheboys School’’ scenes from Nicholas Nickleby or
the shipwreck scene from The Tempest. As films gradually
increased in length, valiant attempts were made to
squeeze the whole plot of a novel or film into a running
time of around twenty minutes. Popular titles adapted in
this early period included Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903),
Frankenstein (1910, and much filmed since, though
never, despite such titles as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
[1994], with much authenticity), Robinson Crusoe
(1913), Faust (1915), and Don Quixote (1915).
Technically, most of these early films were static—
filmed from a fixed camera position, usually in long shot,
and presenting action in tableau-like form. By the 1910s,
however, cinematic technique had become much more
sophisticated, with extensive camera movement, fuller
use of screen space and camera angle and distance, a
more naturalistic acting style, and creative editing that
enhanced understanding of plot and character rather than
simply moving the action from one setting to another. It
became possible to tell stories on the screen with more
completeness and complexity, though the desire to give
the young medium cultural respectability led to continued reliance on Shakespeare and Dickens in particular.
Soon, however, more recent ‘‘best-selling’’ works began
to appear on the screen, such as Mrs. Henry Wood’s
(1814–1887) melodrama East Lynne, filmed as the first
British six-reeler (sixty to seventy minutes) in 1913, and,
more controversially, D. W. Griffith’s (1875–1948)
adaptation of Thomas Dixon’s (1864–1946) The
Clansman, filmed as The Birth of a Nation, one of the
longest American features to date, in 1915. By the 1920s,
such works predominated, with adaptations of now
largely forgotten writers such as ‘‘Ouida’’ (1839–1908),
Marie Corelli (1855–1924), Sir Hall Caine (1853–
1931), E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866–1946), and the
‘‘sensational’’ novels of such writers as Michael Arlen
(1895–1956), whose The Green Hat was filmed as
A Woman of Affairs in 1928, starring Greta Garbo
(1905–1990); while the endlessly prolific Edgar Wallace
(1875–1932) may well hold the record for being the
most frequently filmed English-speaking author ever.
In Europe the epics of the Polish novelist Henryk
Sienkiewicz (1846–1916), such as Quo Vadis? (filmed in
1912), helped to provide material for the influential
Italian historical dramas, and the novels of Selma
Lagerlo¨f (1858–1940) were crucial sources for the great
films of Victor Sjo¨stro¨m (1879–1960) and Mauritz
Stiller (1883–1928) in Sweden, particularly the former’s
Ko¨rkarlen (The Phantom Carriage, 1921) and the latter’s
Go¨sta Berlings saga (1924). In France Jean Renoir’s
(1894–1979) Nana (1926), Jacques Feyder’s (1885–
1948) The ´re `se Raquin (1928) and Marcel L’Herbier’s
(1888–1979) L’argent (Money, 1929) were all based on
works by the still controversial Zola. L’Herbier also
filmed Luigi Pirandello’s (1867–1936) Feu Mattias
Pascal (The Late Mathias Pascal, 1925) and Feyder
adapted both the best-seller L’atlantide (Lost Atlantis,
1920) by Pierre Benoˆıt (1886–1962) and Crainquebille
(Bill, 1922) by the then prestigious Anatole France
(1844–1924). What is probably the greatest French film
of the 1920s, however, was a different sort of adaptation:
every word of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s (1889–1968) La
Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928)
was scrupulously based on the original transcripts of
Joan’s trial, and the austerity of the filmmaking style
exactly matched the sparseness of the dialogue.