film as art form

Overview

please respond to tajon. with 170 words

Chapter 7 and the podcast this week both discuss how dramatization functions, and I was left with a new perspective on why some stories are better suited to be adapted in different mediums than others. Simply put, dramatization is the process of about a novel, a real event, or even a piece of theatre, and making it into something that can be acted out and viewed. It's not simply about copying the story onto a stage or a screen, it's about determining how to demonstrate emotion, conflict, and meaning through action, dialogue and visuals rather than narration. Adaptation theory looks at this as a creative process, not just a copying, as the reteller has to interpret it and make some decisions on how to retell it (Oza, 2024). That's consistent with the podcast, which stated that dramatization requires both writers to know what to leave in, what to take out, and what to embellish for the listener to feel something in real time as opposed to reading it.put

The thing I found most intriguing, however, was the discussion over direction in adaptation—the fact that it is easier to take a play and make a film of it, than a film and make a play of it. If you're thinking about it, and using action and sci-fi as an example, it makes sense. Theatre has physical limitations of space and budget and a play is already developed around dialogue, character interaction and a somewhat limited setting. It's actually quite a good approximation of film: Take a play and turn it into a visual and aural medium basically—it's not that different from adapting a play into a film (Literary Latitude, 2025). That same core framework of dialogue can be extrapolated and develop into a much larger project, with actual locations, camera moves and effects added to it to make it feel bigger.

It's much more difficult to move in the opposite direction, particularly when it comes to genres such as action and science fiction. These genres rely a lot on the dramatic elements, such as explosions or spaceships or quick chase scenes or alien worlds—anything that can't really be done live in a theatre. A play is bound by a stage, a crew of actors, no CGI (at least in the original) etc., so an adaptation would need to find symbolic or minimalist ways to represent the things film shows literally. Way bigger creative challenge, hence the rarity of movie adaptations of stage productions, particularly in the visual scale oriented genres, as opposed to stage productions being adapted into movies (Oza, 2024). Hence, sci-fi and action films are never made into stage productions while stage plays are made into blockbusting films quite often.

References

Literary Latitude. (2025, February 1). Adaptation theory in film studies. https://literarylatitude.com/2025/02/01/adaptation...

Oza, P. (2024). Adaptation theories in literature: Shakespeare into films and cinema. SSRN. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_i...