Often, when the talk turns to cinema and we come across the phrase "based on the novel by," many devotees of the seventh art give a start (and even more so lovers of literature, to tell the truth), as if faced with some inexplicable secret or, worse still, an article of blind faith impossible to refute. And yet the history of cinema is rich with excellent examples: proof of this is the fact that there exists a very famous prize, the Academy Award, reserved for the best non-original screenplay, which refers precisely to that much-feared adaptation mentioned above.
As a lover of genre cinema, time and again I have heard pre-emptive criticism of any film adaptation of works held to be cult by all the fans of those literary genres sometimes deemed borderline, and yet more than worthy examples, if not outright masterpieces that have left an indelible mark on the history of cinema, are not lacking. A first, very famous example is probably Peter Jackson's Il Signore degli Anelli trilogy (whose beginnings as a B-movie director, given to splatter and gore, are worth recalling, with the two cornerstones of the genre Bad Taste, 1987, and Splatters – Gli schizzacervelli, 1992), drawn from the novels of the same name by J. R. R. Tolkien: the excellent work of philological fidelity carried out by the New Zealand director is undeniable, and indeed he continues along this path to this day, with excellent results, in the Hobbit trilogy.
But probably the film adaptation that has marked history and remains the most famous to this day is Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), drawn from Philip K. Dick's Il cacciatore di androidi (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 1968). When it comes to screen transpositions, Ridley Scott's is without doubt one of the most successful, if not still the finest, thanks also to the nothing short of obsessive work carried out by the director from South Shields in bringing to the screen one of the most visionary and, above all, most controversial science-fiction writers in history: consider, as simple evidence of the research behind the film, the almost maniacal use of analogue special effects (and the year of production should serve as neither a justification nor a dividing line regarding the use of this "artisanal" technique: think of the equally effective use of a primitive, to the eyes of today's viewer, CG in the contemporaneous Tron by Steven Lisberger) and the fact that today there exist as many as three versions of the film: the International Cut of 1982, the Director's Cut of 1992 and the more recent Final Cut of 2007, three pieces of testimony to how Scott, though more than thirty years have passed, cares about the fidelity of a work that is capital both in his own filmography and in the history of cinema and literature.
Philip K. Dick's work in particular should be taken as the epitome of how, when there is care and talent behind the camera, the film adaptation is not that impossible chimera to prise open. As noted just above, the literary output of the Chicago writer is about as "peculiar" and difficult as science-fiction literature has ever offered, and can be summed up, roughly and simplistically, as a blend of science fiction, psychoanalysis, intoxicated visionary flights born of the 1960s and inner demons that on the page possess an evocative and cathartic power with few equals: an output that has therefore rightly raised him to the rank of cult author and that, naturally, carries with it an incredible dose of high expectations whenever even a single one of his stories might be turned into images. If, in fact, on the page his words have the frustrating effect of catapulting us into a dystopian world that is hardly accommodating and disturbing down to the reader's most intimate level, a forerunner of that imagery known today as cyberpunk, it is an arduous task to carry all this to the screen and, above all, to convey to the viewer the tension inherent in his work.
And yet many have tried, and the results, though uneven, have often been satisfying. Besides the aforementioned Blade Runner, which occupies a place of its own in this particular ranking, think of Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly – Un Oscuro Scrutare (A Scanner Darkly, 2006), drawn from the novel Un oscuro scrutare (1977), where the use of the rotoplay technique manages to render the constant inner contradictions of the policeman Bob Arctor, as well as providing an effective device in the depiction of the shifting suit worn by the protagonist, of whose psychological tensions and drug addiction it is nothing but a metaphor.
Consider, too, Steven Spielberg's transposition Minority Report (2002), drawn from Dick's short story Rapporto di minoranza (1987). The film, though with evident limits, is nonetheless an effective and faithful adaptation: one might say that perhaps it dares too little, sacrificing the ethical theme proposed by the original story on the altar of the special effect, focusing more on the container, the futuristic city with its cutting-edge crime-fighting tools, than on the content, the dubious morality underlying pre-crime, that is, the capacity guaranteed by modern security systems to anticipate a crime before it has actually taken place. On the whole, then, Minority Report remains an enjoyable film, at times fascinating in the moment when the moral question mentioned above is raised.
Another adaptation drawn from Dick's prolific output that is worthy of mention and, perhaps, underrated, is Paul Verhoeven's Atto di Forza (Total Recall, 1992), which takes up directly the events narrated in the short story Ricordiamo per voi (We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, 1987). Here too the result is quite commendable: the film, which over the years has gained ever more credit among genre lovers, so much so that in time it earned cult status and became the subject of a 2012 remake (Len Wiseman's Total Recall – Atto di Forza, this one truly a slight thing compared with the model). Verhoeven's film, though faithful to the original story only in its first part, manages, thanks to the brazen use of avant-pop effects typical of the genre cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, to capture the central core of the story: the difficult relationship between memory and reality, and the degree to which real experience can coincide with imagined and/or remembered experience, and the degree to which, in the world imagined by Dick, an individual is willing to put himself on the line to recover a forgotten experience or to remember one never actually lived.
To conclude the discussion of the Chicago writer (on whose adapted works, and the impact these have had on the history of cinema, one would need to write a separate book) and of how his output continues to this day to occupy a prominent place in the cinematic imagination, let us remember that television too, now risen to the status of a cornerstone in viewers' collective imagination and at last free of its inferiority complex toward cinema, is likewise measuring itself against Philip K. Dick: the 2015 small-screen adaptation of La Svastica sul Sole (1962), a series that keeps the novel's original title, The Man in the High Castle. Here too the result is more than good, and one can safely state that the choice to bring the novel's alternate history to the small screen (a world in which Hitler and the Japanese defeated the Allies during the Second World War) proves to be the best one, especially as regards the dense web of political-fiction plotlines underlying the story.

Certainly, within this particular vein another most interesting experiment is represented by William S. Burroughs and his most famous novel, Il Pasto Nudo (The Naked Lunch, 1959): David Cronenberg's adaptation of the book dates to 1991. In this case we are faced with a project probably even more ambitious than the work of Philip K. Dick, especially if one thinks of the peculiar narrative structure of this work, built on the cut-up technique: the Canadian director rightly chooses not to take the road of a slavish restaging of the novel in all its fragmentariness, a risky and in some ways impossible challenge, and concentrates only on a few of the many episodes recounted in Il Pasto Nudo, adding to them Burroughs's biographical story, specifically the real circumstances that led the writer to meet Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in Tangier, who then convinced him to publish what would become his most famous work. Cronenberg is probably the best possible director capable of putting on screen the complex and intricate world that Burroughs presents to us in his novel, a world peopled by personifications of fear and animal tensions that only the author of films such as Scanners (id., 1981), Videodrome (id., 1983) or La Mosca (The Fly, 1986) could have brought off. Always interested in the representation of the body in all its aspects, Cronenberg, famous for his poetics of so-called body horror, succeeds in the feat of making Burroughs's visions real and tangible, and of conveying to the viewer the disgust and the fears born of the hallucinated mind of the protagonist, the writer Bill Lee.
In this quick and far from exhaustive overview it is worth pausing on a medium that has recently invaded cinema screens with mixed fortunes: the comic book. Setting aside the adaptations drawn from so-called ongoing series, which for reasons inherent in their periodical nature are hard to propose in film form (even though the recent, excellent transpositions of series such as Deadpool or I Guardiani della Galassia, or Sin City by Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller and Quentin Tarantino, are all fine examples of how, in the end, a cinematic route for the "floppies" is possible), the films drawn from graphic novels and self-contained series deserve a quick glance. By now the films that take as their subject some of the most important titles in the history of comics are extremely numerous: uneven though they are in quality, it is worth recalling, by way of example, some of the most famous, such as 300 (id., Zack Snyder, 2007), drawn from Frank Miller's graphic novel of the same name; A History of Violence (id., David Cronenberg, 2005), which takes up the events of Una Storia di Violenza by John Wagner of 1997; Persepolis (id., 2007) by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud (drawn from Persepolis. Histoire d'une femme insoumise by Satrapi herself, 2000-2003); Kick-Ass (id., Matthew Vaughn, 2010), an adaptation of the miniseries of the same name by Mark Millar that appeared on newsstands between 2008 and 2010; the pop explosion of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (id., 2010) by Edgar Wright, based on Scott Pilgrim (2004-2010) by Bryan Lee O'Malley; and above all the iconic Il Corvo – The Crow (The Crow, Alex Proyas, 1994), based on the events narrated by James O'Barr between 1988 and 1989 and a genuine trailblazer for a new and more mature, one might even say revolutionary, way of seeing comics on screen.
The film transpositions drawn from manga, Japanese comics, would deserve a discussion of their own, for they have often yielded astonishing results (in some ways even superior to the works that inspired them): one thinks of Akira (1988) by Katsuhiro Ōtomo, the latter the author of both the comic and the animated film, and Ghost in the Shell (Kōkaku Kidōtai, Mamoru Oshii, 1995), an adaptation of the manga of the same name by Masamune Shirow published between 1989 and 1990, whose cultural impact is undeniable and which, in the years following its release, became an avowed source of inspiration for much of science-fiction cinema.
But when it comes to graphic novels it is impossible not to cite the one who is perhaps the most important author in the field, namely Alan Moore. It was in 2005 that James McTeigue brought to the screen the masterpiece V per Vendetta (V for Vendetta, 1982-1985): a film that imposed worldwide the figure of V, a masked protagonist and solitary revolutionary in a militarized, totalitarian society that so recalls that of George Orwell's 1984. Though not the perfect transposition, the film nonetheless does justice to a comic of extremely political content, and had the merit of introducing to the wider public the charismatic figure of the protagonist V and the values he carries (perhaps even too much so, to tell the truth, given the cannibalistic marketing operation that engulfed the film, with its famous masks now become a symbol and reification of a sentiment emptied of its original intentions).

Judgment must instead be suspended on Watchmen (id., Zack Snyder, 2009), another work sprung from the brilliant mind of Alan Moore. The film in itself is even pleasant and engaging, but it must be said that in this case the comparison with the original source falls irremediably in the comic’s favour: Watchmen is in fact too complex and layered a work (not by chance ranked by “Time” magazine among the 100 best novels of the twentieth century) to lend itself to an adaptation that of necessity takes the form of a simplification, a compendium, of events far more intricate and charged with meanings and interpretations that in this case cinema will never manage to transpose faithfully; one should also bear in mind that the direction is the work of an “artisan” of film such as Zack Snyder, too unbalanced toward the pursuit of the special effect and the spectacularization of the shot for a subject whose strengths lie instead in contextualization and in the rewriting of the superhero canon in general and the comics canon in particular (not by chance there exists an Ultimate Cut of the film, 215 minutes long, which tries to complete and broaden the complexity of the picture presented).
It must be said that, as with all the other films based on his works, Alan Moore completely dissociated himself from the production, obtaining that he not be credited as the author of the film’s source material: after all, the “Bard of Northampton” is a complex and prickly figure (it would have been astonishing had he claimed otherwise), and in some respects his judgment is even shareable, given the problematic nature of his work. The fact remains that some authors have had the audacity to measure themselves against a difficult model in order to translate into images works that have allowed comics to compete on equal terms with great literature (after all, is the comic not visual literature?).
Certainly, in all this multiform fresco there is no wish to assert the superiority of one language over another or the equivalence of the two, still less that transposition amounts to an infallible equation; and indeed the history of the genre does not lack glaring errors, if not outright masterpieces in reverse, in which ugliness seems to rise to the level of a stylistic signature.
An exemplary case is the arc of Uwe Boll. Moving to another medium, hugely widespread but perhaps cinematically undervalued, namely the video game industry, the German director has adapted some of the most famous story-driven video games (one above all: Alone in the Dark, 2005) so badly as to earn the hardly coveted reputation of “Worst director in history”, even dethroning in this particular ranking the cult author Ed Wood (while gaining, at the same time, a sizeable following of admirers who have elected him a champion of B-movie cinema). In all fairness one should consider, in this specific case, the laughable financial resources placed at Boll’s disposal for his films; the fact remains that his works inspired by video games are embarrassing to say the least (and yet Boll, when free of non-original screenplays, has often shown himself to be at the very least a dignified genre director, as in the cases of Rampage, 2009, or Auschwitz, 2011).
Again: La leggenda degli uomini straordinari (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, 2003), to use a euphemism, does not do the slightest justice to yet another masterpiece by Alan Moore, La Lega degli Straordinari Gentlemen (1999): suffice it to say that the director, Stephen Norrington, never went behind the camera again after this unfortunate experience, and that Sean Connery, the film’s lead, retired from the screen for good: whether it was the fault of the dreadful reviews or rather a life choice, we are not given to know; without doubt, however, this film represents an indelible stain on the Scotsman’s honourable filmography.
Returning to literature, the cases of box-office flops and, above all, of terrible adaptations are legion. A very weak Will Smith in Io Sono Leggenda (I Am Legend, Francis Lawrence, 2007) debases in little more than 100 minutes the post-apocalyptic atmosphere that distinguishes Richard Matheson’s novel of the same name from 1954 (better, then, our own L’Ultimo Uomo sulla Terra by Ubaldo Ragona from 1964, with Vincent Price), despite a very healthy box-office return (which, mind you, will never constitute a measure of a work’s quality).
Worse still befell Douglas Adams’s Guida Galattica per Autostoppisti (1979). In 2005 the book was brought to the big screen by Garth Jennings: the result is the worst that could be obtained and stands as the example to keep in mind of how a film transposition of a book should not be done, especially when dealing with a cult work such as Adams’s novel and everything that entails. As Paolo Zelati noted at the time in “Nocturno” no. 38 of September 2005, the film is «very far from the grotesque/surreal climate so beloved of the countless admirers of Douglas Adams’s book of the same name», marked by a strong narrative incoherence and, above all, stripped of nearly all those cult lines, and thus of the irony, that made Guida Galattica per Autostoppisti a one-off in its genre: in short, a film deprived of its very essence.

At this point it is worth closing this survey with a most singular title, both as regards the book and as regards its film counterpart: Kurt Vonnegut’s Mattatoio n.5 o La Crociata dei Bambini (Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, 1969), which George Roy Hill brought to the cinema in 1972 under the title Mattatoio 5 (Slaughterhouse-Five). Here too it is wise to suspend judgment and consider the film as a product in its own right, freeing oneself of the inevitable preconceptions that come from comparison with a source which, in this case, represents a capital work in the history of literature. Even so, the film is perfectly watchable, managing, in part, to render the peculiar condition of Bill Pilgrim and his condemnation of armed conflict, and to convey that sense of bewilderment and that black humour which distinguish Vonnegut’s poetics. As said, there is no comparison whatsoever with the book, but the film, in the skilled hands of a director as capable as Hill (winner only two years later of the Oscar for best director with La Stangata), is the most credible and closest approach to a work that is, in this writer’s judgment, among the most important of the twentieth century. Testimony, then, that the film adaptation, when carried out with the proper care and the proper awareness of models at times almost impossible to transpose, is anything but a reckless challenge lost from the start.

Marco Ramacci. A graduate in Modern Literature, he deals with contemporary culture (cinema, art, literature, music and comics), in particular the so-called underground cultures, and with communication and Social Media Marketing. Since July 2016 he has been editor-in-chief of Studi Umbri.