To Whose Self Be True? Students Look at The Turn of the Screw and Its Film Adaptations

Following an introductory survey of the relevant literature, the essay examines how a group of MA students tackle the issue of what makes a successful film adaptation. Surveying their written responses, the study identifies some preconceptions that participants in a novel-to-film course bring to the comparative assessment of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents and Ben Bolt’s The Turn of the Screw, adaptations of Henry James’s classic novella. The essay considers which key concepts in today’s critical discourses surface in the student essays and which remain ignored, as it observes how the binaries of author/director vs. audience, closure vs. openness, and fidelity vs. creative independence are activated. Finally, the question is addressedhow students deal with the double bind of being invited to honor such mutually exclusive injunctions as the expectation that they embrace a nonhierarchic approach to the film-literature nexus and the obligation for them to prefer multivalent over monological interpretations. (ÁF)