If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes

Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration draws its name from Susan Sontag's ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, an essay that considers screen adaptation as a phenomenon in all senses of the word. Although discussing the particular case of science fiction novels adapted for the screen, Sontag's article nonetheless evokes the stigma that tends to be attached more generally to screen adaptation that concerns the difference between modes of aesthetic engagement. Reading a novel requires imagination and cognition, while, as Sontag puts it, in lieu of ‘an intellectual workout, [these films] supply something that novels can never provide—sensuous elaboration’. Yet Sontag's words do not comfortably sit with my experience of many film adaptations that certainly do demand an ‘intellectual workout’—and more— of its spectator. Indeed, adaptation theorists have adequately challenged the assumption that the experience of literary and cinematic arts might demand different responses of their beholder, that literature requires imaginative engagement, for instance, while a film simply appeals to the senses. In doing so, these scholars have overthrown any hierarchies of value that are implicitly (or explicitly) formed in such categorizations: that novels are complex, demanding, and therefore worthy, while films are dismissed as facile entertainments, with the particular form of the film adaptation seemingly furthest removed from the realm of art due to its fundamentally derivative nature.

I build on this scholarship to further advocate that film adaptations certainly do involve an ‘intellectual workout’.