Introduction: From Sight to Insight

Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration's attention to perception as the meaningful grounds of grasping adaptation and appreciating it as an aesthetic experience has firmly emphasized the critical value of attending to the materiality of screen adaptation. In doing so, this book has continued to challenge any claims that it is only novels that are conceptual and complex works that appeal to the reader's imagination, while screen adaptations in their sensual density are merely grasped by perception, and are impoverished or simplistic versions of previous material. But as the previous three chapters have shown, this is far from accurate: in their appeal to the eye, ear, and in their very tangibility, screen adaptations vivify their source material. In doing so, whether an adaptation's sensuous contours enhance or transform their source material is, in the first, grasped by the spectator's own materiality and their capacity to translate the senses into cognitive sense. Therefore, far from perception nullifying its activity, the sensing capabilities of the lived-body actively grounds imagination. This chapter seeks to flesh out the relationships between the ‘embodied imagination’ and the appreciation and evaluation of screen adaptation.