Film adaptations of Thomas Hardy's Jude the obscure and The mayor of Casterbridge

Abstract

Having studied Communications for two years before opting to read for an Honours degree in English, I grew interested in the medium of film and its potential in creating works of artistic value. Attending lectures on film adaptation of literary works made me aware that reading novels, short stories, plays and even poems through a filmic interpretation enriched my own interpretation of a number of texts, and inspired me to combine the two media and study their relationship for my dissertation. Thomas Hardy is well-known for the visual descriptions which characterise his works, and filmmakers such as John Schlesinger (Far From the Madding Crowd, 1967) and Roman Polanski (Tess, 1978) exploit Hardy's "cinematic" style in creating their own film versions. I chose to analyse the way Hardy's visual approach, among other stylistic and thematic concerns, was adapted in other productions, which have generated less criticism than the two films mentioned above. Hence, I chose Michael Winterbottom's Jude ( 1996), which is an adaptation of Hardy' s last novel, Jude the Obscure ( 1896), and the BBC's 1978 television series of The Mayor of Caster bridge ( 1886). My dissertation analyses the adaptive techniques adopted by the filmmakers, and gauges their success as film adaptations. In chapter one I provide a brief account of several criteria proposed by various film theoreticians in order to assess the wo1th of an adaptation. In chapter two I analyse the way Michael Winterbottom transposes the themes and style to the screen in terms of sight and sound. Chapter three deals with the BBC production in a similar way. However, since this film adaptation is a television series, there are other aspects that are taken into consideration. In the final chapter, I comment more generally on how successful the adaptations are, and by referring both to the positive and negative points in the films, I conclude that Jude is the stronger.