SOURCE: Gelder, Ken. “Jane Campion and the Limits of Literary Cinema.” In Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text, edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, pp. 157-71. London: Routledge, 1999.

In the following essay, Gelder explores the relationship between literature and the cinema via an analysis of the movie The Piano, noting that even though the film was not an adaptation, it elicited critical analysis that designated it as “literary.”

Jane Campion's film The Piano (1993) poses some interesting problems in terms of the relationship between literature and cinema. We can begin by noting that the film itself attracted the kind of sustained analytical criticism which worked to designate it as ‘literary’, even though it was not actually an adaptation. This meant that when the novel-of-the-film appeared a year later—co-written by Jane Campion and Kate Pullinger—it could only be identified as somehow less literary than the...