The soul of the moving picture (1924)

Film Adaptation 151 all, for he feels that the author has gone about his business with excessive independence and with too little concern for his excellent criticism. From all of this it should be manifest that it is rare that a good adaptation is the result of a single effort. Adaptation is a slow and complicated process. There must be untiring revision — with the disagreeable result that a manuscript promised for and by a certain date is not ready at the stipulated time. It is much better all around when the author lives himself, as it were, into the milieu he plans to film, becomes perfectly familiar with it, if he was not familiar with it when he began, creates characters with whom he is on speaking terms, and fashions a fate such as he himself has experienced. It is dangerous to adapt a great work to the film. The adaptation of the Marriage of Figaro showed the baroque curlicues, the confusions, the harmless malevolences of Beaumarchais's work (which in the opera are quite unessential and the transparency of which appeal to us to-day as altogether childish) ; we thought of Mozart and sighed. And Hamlet! With Asta Nielsen! Without Shakespeare ! Adapted "after an old saga !" Why that was merely and after all a stolen creation. The living poet may decide for himself whether