Abstract:
At the beginning of scholarship on film adaptation, critics dismissed adapted
films as watered down versions of their literary antecedents. Scholars such as
Woof (1950) argued that the films were reductive of the supremacy of the texts,
and that films depended on the popularity of literary texts in order to gain
credibility. This fidelity-betrayal aesthetic would see adapted films reviled and
disregarded as fodder only fit for the lower classes of the society. In further
arguments that were logocentric (aiming to vouch for the supremacy of the
text and dismiss the dependence of the adapted film), films adapted from
literature were judged to be less intellectually stimulating, and born out of a
lack of ingenuity on the part of the filmmakers to create new works of art,
completely autonomous in their right (Cartmell, et al. (2008). Using the case of
Things Fall Apart (the literary text and the adapted film) this paper,
however, seeks to counter this notion and rationalize that in adapting the film
from Achebe’s text, the filmmaker succeeds in bringing the story of Okonkwo
and Umuofia back home – to the people among whom it originally happened.
The main argument in this paper is hinged on the understanding that while
the text is discriminative, allowing only the schooled members of the Igbo
population to read their story, the film is more accommodating. This is made
possible because the cinematic medium has the ability to reach a larger section
of the Igbo people who do not have a reading chance or interpretive ability to
interact with the narrative in the literary form and the meanings thereof
