Novels To Movies

The film directors have started adapting literary classics for a long time. Literary classics attract every director, with its vivid plots, deep connotation and huge audience appeal. Since the novel Don Quixote’s plots are wonderful, characters vivid, in the film adaptation, it has great advantage. In addition, the novel has profound connotations, attracting a lot of directors inevitably. Through the movie, they showed different interpretations of Don Quixote. Every director’s work has distinctive character of their times and personal style. In this article, the author will study three different visions of the film Don Quixote from the former Soviet Union director Grigori Mikhailovich Kozintsev, American director Orson Wells and Chinese director Gain respectively. Through the comparative study, the author tried to learn the different backgrounds of times, ideology and directors’personal characteristics’importance in the movies adapted from literature.The author analyses the three different movies which directed by the three directors in the first three chapters. Kozintsev living in the middle of the Soviet Union in the20th century, his works has the special characteristics of the Soviet Union Times. The tragic hero of Don Quixote and the Duke’s family of the exploiting classes formed a sharp contrast. Kozintsev put Don Quixote’s spiritual up to a higher level, and enlarge the advantages of working people, shaping their images more positive. Orson Wells’ work was clipped from the pile of material by his assistant after his death, so the circumstances are not complete. But this movie is still rich in imagination, and strong Orson Wells’ personal style to perfect revealed in the works. Orson Wells thought Don Quixote was the embodiment of himself. He is full of enthusiasm to dream, like Don Quixote. This movie has strong personal color. The Chinese director Gain’s Don Quixote is very different from original work, changing many circumstances. It’s a typical commercial film. The film’s entertaining and commercial are far beyond the film itself.Chapter four talk about the differences and similarities among the three movies."Differences" mainly focuses on the interpretation of work’s connotation and the shaping characters. Living in different countries and times, the three directors have different understanding of the original story, so their characters are distinctive. Kozintsev’s Don Quixote is like a national hero much more. Orson Wells’full of adventure. Gain’s vision is more like a typical hero in martial novel. And the "similarities " are talked from the characters, continuation of the original plot and the recognition of Don Quixote’s spirit. The images of Don Quixote and Sancho in the original are impressive. The persistence of the characters is the continuation of the original. As a famous work in the world, there are many classic case is well known. If they had abandoned the classic, they should have abandoned the essence of the novel. Don Quixote’s important spirit connotation, spirit of adventure and enthusiasm of the dream, which is confirmed widely, was so inherited inevitably in the all three films.