Creative Treason Faithful Basis

The French Lieutenant’s Woman, written by John Fowles, is well known as an outstanding classical literature. When the writing was adapted and produced to the screen, Pinter and Reisz followed such principle, not insisting on the original ideas of the work, also developing and reforming imaginable ways to display these ideas and tones. It is a quite complex process that dramatizing the book into images. However, in the film, the dramatist and the director fully motivated every factors and used every methods in participating the production, finished smooth transition from literal words to screen scripts. Thus, the movie achieved a great success.On the one hand, for the purpose of being in accordance with the spirit of the original work, Pinter and Reisz worked hardly in adapting, which can be seen as follows:firstly, strictly sticking to the original mainline of the story, in order to display the vital intention of this fiction, they replaced a lot of plots that can hardly be represented visually with the plots which are suitable to be used to combine the sounds and pictures; secondly, the film well inherited the sense of freedom from existentialism, which can be clearly seen from the portraying of the characters such as Sarah and Charles; in addition, Pinter and Reisz used the Montage to break the unitary story line up, eliminating the boundaries between reality and imagination and endowing it with the features of post-modernism, which is in accordance with the artistic characteristic of the book.On the other hand, the success of the adapting can be attributed to the deviation from the original work. This can be seen from two aspects:firstly, the characters were reshaped so as to adapt to the relatively small space and time capacity of the film; secondly, in order to expose the brilliant multi-possible endings, framewise, the movie utilized an anti-tradition "embedded structure".By and large, Pinter and Reize carried out a "Creative Treason", faithful to the original work, and went beyond it. By contrast and comparing the novel and the film, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, we can witness the common features in different artistic categories. At the same time, discover the significance of their own, thus, promoting their development toward a better direction.