"A new medium always alters the nature of what is presented". Discuss in relation to a film, or other, version of a literary text.
A new medium will always offer new ideas to a literary text due to the interpretation involved in creating the film or stage performance. Two people reading the same book will inevitably finish with different ideas about what has happened, what the important aspects are and whether they thought it was a good book or not. When creating a film from a book, the director will emphasise what he sees as the more important sections and the images he created when reading the book could be wholly different to the viewers of that film and therefore, for some viewers at least, the nature of what is being represented will be very different to their ideas of the text.
One the most eagerly anticipated films that has been released recently is The Lord of The Rings, written by J. R. R. Tolkein and directed by Peter Jackson. The Lord of The Rings consists of three books and when making the film, Jackson decided to stick to that format, making three films, however he still had to decide which sections he felt were important enough to leave in and which he could take out. It can be almost guaranteed that another director would have made an entirely different account of the book, both leaving in and taking out different sections, and so altering the nature of what is presented. A cartoon film of the first book was made approximately fifteen years before Jackson's version was released and many of the characters were portrayed in a very different light to the more recent film. One example of this is the character of Legolas who, in the book, rides Frodo to safety when confronted by the Dark Riders. In Jackson's film, it is the character of Arwen who does this, not Legolas, and as a result the film contains a strong love story, between Arwen and Aragorn, which is not seen in the book until the last two books and even then, is a background event.
