After decades of theorising intertextuality and authorship, the notion of fidelity would seem to have lost all currency as an appropriate criterion for analysing film adaptations. With films often based on literary texts that themselves tend to be adaptations of some other source material, simply comparing a film version to its literary original is considered an unproductive and theoretically flawed operation. Instead of assuming that a film adaptation adapts ‘exactly one text a piece’, or necessarily seeks to reproduce, on its own terms, some deeper essence of the source text, we are urged to conceive of adaptations in terms of intertextual dialogism, that is as artistic texts that, just like the literary sources on which they are nominally based, are situated in the ‘entire matrix of communicative utterances’.

Paradoxically, however, attacks on the fidelity criterion have never stopped, as if the study of film adaptations continues to adhere to a narrowly one-to-one comparative model. Thomas Leitch, for example, lists fidelity as one of the most stubborn fallacies in adaptation studies and explains its persistence as a corollary of the ‘appeal to anteriority’. Classical texts are valued more than modern texts, Leitch explains, especially among scholars who received their training in literary studies, and this invites comparisons between film and book in which the former is always found wanting. For this reason even Robert Stam, a proponent of the intertextual approach to film adaptation, has been accused of relapsing into the fidelity argument. According to Leitch, Stam ‘fetishises novelists and novels’ because he ‘wants to use film to look at literature’. Similar comments have been made about Brian MacFarlane’s influential study Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (1996) and George Bluestone’s pioneering Novels into Film (1957) even if these authors themselves were highly suspicious of the fidelity criterion.

Perhaps the repetitiveness of this anti-fidelity rhetoric demonstrates that the concept of fidelity itself is not entirely useless. After all, comparing a film adaptation to its literary original is an intuitive thing to do and, as long as we remain alert to other factors that may have shaped the end product and its reception (political context, commercial interests, cultural sensitivities), the (one-to-one) comparative model still has much to offer.