The repetition must be, however, accompanied by creation, by a reinvention of the familiar world and shaping it into something new. According to Hutcheon, the real comfort lies in the experience of tensions between old and new, “in the simple act of almost but not quite repeating, in the revisiting of a theme with variations”.10 Watching the film that resonates with echoes of a well known world, that emerges from a confluence of pleasurable memories and new ideas, is like prolonging the myth that lies at the origins of our being and does not cease to intrigue us and give us force. The appeal of adaptations is therefore rooted in the desire to witness a rebirth of this myth. The different filmic versions of one single book are all manifestations of the same wish to revisit “an old friend”. The power which attracts the filmmakers is the desire to recreate and add some freshness to the familiar world. The power which draws the audience to an adaptation is the possibility offered by the film to see and hear what they imagined and learned to love in their own imagination, the wish to enter in a more sensual way into the beloved world created by the book.
The following lines will explore some other reasons for the enormous attraction of making and watching adaptations.11 One of them lies in the urge to create. Being fascinated by a writer’s creation, filmmakers may find pleasure in sharing the aesthetic experience by completing the literary work and stilling their insatiable curiousity to find out how this “unwholesome” work can be transformed to the filmic medium. Cinematic adaptations blur the boundaries between different media, they force the filmmakers to penetrate the surface of a written text, to read out what lies beneath this surface and recreate it in the visual and aural medium.