The Hobbit Book Vs Movie

A comparative study to find out the differences between novels/books and their film adaptations

Abstract: From a producer’s point of view, the desire to bring books to the movie theatre is easy to understand given that most box-office successes are movies based on books. An example is The Untouchables (2011), based on the novel Le Second Souffle and inspired by the life of Philippe Pozzo di Borgo. 21.4 million Tickets were sold in France. More recently, in December 2012 The Hobbit, directed by Peter Jackson and based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s book Bilbo the Hobbit, was viewed by more than 4 million people in France (Première Magazine, 10/01/2013). From a publisher’s point of view, the adaptation of a novel can regenerate interest in the book

Both use signifiers to connote a world of meanings, the signified. The word and the frame, the signifiers in literature and film respectively, are both visual as they are both perceived with the eye. When a word is read, it refers to or creates a mental image or concept that signifies meaning. When a frame is watched, the effect is immediate—here the image that signifies meaning is not mental but directly presented to the eye. Thus, it might be said that the filmmaker’s task is easier. It could also in one sense narrow the scope of the medium, if the signifier in the medium was too explicit to unravel the possibilities of the signified. However, it is argued that a cinematic frame can provide for more information than the more ambiguous word. A film speaks through its frames just as literature through words. Besides, in film each angle, each cut, could make multiple significations. Juxtaposing shots make them collide and it is from the collision that meaning is produced. The meaning produced through montage is further enriched by devices like music and acting. Verbal signs work conceptually whereas cinematic signs work directly, sensually and

Eisenstein provided one of the practical explorations into the relation between film and literature in an essay entitled ‘Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today’. His main point was the manner in which Griffith’s montage techniques are indebted to Dickens’ use of close-up detail in his novels. Griffith adapted Tennyson in Enoch Arden (1911), Browning in Pippa Passes and Jack London in The Call of the Wild (1908). In The Cricket of the Hearth (1909), he adapted Dickens who inspired him to use parallel editing, the close-ups montage and even dissolve, which gained the Griffith the title “Father of the Film Technique” (Boyum 3). William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway can be considered the other two cinematic writers of the twentieth century. Practically, every resource of modern film—the close-up, the medium shot, the long shot, the moving camera, parallel editing, referential cross cutting, colour, and even sound recording can be seen in their