In discussing the change of medium in adapting literature to film, Linda Hutcheon writes that film adaptations ‘add bodies, voices, sound, music, props, costumes, architecture and so on.’ (2006; 37) In creating an auditory and visual rendering of a literary source, all of these elements are, by necessity, either displayed for the audience, or conspicuously absent. However, few films show the process of adapting a story from an initial source to a new medium. Although there are exceptions, such as Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002) and Hamlet 2 (2008; dir. Andrew Fleming), Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm (2005) contains a narrative that focuses on the process of adaptation that is complex and richly problematic in ways unequalled by the bulk of its industrial contemporaries.
Considering the vast popularity of the fairy tales of The Brothers Grimm, there is a stylistic, formal, and narrative interplay that occurs between the viewer and the film, as the film consistently undercuts and alters the known tales that comprise the source material. In this way, the narrative reverses the approach to adaptation resulting in a cyclical process of adaptation and alteration, often featuring a falsification between media, and offering a form of feedback, where the viewer perceives the methods of adaptation as moving in opposite directions simultaneously.
This article focuses on The Brothers Grimm and attempts to engage with its unique approach to adaptation. Different theories of adaptation are explored to demonstrate how The Brothers Grimm functions as adaptation, in what ways the film depicts fabrication within the process of adaptation, and in what ways this approach to narrative depiction of adaptation and adaptation itself provides a significant source of pleasure within the film. This argument also aims to draw attention to The Brothers Grimm as a film that is potentially fruitful for analysis.
Hutcheon, L. (2006) A Theory of Adaptation, Routledge; London
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