Beyond Historicity: Aesthetic Authenticity in Cinematic Adaptations of Non-/Anti-Realist Fiction

Abstract The literature on authenticity in adaptation studies seems to be focused almost entirely on adaptations of either historical and (auto-)biographical literary texts or non-fiction narratives. The usual case studies are often generically limited to heritage and historical films, period dramas, documentaries, and biopics, to the exclusion of non-/anti-realist genres. However, there is more to adaptation than empirically and/or historically verifiable source texts, which warrants an examination of authenticity in adaptations of fantastical, science-fictional, and gothic fictions away from the fixation on historicity and veracity. This paper proposes an aesthetic (metadiscursive and experiential) outlook on authenticity in genre adaptations, namely George Miller’s adaptation of A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022); Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’, Arrival (2016); and the different adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Metadiscursively, authenticity depends on the self-consciousness of artistic representation, the extent to which the source text and its cinematic adaptation acknowledge their status as fictional narratives and their representational, medium-specific limits and potentials. Experientially, authenticity is judged by the degree of audience immersion in the storyworld, the feeling (generated by diegetic techniques) that what they are watching is experientially plausible despite the implausibility of the genre itself. Without lapsing in excessive realism and verbatim fidelity, an authentic adaptation is heedful of the paradoxes surrounding authenticity itself in any fictional narrative, attentive to their aesthetic and thematic treatment in the source text, aware of the representational affordances of the literary and cinematic media, and capable of offering the audience an immersive experience.