Literary Adaptation in Iranian Cinema

Literary works are valuable sources that manifest in various forms in different artistic areas. One of these areas is where literary texts are used in order to create films, a procedure known as adaptation. Adaptation here means using a written text partially or fully in order to create a visual text, and several scholars maintain that this procedure takes place in three ways, namely free, faithful, and word-for-word. Other approaches have also been put forward. The current research looks at adaptation, focusing on both the narrative text and the visual text. Considering the visual text, three approaches to cinematic adaptation have been introduced and illustrated with examples from the Iranian cinema. Considering the narrative text, two approaches to the analysis of adapted works have also been reviewed. The current paper aims to address the shortcomings of approaches to the analysis of adaptation and put forward a new perspective that gives more weight to the elements of the literary text.