This chapter examines three films adapted from Indigenous source material by non-Indigenous directors: Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), adapted from Mardudjara writer Doris Pilkington/Nugi Garimara's Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996) and directed by white Australian Phillip Noyce; Whale Rider (2002), adapted from Māori writer Witi Ihimaera's novel The Whale Rider (1987) by Pākehā Niki Caro; and The Lesser Blessed (2012), adapted from Tłı̨chǫ (Dogrib) writer Richard Van Camp's 1996 novel of the same title by Ukrainian-Canadian filmmaker Anita Doron. Films made by a non-Indigenous director adapting an Indigenous text, I argue, can be considered ‘told-to’ adaptations, in the manner of ‘told-to’ literary texts in which Indigenous narratives are shepherded through publication by a white coauthor. If told-to texts are typically Indigenous authors’ narratives that are collected or edited by non-Indigenous people, films made by white filmmakers adapting Indigenous material can be conceptualised as ‘told-to adaptations’, as they replicate many features of told-to texts, which include, according to Sophie McCall, the forging of ‘a variety of contact zones’, ‘debates over cultural property’ and the potential for cross-cultural collaboration in ‘a meeting ground for multiple voices’ (2011, 2–3, 4, 5). Although the capacity for these adaptations to represent Indigenous culture is certainly much greater than those discussed in the previous chapter, given the provenance of the source material, particular issues arise within the contexts of production in each example and the ways in which the filmmakers choose to orient their adaptation to as large (implicitly white) an audience as possible: namely, these Indigenous stories undergo alterations for the sake of their translation for the cinema designed to appeal to mainstream audiences.

One key concern with told-to narratives is ‘the unequal power relationship traditionally at play in the production of the text’ (Rymhs 2006, 92). This imbalance of power undermines terms such as ‘collaboration’ that suggest a more level playing field between narrator and collector. The term ‘composite’ has also been used to represent the process of telling and circulating these narratives (Sands 1997, 39).

Both Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady (1996) and Mira Nair's Vanity Fair (2004) adapt canonical, male-authored novels of the nineteenth century in ways that address the power dynamic of the male gaze and that reposition the geographical framing of the source text. As such, they furnish examples of Julie Sanders's claim that infidelity to a source text enables ‘the most creative acts of adaptation’ (2006, 20) through their feminist lenses, forged away from the imperial metropole. Keeping in mind questions of the ‘politics of fidelity’ (Dicecco 2015, 170), however, Campion's and Nair's departures in their adaptations facilitate degrees of critique of these canonical narratives. Whereas Campion's film frames its source text self-reflexively as a bookend to the narrative presented by the novel, Nair's film, for its part, lends greater weight to colonised spaces and cultures and their interactions with the imperial centre. Both films also rethink their heroine's fate, diverging to various degrees from the narratives of these women's lives as originally conceived by male novelists. Further, both films position a male collector figure as a predator, the downfall of the films’ respective heroines, foregrounding the male gaze as ominous.

Campion and Nair made these films when their careers were already established, with their largest budgets to date (McHugh 2009, 140; Muir 2006, 218), enabling their work with high-profile international stars. As late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century films, The Portrait of a Lady and Vanity Fair's recreations of nineteenth-century society depart from, disrupt and de-familiarise the heritage genre in both narrative and visual terms. Ultimately, The Portrait of a Lady's greater self-reflexiveness announces more assertively its transfiguring relationship to the original text, privileging a gendered perspective, however, over one that engages meaningfully with race. Vanity Fair, in contrast, both supplements the novel where the representation of the non-Western Other is concerned and replicates some of its Orientalist assumptions in its more blurred stance on the nineteenth-century original and its own feminist intervention's reliance on exoticist consumption.

The year 2012 saw the release of two films adapted from Booker Prize-winning novels: Midnight's Children by the British Indian writer Salman Rushdie, published in 1981, the film version of which was directed by Deepa Mehta; and Life of Pi by the Québécois writer Yann Martel, published in 2001, the adaptation directed by Ang Lee. In addition to their place in internationally celebrated literature as Booker Prize winners and their focus on Indian characters and Indian history in the twentieth century, including the Emergency as a key event, the two novels also share an engagement with magic realism. This chapter examines how these two films adapt the magic realist elements of their source texts, discussing the elements from the novels that have and have not been visually presented, and the implications of what the audience is made to see. The visual content of the films conceals the locations of production: both films are transnational, with Life of Pi having been made all over the world. Indeed, Lee's film (and its source text) itself gestures to the economics of transnational cultural production. In different ways, both films incorporate the figure of the author: Life of Pi as part of its fictional narrative; and Midnight's Children via Rushdie's voice-over narration. Although both films engage in the representation of India, only Life of Pi, whose Indian setting constitutes a far briefer proportion of the narrative, was (partly) filmed in that country, a representation complicated by a transnational production that configures what is visible to the audience. Given the elements of magic realism, then, both films engage questions of visibility and veracity at the level of production as well as narrative. That production should be transnational, with Mehta (like Rushdie) and Lee part of the Indian and Taiwanese diasporas, respectively, inflects what is visible in particular ways.

Midnight's Children

Given the status of Midnight's Children, particularly in the postcolonial literary canon and the late twentieth-century literary canon more generally (the novel not just winning the Booker Prize, in fact, but also the ‘Booker of Bookers’ in 1993), it is perhaps unavoidable that there would be a considerable weight of expectation accompanying the film adaptation. Indeed, as Rushdie has noted, Midnight's Children's Booker success immediately prompted proposals to adapt the novel, first for television, then as a film; these plans not materialising, more proposals ensued once the novel won the Booker of Bookers.

This book has examined a range of ‘raw material’ and its film adaptation, from nineteenth-century novels to late-twentieth-century prose fiction to an Inuit Traditional Story. Film adaptation demonstrates the desire on the part of both those who tell stories and their audiences to return to the same material, reimagining it. Who reimagines it, how and for whom, have been key questions throughout this study. Some of these reimaginings, as we have seen, have been pointedly politicised; others have downplayed the political implications of the texts they have adapted. At least part of an adaptation's audience is unlikely to be familiar with the source material in the first place; the adaptation may guide viewers to the source, but equally, it may not.

Some of the examples of adaptations in this book involve a temporal gap of more than a century between the source text and the film. But contemporary publishing functions rather differently. Simone Murray's study of the adaptation industry observes how, so imbricated has publishing become in film adaptation, that adaptation ‘is now factored in and avidly pursued from the earliest phases of book production’ (2012, 13). The novel Caging Skies by Christine Leunens (2019), the source material for Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit (2019), presents a striking example of this phenomenon insofar as the author thanks Waititi in the novel's acknowledgements (Leunens 2019, 297). Further, the film, clearly in production prior to the publication of the novel, presents some considerable differences from its near-simultaneous source text, including the infusion of humour, the dramatisation of Hitler as imagined by Jojo, and the temporal span of the narrative: Jojo takes mere days to confess to Elsa that the war has ended in the film; whereas in the novel, his ruse continues for years, and he even smuggles Elsa, unaware of the possibility of her own freedom, out of his house and into another flat under the guise that her life, as a Jewish woman, remains endangered, even in 1949. What may be an understandable and pitiable (because brief) deception on the part of a German boy in the film is monstrous in the novel as Jojo ages, his first-person narration revealing the extent of his deluded self-deception and justification for continuing to hold Elsa prisoner while insisting on his status as her protector.

In 2017, Hal Niedzviecki, editor of the Writers’ Union of Canada's publication Write, published an editorial in which he suggested there should be an ‘Appropriation Prize’. As an introduction to an issue of the publication that featured several Indigenous writers, Niedzviecki's editorial attracted both support (and funding for an actual such prize), largely from white Canadian journalists, and outrage (some of which was directed to funding the Indigenous Voices Awards in response). The second decade of the twentieth century was not the first time that cultural appropriation was hotly contested in Canada and beyond. The early 1990s saw a number of Indigenous writers demand that white artists, in the words of Lenore Keeshig-Tobias (Anishinaabe), ‘stop stealing [Indigenous] stories’ (1990, 7). In 1994, an Australian legal case (Milpurrurru et al. v. Indofurn Pty Ltd et al.) addressed Indigenous copyright in patterned carpets; the ruling stipulated that ‘[t]he right to create paintings and other artworks depicting creation and dreaming stories, and to use pre-existing designs and well recognized totems of the clan, resides in the traditional owners (or custodians) of the stories or images’ (qtd in Ziff and Rao 1997b, 16). Yet cultural appropriation – and its defenders – despite the work of the 1990s contesting it – has persisted: white US author Lionel Shriver at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in 2016, the year before Niedzviecki's editorial, had equated cultural appropriation with ‘try[ing] on other people's hats’ (qtd in Convery 2016), dismissing and deflating concerns about cultural representation, particularly when those in the position of doing the representing belong to the white mainstream and those being represented do not. As Bruce Ziff and Pratima V. Rao write, however, ‘When white writers appropriate the images of [non-white people], a political event has occurred’ (1997b, 5). White artists who cry foul at accusations of cultural appropriation use art as a defence against politics, as though art is always already exempt from the political.

Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice (2004) and Ray Lawrence's Jindabyne (2006) present radical relocations of their source narratives, Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Raymond Carver's short story ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ (1988), respectively. In shifting the narrative setting from Regency England to twenty-first-century India, primarily, and from the American Pacific Northwest to Australia, these two adaptations foreground race relations that are not thematised in the source texts but are facilitated by the geographical relocation. A comparison of these two films highlights the very different postcoloniality of India and settler-coloniality of Australia: as emphasised in Bride and Prejudice's dialogue, India had been independent from Britain for nearly sixty years at the point of the film's narrative (and production); as a settler-colonial nation-state, however, Australia, although independent from Britain, has yet to decolonise, a fact central to the film's narrative in its grappling with Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. Where Bride and Prejudice explores the relationships between a postcolonial India and the US and the UK in the context of globalisation, neoliberalism and neo-imperialism, Jindabyne grafts Carver's narrative onto the politics of apology in a settler-colonial context amid attempts to reconcile with Indigenous peoples.

Despite the films’ shared strategy of narrative relocation effecting an exploration of racism, their genres diverge widely: whereas Bride and Prejudice, inspired and inflected by the conventions of Bollywood cinema, is fundamentally a romantic comedy, Jindabyne's drama hinges on trauma, both for individual characters and in terms of the fallout of the colonial encounter. Both films feature an American character out of their depth in a culture to which they do not belong, but whereas Bride and Prejudice's comedy necessitates a forging of this belonging, the settler-colonial context of Jindabyne suggests that belonging is always already impossible. Translation, part of the ‘constellation of terms and tropes’ (Stam 2005, 4) deployed to discuss film adaptation, is particularly apt for examining the relocations of Bride and Prejudice and Jindabyne: ‘Literally “carrying across”, translation is itself a form of migration between languages, places, and cultures’ (Orr 2013, 286); further, both films include translator figures.

Once Were Warriors (1994), directed by Lee Tamahori, and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), directed by Zacharias Kunuk, are both Indigenous films adapted from Indigenous source materials: Alan Duff 's novel Once Were Warriors (1990), and an Inuit Traditional Story, respectively. These films were made a world away from each other, at the bottom of the southern hemisphere in Aotearoa New Zealand and the top of the northern hemisphere in Nunavut, and they present starkly different worlds: an impoverished and dispossessed Māori community in late-twentieth-century Auckland; and a sixteenth-century Inuit community in Igloolik and beyond. The pairing of these two adaptations demonstrates a range of Indigenous narratives and filmmaking practices.

Despite the vast differences in geography, territory, narrative and language, however, Once Were Warriors and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner share key features of production, circulation and reception. Both films were made with a large proportion of Indigenous crew members: ‘half the crew’ of Once Were Warriors were Māori, according to its director (Tamahori 1995, 27); and all but the director of photography for Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner were Inuit. Both films were landmarks of the cinemas of the respective settler-colonial nation-states that claim them: Once Were Warriors was the highest-grossing film of Aotearoa New Zealand at that point; Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, the first feature film entirely in Inuktitut, was the highest-grossing Canadian film in 2002. That both films also found success on the international festival and art-house circuit further testifies to their dual audiences at home and abroad, although ‘at home’ audiences do not simply encompass the nation-state. Pākehā viewers in Aotearoa New Zealand and ‘Southern’ viewers in Canada are not insider audiences for these films. Both films either minimise or eschew the presence of white people: for Once Were Warriors, this near-excision runs counter to the source text of Duff 's novel; for Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, the historical narrative dictates this absence. Both films also alter their source material, most significantly in the narratives’ respective endings. Questions of fidelity in relation to film adaptation are internal rather than external to the Indigenous communities relevant to these projects, in contrast to the adaptations examined in the previous chapter: changes are not imposed by non-Indigenous screenwriters and filmmakers.

Published in the early and mid-nineteenth century, respectively, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) each contain a slavery subtext: the eponymous country house Mansfield Park in Austen's novel, the site of protagonist Fanny Price's upbringing and development from the age of ten onwards, is owned by her aunt's husband, Sir Thomas Bertram, who also owns an estate in Antigua; the character of Heathcliff in Brontë's novel is brought to Wuthering Heights from the major slave port of Liverpool by Mr Earnshaw, and despite varied descriptions of his appearance is consistently racially Othered. Austen's and Brontë's novels are more oblique in their references to racial difference and empire than Thackeray's Vanity Fair and James's Portrait of a Lady, but they are products of empire nonetheless. If Austen only alludes briefly to Sir Thomas's ownership and experiences of the Antiguan estate, and Brontë never explicitly specifies Heathcliff 's racialised identity, the novels’ historical contexts of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century encompass Britain's involvement in the slave trade as well as significant ownership of slave-holding properties on the imperial periphery. Critical debates surrounding the nature of the Bertrams’ wealth and Austen's and/or her novel's position on it and the representation of Heathcliff have reached no real consensus.

Film adaptations of Mansfield Park, directed by Patricia Rozema (1999), and Wuthering Heights, directed by Andrea Arnold (2011), offer their own versions of these narratives’ implication in questions of empire and race, extrapolating from the novels’ gestures towards slavery and salvaging this context for their screen versions of these two novels. They thus intervene in critical discourse by visualising the filmmakers’ readings of these texts. Further, the construction of domestic spaces and their environs in both these films underscores issues of power as they reside in questions of hospitality in both narratives. Rozema's version of Mansfield Park carefully positions Fanny in relation to domestic spaces in order to articulate her relationship to power in ways that many critics of the novel have often failed to do in their political sloppiness where questions of gender and race are concerned.

After the astonishing, Booker Prize-fuelled success of Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient (1992), the first Canadian novel ever to win the prestigious award, filmmakers sought to adapt this ‘unfilmable’ novel. The resulting film (1996), written and directed by the British Anthony Minghella, produced by Hollywood legend Saul Zaentz, met with its own prize-laden destiny, including nine Academy Awards and five BAFTAs. A lesser-known adaptation story of The English Patient is that a Canadian consortium, led by Toronto-based Rhombus Media's Niv Fichman, sought the adaptation rights, with Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan at the helm. Certainly, there was no way their bid could compete financially with Minghella and Zaentz, and the rest, as they say, is history.

When I taught The English Patient and its film adaptation, just after the American Russell Banks's novel The Sweet Hereafter (adapted by Egoyan), I have often asked my students what they would imagine The English Patient directed by Egoyan (at that earlier point in his career in the 1990s) would look like. Generalised declarations that have accompanied discussions of Minghella's adaptation in terms of ‘what film can do’ or ‘what we can expect from a film’ fall by the wayside at this point: expectations about chronology and mainstream audience sensibilities evaporate. Suggestions arise about greater fragmentation (closer to Ondaatje's novel and – indeed – to Egoyan's earlier filmmaking aesthetics), and greater attention to the character of Kip – Kirpal Singh – the Sikh sapper whose narrative is minimised in Minghella's film, yet around whom the climax of Ondaatje's novel revolves with a resounding rejection of the West and its imperialist legacies. Other possibilities in this imagined adaptation that was never made include Canadian actors playing the Canadian roles of Hana and Caravaggio (Juliette Binoche and Willem Dafoe, respectively, in Minghella's version). There is also, usually, an acknowledgement that, notwithstanding Egoyan's two Oscar nominations for The Sweet Hereafter, this imagined version would never have achieved the same meteoric success as Minghella’s.