The cineaste is no longer content, as were Cornielle, La Fontaine or Moliere before him, to ransack other works. His method is to bring to the screen virtually unaltered any work the excellence of which he decides on a priori.
One is no longer adapting a subject. One is staging a play by means of cinema. (Bazin 93)
Hah! I wonder how Bazin would feel with modern interpretations? The Nolan trilogy especially? He would probably look down on any attempt to interpret the Batman story but how it has been portrayed before.
However one approaches it, a play whether classic or modern Is unassailable protected by its text. There is no way of adapting the text without disposing of it and substituting something else, which may be better but not the play. This is a practice, for that matter, restricted of necessity to second-class authors or to those still living since Ths masterpieces that time has hallowed deman, as a postulate, that we demand their texts. (Bazin 84)
Yeah, right! What, exactly, Bazin, makes these texts so "hallowed" that they cannot be manipulated to make them into different, altwrnate works of art? At the root of this is the same thing at the root of legalistic prescriptivism and religious fundamentalism: an unrealistic view of texts and labguages as more "holy" and "objective" than they really are. Almost divinely guarded.