In the world of English-language scholarship, the study of Chinese cinema has developed in close connection with the study of modern Chinese literature. Many specialists in Chinese cinema started as students and scholars of literature, applying methods from literary studies to the newly discovered object of cinema. By now, however, it is clear that Chinese cinema can and should be considered from a variety of other perspectives as well: as art, as industry, as technology, and so on. Some of the best recent scholarship negotiates fluently among different perspectives, resulting in work that is comparative not in the schematic sense of bringing together different geocultural objects but in the sense of critical interdisciplinarity. It is in the latter sense that the pointed return to a seemingly archaic topic—the adaptation of existing literary works into cinematic ones—may have a strategic value. This is the challenge of Hsiu-Chuang Deppman's book Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film.

The book details seven case studies of recent Chinese films. The films, listed in a neat introductory chart (p. 3), are discussed in the following order: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Raise the Red Lantern; Red Rose / White Rose; In the Mood for Love; Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress; A Time to Live, A Time to Die; and The Personals. The book concentrates on close readings that focus on literary, or better yet novelistic, items like plot, character psychology, symbolism, and social commentary. Those readings also include references to artist biographies, historical contexts of society and politics, and the audiovisual composition of the films themselves. Overall Deppman's writing style is clear and straightforward. Nevertheless, there are a few minor errors. For example, the chart mentioned above incorrectly calls Hou Hsiao-hsien's 1985 film A Time to Live, A Time to Kill. Another example is the partial translation of “Dianmao Film Production Company” as the name of the Hong Kong studio that hired Eileen Chang to write screenplays in the early 1960s (p. 63). The studio was officially known in English as Motion Picture and General Investment or MP & GI; it is also though not entirely accurately referred to as Cathay.

More significantly, one might question the book's concluding remark that “cross-cultural and translingual adaptations” constitute a new or growing phenomenon (p. 195). The claim of newness or growth implies a difference between past and present. Yet the derivation of any historical narrative depends on the choice of representative examples. What about such classic Republican Shanghai films as Love and Duty (1931) or The Young Mistress's Fan (1928, 1939)? Or, at the other end of the scale of fame and “quality,” the Taiwanese gothic Bride in Hell (1965)? Or the various postwar Hong Kong films inspired by Shakespeare, Dickens, and Austen? In fact existing literary works have fueled film production for almost as long as films have been produced in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. If the films that Adapted for the Screen examines do add up to something new in the history of Chinese film adaptation, some summary of the older mode(s) of adaptation would be useful.

Here is where the strategic value mentioned above comes into play. By first challenging the notion that adapted films are to be judged in terms of fidelity and posteriority to their literary source texts and instead showing many instances of difference and creation in the seven films, Adapted for the Screen implies that cinema is not the same as literature. If so, and if literature has nevertheless shaped cinema, then we should also ask if or how cinema has shaped literature. And the same question could be put to cinema studies in relation to literature studies. To answer these questions we can reexamine literature in light of cinematic issues and methods; the book intimates this in observing the alternating structure of Liu Yichang's Intersection (the inspiration for In the Mood for Love) and the heterogeneous “democratic” texture of Chen Yuhui's The Personals: Forty-two Men and I (the source for the film The Personals). Even further, however, we might also look beyond individual texts and works, for example by examining them as artifacts in their social and industrial contexts of production, circulation, and consumption.

These examples of what to do next with literature-and-cinema, and specifically with adaptation as an intermedial phenomenon, suggest to me that this book's strengths lie in how it can supplement and be supplemented by other readings of a more theoretical or historical nature; how it can model close textual analysis for other case studies of literature-and-cinema in action; and how it can provide solid foundations for lectures, classroom discussions, and writing assignments. In sum, Adapted for the Screen is a strategic and eminently usable resource for teachers and students alike.