Today almost everyone takes it for granted that films tell stories. Yet long before film emerged as a medium, literature carried a culture’s narratives. The two have much in common as forms of storytelling: both can be seen as an “emotion machine” (Tan), using distinctive plot and style to give audiences or readers a particular emotional experience.

As film and literature have shaped and absorbed each other, however, opinion about their relationship has split. Some scholars see adaptations of literature and drama as a major film genre of the twenty-first century (Geraghty). Others object to mixing literary and cinematic forms, arguing that “no one can shoehorn a film that utilizes special visual effects into the form of a play or a novel” (Balázs). For these critics and those who share their view, films based on literature weaken both the independence of literature and the distinct identity of film.

Still, adaptations such as Pride and Prejudice, Gone with the Wind, and Jane Eyre have won wide acclaim, commercially and artistically. Are films based on literature really so far removed from what Benjamin called aura? Is their literary dimension a burden, or a new source of aura? This essay reexamines the relationship between literature and film through Benjamin’s classic theory, asking where and how aura takes shape in films adapted from literature, and in doing so offers a new way to see their artistic and aesthetic value.

Because every adaptation carries a work from one medium into another, the question of aura is also a question of translation: what wears away in that passage, and how can adaptation lose less?

Aura, the concept most closely tied to Benjamin, is rich in meaning. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin defines what makes true art through his critique of mechanical reproduction. He describes aura as “the unique manifestation of something that is at a certain distance, but feels so close.” In short, aura encompasses the originality of the traditional artwork, a sense of ambiguity and distance rooted in mystery, and uniqueness.

At first glance, film, a medium built on photography that can be copied without limit and distributed around the world, seems to give up the originality and uniqueness aura requires and to dissolve the distance that once stood between traditional works of art and their audiences. In A Short History of Photography, however, Benjamin distinguishes between “photography as art” and “art as photography.” The first follows the logic of mechanical reproduction; the second treats photography as an independent artistic medium that creatively reproduces the real world. Aura, then, is an abstract concept that can be understood in several ways. It is less a critique of mass production than a concise description of the unique aesthetic experience art offers, above all the moment of surprise between a viewer and a work.

Applied to film, this means that film has aura only if it is an independent form, distinct from every other art and therefore able to create an aesthetic experience no other form can. From its birth, film has had features no other art possesses: it can reproduce reality visually or overturn it, break apart real time and spatial order, and create dynamic, even interactive rituals. Together these features gave film its original aura.

Watching a film can produce a deep experience of “gazing.” A character’s expression, a landscape, or a sequence of events may trigger associations and build, in the viewer’s mind, a new imagined world supplemented by the world of the film. That imagining is itself a kind of blurred aura, at some distance from both the film and the real world. Layered together, the film’s own aura and the viewer’s subjective sense of it create a unique emotional bond between the work and the people who watch it.

Describing what he felt looking at a photograph, Benjamin writes, “She, in the photograph, is leaning against him, and he is holding her; yet her eyes pass over him as if she were gazing at the coming doom.” Film is, in a sense, a more systematic, industrial, and varied form of photography, and what Benjamin felt before a photograph still echoes in what audiences feel today before films made of countless images.

Consider again the classic films mentioned at the outset, such as Pride and Prejudice and Gone with the Wind. Their success points to a global pattern: once film took on the work of storytelling, many of the world’s literary classics became its source material. Why classics? Across many adaptations, drawing on literature for inspiration or a script offers at least three advantages.

First, it makes production far more efficient. Filmmakers do not have to build a complete, coherent story from scratch, and the gain in efficiency lets them put more money and effort into “industrial” processes such as editing and special effects. Second, the fame of a classic helps a film reach a larger market, faster. Third, it guarantees a certain level of quality, since the film’s plot closely follows an acclaimed literary work.

Adaptation has clearly brought film many conveniences. From the standpoint of film as an art, though, it also seems to create new tensions. When literary content meets cinematic form, does the literary weaken the cinematic, which ought to come first? Some critics have dismissed adaptation as “outmoded and as lagging behind the critical times” (Ryan 220–43).

The lag is not only a matter of timing, since a film always arrives after the literary original, whose originality as the first version cannot be replaced. It also reflects film’s potential “dependence” on literature. Whether a film presents a literary text in full, as in The Old Man and the Sea, or selectively and in fragments, as in My Memories of Old Beijing, which uses only three of the novel’s five stories, films based on literature inherit some of literature’s charm. That charm can also become a constraint, putting the film at risk of damaging the flawless artistic image of the original.

For many critics, literature’s influence on film is a major reason film has lost its aura, because literature has changed the nature and character film had at its birth. Seen from another angle, however, adaptation can be understood as a kind of “new interpretation,” and the conclusion changes completely. As one scholar puts it, “no matter how the new media technology develops, there is always a tipping point that ensures that a movie is a movie” (Zhou). The question is where that tipping point lies when literature enters film, and whether there really is a necessary boundary between literature and cinema that protects film’s irreplaceable status as an independent art.

On closer inspection, that irreplaceability does exist, and it shows in at least three ways.

Different arts at the core. Film and literature differ clearly in their artistic value and core aesthetics. Film has always been seen as the “art of vision,” literature as the “art of language,” and the two have very different origins and histories. Their convergence should not be framed as a contest. As media continue to converge, the meeting of film and literature is inevitable. Approached with openness, the two can complement and strengthen each other, creating a new mode of narrative that neither could produce alone. In that mode, film remains a visual art, and literature does not replace its core aesthetic value.

Film stands on its own. Film and literature are fundamentally different: strip away the literary elements, and film still holds up on its own terms. In this sense, film has never been an appendage of literature or any other art.

A real tension. There is genuine conflict between the literary and the cinematic, which is why many people believe that “film should realize the abandonment of literature.” Too much literariness can hurt a film. Adaptations often need to innovate, departing from or even surpassing the original, to defend film’s “dignity.” As Brooks puts it, “Ninety-nine percent of the novels that are adapted for the screen have to undergo major cuts and changes to make a good movie.”

Every adaptation is a translation from language into image, and translation always risks wear: a novel’s inner voice, its pacing, the gaps its readers fill in for themselves. The arguments above suggest five ways an adaptation can lose less in that passage.

The fusion of film and literature will clearly keep deepening, and the world of literary adaptation will keep growing. That raises a question: as film moves with this trend, how can more people come to see its artistic value, and see that this value is constantly being renewed? Beyond film’s traditional value as a visual art, the new narrative energy literature brings to it points toward a new kind of aura.

First, film’s moving images can bring the poetry of literature back to life and become a creative way to extend it. By adapting the plot and reshaping the narrative of the original, a film’s “secondary narrative” may go beyond its source. From the standpoint of cultural transmission, adaptations allow cultural resources to be developed again and again and help cultural achievements reach more people. That lets film’s aura transcend time and space and produce many different aesthetic experiences, as each viewer sees the same work in a different way.

Second, digital technology has made film’s nature as a mixed medium more visible (Shi), and traditional ideas of film aesthetics need to gradually make room for the cross-textual and intertextual features of today’s films.

The aura of film, in short, is not fixed. If innovation in film is judged only through a superficial understanding of the critique of mechanical reproduction, we will never connect with the deeper humanistic spirit within it. If adaptations are seen instead as an art form that can accommodate both, we can further explore the new and unique aesthetic experience built from within film and literature together: a new aura.

Adaptation loses least when it translates rather than transcribes: carrying over what matters and letting film say it in its own language.

Films based on literature are cinema’s “secondary narrative” of literature. On the mixing of the literary and the cinematic, some scholars see literature as an intrusion that weakens film’s own value, while others hold that film’s aura has never disappeared or been threatened by other art forms.

Weighing both sides, this essay argues that the essence of film’s aura lies in the irreplaceability of its artistic value: its unique narrative and visual art, which keeps renewing itself as the literary and the cinematic inevitably merge. Rather than resisting literature’s influence on film, we should rethink the aura of film with a more forward-looking and inclusive view.

1. Balázs, Béla. Theory of the Film. Andesite Press, 2015.
2. Benjamin, Walter. A Short History of Photography. 1931, monoskop.org/images/7/79/Benjamin_Walter_1931_1972_A_Short_History_of_Photography.pdf.
3. ———. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Penguin Books, 1935.
4. Geraghty, Christine. Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama. Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
5. Li, Jiangbo 黎江波. “Muguang de Xiangyu yu Lingyun de Huigui 目光的相遇与灵韵的回归：本雅明摄影理论再审视 [The Encounter of the Eye and the Return of Aura: Benjamin’s Theory of Photography Revisited].” Shehui Kexuejia 社会科学家, no. 9, 2023, pp. 122–27.
6. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. University of Nebraska Press, 2004, pp. 220–43.
7. Shi, Chang 施畅. “Dianying Ruhe Kuayue Bianjie: Zuowei Fangfa de Kua Meijie Yanjiu 电影如何跨越边界——作为方法的跨媒介研究 [How Film Crosses Boundaries: Transmedia Studies as Method].” Dianying Yishu 电影艺术, no. 3, 2022.
8. Tan, Ed S. Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine. Erlbaum, 1996.
9. Zhou, Zheng 周正. “Dianying Meijie yu Dianying Bianjie 电影媒介与电影边界——兼论VR影视的非电影性 [Cinematic Media and Cinematic Boundaries: On the Non-Cinematic Nature of VR Film and Television].” Wenhua Yishu Yanjiu 文化艺术研究, vol. 9, no. 4, 2016, pp. 122–25.