Film Theory and Criticism

Last night for the first time I watched "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". Like almost all DVDs now, there is an extras feature on the DVD and one of those features was a documentary on the making of the film.
The documentary was called "Don't Crash: the documentary of
the making of
the movie of
the book of
the radio series of
The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy".
I did not know much about the history of The Hitchhiker's Guide but while watching the documentary, one thing was very obvious; every one involved in the film was a big fan of the book and wanted to try their best to be as true to the books as possible. The author Douglas Adams died before he could see his work turned into a film so no one could tell what he would have wanted his story to look and sound like on the big screen. The producer and director of the film put a great deal of effort to make the film very similar to the book. For example, for the narrator, they choose Stephen Fry because he has a factual, non threatening voice. This is what the tought the voice would sound like from the book.
Dudley Andrew in his chapter on Adaptation in Film Theory and Criticism says that there are three modes of relation between a film and the text it come from. These are borrowing, intersection and fidelity of transformation. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comes under fidelity of transformation in my opinion. Andrew says that fidelity of transformation is a "film trying to measure up to a literary work, or of an audience expecting to make such a comparison".
I believe this is true with Hitchiker's Guide. The making of documentary showed how artists spent years drawing in sketch books to come up with all the dfferent aliens in the film. They wanted the film to live up the the popularity of the book so they literally put in years of work in the pre production phase.

There is a film called Zeitgeist which was put on the internet to be watched free of charge. The film deals with conspiracy theories. Near the end of the film the narrator tells us that film and TV were only created to draw the publics attention away from what was really happening in the world. A scary tought. I do not believe this. In fact, I love film and TV. I could watch TV for hours, even the really bad TV. Because of this, I found Anne Friedbergs chapter The End of Cinema: Multimedia and the Technological Change very interesting. The chapter tells us how TV and the internet has changed cinema and the way we watch what is on the screen in front of us. Today, because of technological advances, film and TV are always just one click away. The way we watch film has changed. We can still go to the cinema but we can also rent or buy the film on DVD and we can also watch the film on the internet.
I would not say that TV and the internet are bringing about the end of cinema. The cinema industry is a resilient one and can adapt to the changes that happen. An example that comes to mind is the film Cloverfield. Th film incorporates the style of filming which is mainly seen on the internet. Usually a shaky hand held camera is used to film an event. In Cloverfield, it looks like all the footage was caught with a hand held camera. This gives the audience a sense that what they are watching actually happened. Because people are used to seeing this type of video on the internet, they can watch a full film in this style. I do not think TV and the internet is bringing about the end of the cinema. The cinema industry is too resilient.