Underlying the anti-Platonic argument, however, there is often a hostility towards any kind of e~lanation which involves a degree of distancing from the 'J.iyed experience' of watching the film Itself. Yet clearly any kind of serious critical work -I would say scientific, though I know this drives some people into transports of rage-must invoh·e a distance, a gap between the film and th.e criticism, the text and the meta-tex

Directors who built their ~eputa~ons in Europe were dismissed after they crossed the Atlantic, reduced to anonymity. Amencan H1tcbcock ·was contrasted unfavourably with English Hitchcock, American Renoir wi!}l French Renoir, American Fritz Lang with German Fritz Lang.

author of a film.

Zeffirelli's adaptation of Romeo and Juliet shows a keen interest in the gender relations depicted in Shakespeare's play. Yet the recurrent homoero~cism runs counter not only to the romanticizing treatment of heterosexual love in the film, but to the homosocial relations that prevail in the text, underpinning the violent feud as well as ·the male domination of women. These disjunctions between film and text constitute the ba~es of a critique: the homoeroticism in Zeffirelli's adaptation can be viewed as a demystification of the male rivalry in the text, an implicit indication that homosociality may in fact mask homoerotic desire. Yet the text also comes back to worry Zeffirelli's film by revealing that the homoeroticism is linked both to violence, as in the phallic aggressiveness symbolized by the codpieces, and to the exclusion of women, perhaps most obvious in the love scene where Juliet's body is visually marginalized. The discourse of fidelity that informs Donaldson's (1990) analysis, resting on feminist and queer interpretations, leads him to praise the film for 'extend[ing] Shakespeare's critique' of 'patriarchal values' and for 'bringing to the surface homoerotic aspects of Shakespeare's art' (pp. 153, 145). Yet this optimism effaces the many differences between film and text, particularly Zeffirelli's idealization of heterosexuality against Shakespeare's ambivalent treatment, as well as the gender hierarchy that is reinstalled through the homoeroticism.

What principles guide the choice of source text and the verbal choices made by the translator and editors of the translated text, prin through the one "pies of selection that always constitute interpretive moves? An interpretation is inscribed e application of a category that mediates between the source language and culture, on d, and the translating language and culture, on the other, a method of choosing the and transforming it into the translation.

As a result, the film adaptation has generally been de cribed and evaluated on the basis of its adequacy to the literary text, whereby it tends to be judg d as an unfaithful or distorted communication of the author's expressive intention. Such a judge ent, however, routinely involves the unwitting application of a third term, a dominant or authori live interpretation of the text, which the critic applies as a standard on the assumption that the film should somehow inscribe that and only that interpretation (for examples, see Orr, 1984).