How The Danish Girl was adapted and recontextualized through multimedia

Abstract

The Danish Girl has three different versions – novel, screenplay and film. Through comparison, this study explored how Lucinda Coxon (2015) and Tom Hooper (2015) adapted David Ebershoff’s novel (2000), The Danish Girl, to the screenplay and the film of the same name, and how multimodal semiotic resources contributed to recontextualizing the screenplay and the film. This research selected a scene, which represented the ‘remade’ type, from The Danish Girl to instantiate recontextualization in depth. The study found that the adaptations of The Danish Girl mixed different methods. The study also found that the way of recontextualizing the film was more complex than that of the screenplay.