Anna Ráhel Müller

The Comparison of Kazuo Ishiguro's the Remains of the Day and Its Film Anna Ráhel Müller

Kazuo Ishiguro's book The Remains of the Day (1984) and its film adaptation?s story is about a respectful British butler who travels across Britain in 1956. This journey is his first expedition in England. While he fights with his feelings and affections and tries to dig under his conscious mind, he is oppressed and worried. We can read this story as a romantic novel as James Ivory, the director of The Remains of the Day, saw it. His film is more romantic than Ishiguro?s book. It is really exciting to see how good directing can change a story, how the lights and colours can show new aspects of a text, how paralinguistic features can show more than an unbelievable description. The director, cast, and crew must be dependent on the tools of filmmaking to reproduce what is felt, thought, and described on the page. Emotions can be expressed more easily in a film, or at least differently, since the actors? play can give more to it with their experience of life. The filmmakers? production would be their ideas about the book. Comparing these differences between film adaptations and the readers' particular view might be very challenging and rewarding in an English language classroom.