What can a film make of a book? Seeing literature through Apocalypse Now and Barry Lyndon

The question of cinematic adaptation of literary texts has been extensively discussed in the last decades, from different perspectives. Through the analysis of two exemplary cases - Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, based on Thackeray's novel The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, and Coppola's Apocalypse Now, inspired by Conrad'd novella Heart of Darkness - this paper focuses on the question of fidelity and how it puts into question the current notion of "story" which we have inherited from formalist and structuralist oriented literary studies. It is part of a vaster work in progress which aims at understanding some of the procedures and effects of transcodification from literature to film.