Quick thoughts on adaptation

1. "Is it good, in and of itself?" should be the first and most important question.
2. Terms like fidelity and true (to its source) are over-privileged (in Derrida's sense)... better to speak in terms of the relationship to the text.

Notes on "A Conversation with Bertolucci"

"inspired by" Borges' story
keep "the mechanism," "the structure," without the "Borgesian reflection on the cyclical nature of things"
yet - film is "elliptical... or at any rate as mysterious"

film theme: "voyage into the realm of the dead"
- town is "a kind of kingdom of the dead"

- investigation is a "voyage through atavistic memory, through the preconscious"; film "pursues the itenerary of a psychoanalytic therapy"
-- "done entirely without any anxiety... symptoms"; tragic figure, serene film; no stylistic anxiety
"Perhaps creativity allows us more easily to go beyond certain great oceans of neurosis, but analysis is something much more precise... people work, and work because they can channel into their work their libido which would otherwise not find expression."
> "I absolutely refuse to call it a psychoanalytic film because it's impossible to make a psychoanalytic film, because psychoanalysis is psychoanalysis and film is film."

"about the contradictions of demystification" (of father and mother)
- paternal figure is myth

night scenes: unusual coloration - "completely in azure"; nights when you can see everything, "like in the naive painters' work" eg. Ligabue, Magritte. "night 'eclairage'"

everything done on parallel rails: tracking shots always lateral, no violent shocks. remain at a certain distance, not too far away. everything followed laterally. "made exactly like we were on a train... which stops at every station. Yes, the style of the film is that of the rural commuter trains." (57)

editing seems to have function of coordination or association, "as if to accentuate the cyclical return of things, which is so Borgesian"
[conformist -- one five-minute scene made up of close to two hundred shots!]

"mythology of the animals, especially of the lion"
original title: The Flight of the Lion through the Poplar Trees

strange universe. like in Verdi's Aida "where the Nile is the Po River"

names: Draifa ~ "dreifach" three times - symbolic connection with numbers?
film about fathers and daughters
Tara is the unconscious & "the promised land of Gone with the Wind" (private joke)

flashbacks are present
"I wanted the conventional notions of chronology to be shattered."
"Costumes are a convention."

Pascoli's poetry/Leopoardi quotation...
- identitfication with the child

"I envy the characters of novels who, at some point, stop everything and quote a dozen lines from The Aeneid. It's wonderful to be able to recite poems from memory. Maybe you have to be a bit exhibitionist to do it, though."

"a different kind of montage"
"integrate into the last speech scenes of everything we had seen before... a bit didactic... new ending helps people understand the heart of the problem... the traitor and the hero."
orig just close-up of Athos giving speech - "disappointing because it felt too much like a minor key... [then] the final scene dies out in the grass of the train station." proportion problem... inserts break monotony of scene.
"so much the better if it's didactic, if it helps people understand!"

(as far as I can tell, mise en scene is a meaningless, amorphous term.)

Antonioni's Blow Up

First, I must say that I thought the film was beautiful and captivating. Mysteries tend to engage viewers but this was not the compelling aspect of the film - the drive of Blow Up was in its visual language, its poetic images. Anyone 'reading' the movie as a mystery would be disappointed, because the mystery is never solved, never explained, and all the questions are left to the viewer, unanswered and open. Though it has commonalities with a mystery-story: the femme fatale, the murder, the detective-protagonist... the movie is more of a lyrical riddle. I was impressed with its use of quiet visuals to tell the story. As I mentioned in class, I find that too often movies 'based on' novels or short stories depend heavily on the linguistics of the text, never translating and transcending the story fully into its new medium. These direct representations do damage to the narrative (with some exceptions). By translating the story literally, they create a secondary, diluted story that does not live up to the expectations of its own form, thereby discrediting the original at worst (i.e. no one wants to read the book that the box-office bomb is based on), or failing to express the original greatness, at best. Because Antonioni was not married to the text, he was able to escape the pitfalls of direct translation and create a film that utilizes the visual abilities of its medium.

intertextuality/intermediality

It's hard to set the rules for writing about adaptation, when its essential nature is to cross boundaries, one way or another. I get easily tired with arguments about how something should be talked about. Why attempt to limit the discourse? Why, on the other hand, try to open the conversation using suggestion and argument about discourse when time would be better spent actually saying something oneself? Why not lead by example?

Let's assume that all ways of approaching the topic of adaptation are equally valid. What do I want to talk about?

Adaptation is the most blatant example of intertextuality (when that concept is expanded to include relationships between narratives in different media). The meaning of a film adaptation is greatly affected by its relationship to its source, and thus, audience reception is often dependent on the public's familiarity with the source material (as well as how much that material is already 'treasured').

Meanwhile, any film or book is already situated within the larger 'matrix' of narratives within its tradition. So an adaptation is not only tied to its source, but also, more loosely, to similar narratives within its home media and all the more indirectly to narratives related to its source material. Homages are common in novels and films - from titles (e.g. For Whom the Bell Tolls) to visual sequences that mirror scenes from other movies. Relationships between narratives, in whatever form, are inescapable. Adaptation creates ties across media to build our story-matrix ever larger, deeper, and richer.