Cours du 11/01/11 - 6/6

Alice in Wonderland. (?)

In the 20th century, analogy was more used than categories. Film aesthetics take us back to the origins of the theories of Art (Horace).
Writes against Lessing. Literature is not just action and time, characters not just bodies in space
Thanks to adaptations, which can display their origins, there is a way for contemporary adaptations to be modern. Most modern forms of art (textual AND visual).
Prefactory conclusion.


IX Conclusion : Adaptation and Aesthetic Modernity

For Kamilla Elliott, necessary to use analogy to define what is cinematic. Cinema as a continuity of arts.

Lessing : defining modernity.
1972, J.Franck wrote La forme spatiale dans la littérature moderne , he suggested to consider as modern the literature that tries to move away from time and action et would prefer the model of the Nebeneinander. “la littérature et les arts plastiques étaient délimités par deux extrêmes : le temps et l'espace. Suivant l'exemple de Lessing, on peut retrouver l'évolution des formes esthétiques d'après leurs oscillations entre ces deux pôles: la littérature contemporaine (cf. T.S Eliot, Ezra Pound, M. Proust, J. Joyce) évolue dans le sens de la forme spatiale, ces écrivains cherchent à faire percevoir leur oeuvres, non pas comme une succession dans le temps, mais comme une unité dans l'espace. La progression linéaire du récit est arrêté, tout au moins pendant la durée de la scène, l'attention est centrée sur le jeu des rapports au sein d'un espace temporel figé.”

Joyce, Ulysses (1922), not only the chronology of the events of a day, but internal shifts between the different events and chapters of the book.

Proust & Woolf = impressionistic style, visual and spatial dimension of the text (juxtaposing sentences like colours)

More generally modernists = break the dogma of the chronological narrative. (+ Forster, Lawrence...)

Gilles Deleuze, L'image-temps : a film will be modern, by inverting its basic aesthetic codes/categories.
Historically, what talking picture radically change, is that you could see sounds in the image. Added element modifies the reception of space.

Franck = to be modern a text must suspend, its representation in time

Deleuze = cinema : suspension in space. New temporality, external voice.

Maurice Blanchot, Le livre avenir, analyses Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel Le Voyeur, based on “la tache aveugle” = a gap in the narrative, in its chronological time, made up for by the text opening to the visible (images). The author let us see what he is not going to narrate (many visual metaphors to evoke what was happening at that time).

Deleuze's “external voice”: study on Stanley Kubrick's film = Sandro Bernardi, Le regard esthétique ou la visibilité selon Kubrick
“une forte tension des images et de la narration, puisque les images ne s'articulent pas toujours autour d'une ligne narrative cohérente unitaire. Parfois elles bataillent avec la narration et tentent d'en sortir.”

discrepancy between sound and image = modernity.

Another voice will be added to make the film more complex. Say something that is not shown.

Robert Bresson, Notes sur le cinématographe “la beauté de ton film ne sera pas dans les images (carte postalisme) mais dans l'ineffable qu'elles dégageront”.

To avoid the notion of fidelity, reducing adaptation to the mere illustration of a novel, one has to work on the issue of the voice of the film. The director illustrates his vision of the book. (cf. Hisgson, “heritage movies” postcards, just images showing the book, not telling anything)

A film adaptation has to go beyond location. A satisfactory adaptation must move from images to voice / sounds.
What a film shows + what it tells.
Through voice, you keep the style, the aesthetic, the tone of a book.
Is it possible to find in this voice of the film, what was in the space of the book (not narration in time, but images based on space) ?

What made the originality/gist of the novel, beyond its plot etc...?
Perfect way to adapt a nebeneinander novel is to invert the categories. Keep the content but invert the form.

Adaptation might not so be reducted, less criticized, if we consider that is has to invert the modes of expression.

Actions and time in the book must become bodies and space.

When studying a film sequence : what images mean = visual aesthetic of the book (Atonement)

Inversion of categories, discursive image.

Je crois que ces cours vont m'être une grande utilité cette année. Finalement ça aura eu du bon.