Becoming “Arturo Ripstein”? On collaboration and the “author function” in the transnational film adaptation of El lugar sin límites

The article sets out a detailed case study of Mexican director Arturo Ripstein’s film adaptation of Chilean writer José Donoso’s 1966 short novel El lugar sin límites (‘The Place without Limits’, aka ‘Hell Has No Limits’), which featured a significant, though uncredited, contribution from the exiled Argentine author Manuel Puig. Non-mainstream and oppositional filmmakers and critics in Latin America — for example, Grupo Cine Liberación with their late 1960s formulation of ‘Second Cinema’ in ‘Hacia un tercer cine’/’Towards a Third Cinema’ (Solanas and Getino) — have often attacked, as ‘ideologically limited’, ‘ extranjerizante’ or ‘Eurocentric,’ and ‘literary’ or ‘individualistic,’ the kind of film auteurism in which Ripstein has engaged over four decades. Despite these and other similar attacks, it seems clear that this model of film production (along with Ripstein’s ‘brand’ of it) has been particularly resilient in the face of the political, economic and cultural vicissitudes of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s in a number of countries in the continent. Few sustained studies of auteurism as an internationally successful mode of production in Latin America exist, however. In this article, then, rather than focusing solely on the similarities and differences between the homonymous film and literary texts (the p rincipal critical activity in which studies of the adaptation process engage [Grant 2002]), I propose to use the transnational story of the adaptation of El lugar sin límites — as told from the point of view of its diverse ‘authors’ (Donoso, Puig and Ripstein) — to explore some questions concerning collaborative authorship across film and literary culture in Latin America after the end of the period of the literary ‘Boom’. I focus on the differences in the accounts that I reproduce here not in order to discover, or distil, a ‘true story’, but instead to show, and to work with, the diversity of authorial discourse about the adaptation of Donoso’s novel. While this particular case of transnational auteurist adaptation is a compelling anecdote in its own right, my examination of it will move beyond the biographical. As my title suggests, the discussion here is underwritten throughout by an interest in Michel Foucault’s concept of the ‘author function.

A strange way of loving : the Brontean sadistic heart of Jacques Rivette's Hurlevent

This essay analyses Jacques Rivette's Hurlevent, the French film adaptation of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, in terms of the adaptor's reworking of the novel's major themes and characters in predominantly visual images. The analysis seeks to determine whether the changes created by the film-maker affect the faithfulness and aesthetic worth of Hurlevent as an adaptation of Bronte's text. In the light of various notions of adaptation, such as Battestin's and Armour's theory of analogical autonomy, this analysis also seeks to demonstrate whether this film has succeeded in unveiling the roots of the novel's sadistic traits and the soil from which they stem; the agony of love denied.peer-reviewe

The Art of Adaptation

My honors thesis The Art of Adaptation discusses the process of adapting old stories and theatrical pieces for modern audiences through the exploration of various adaptations (theatrical, operatic, dance and film) of Euripides\u27 Medea. It also touches on my own short, modern, adaptation; FURY: A Rock Musical Inspired by Medea. All of this research was important in making the performance aspect of my capstone the best it could be

Good work, little soldier: Text and pretext

This article reads the relation between Denis's Beau Travail and Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film Le Petit Soldat as a film-on-film variant of film-on-book adaptation. The model informing this reading is not so much intertextual as pretextual. The principal points of contact between the two films discussed are 'actor' (Michel Subor), 'character' (Bruno Forestier) and 'narrator' (Forestier/Galoup). The use in Beau Travail of Le Petit Soldat is compared with and differentiated from the use of Melville's 'Billy Budd, Sailor'. The conclusion arrived at is that the film-on-film relation can be read as a development of the mirror motif borrowed from Godard by Denis, in order to replace abyssal models of intertextual infinity with the finitudes of abyssal reflexivity. This is to offer a model of pretextuality that is not dependent on privileging the pretext: implicit is the suggestion that Beau Travail and Le Petit Soldat may be read as a single, if hybrid, text

CASE STUDY 3: Literature and Film - Reading Film: An Angel at My Table

A research case study within a chapter entitled, 'Literary Research and Other Media'; exploring the relationship between film adaptation, life writing and examining in particular the use of montage, with reference to Sergei Eisenstein's theories of montage and Jane Campion's film adaptation of Janet Frame's memoir, 'An Angel at My Table'

Zhang Yimou's 'Blood simple':cannibalism, remaking and translation in world cinema

Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop (2009) remakes the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple (1984) in a way that re-imagines the earlier film in a Chinese setting, adapting and recreating the narrative, but the film cannot be regarded as being aimed solely at a Chinese audience, as it was also released in the United States and United Kingdom. Drawing from translation studies and film studies, this article analyses how Zhang’s film adapts its source material, particularly its tendency to make explicit elements that were left implicit in the source text. The idea of cannibalization, from Brazilian modernist theory, helps explain the ambiguous orientation of the remake as both homage to and localization of the source text. This hybridity was not well received by American audiences and shows how the movie’s connection to both Zhang and the Coens leads to a dual voice in the film. The analysis demonstrates how translation and cross-cultural adaptation enrich ideas of world cinema

Film Adaption and Transnational Cultures or Production: The Case of Guillermo Arriaga

The circulation of Latin American cinema in a transnational context has widened the options that actors and directors from the region have regarding their involvement in the different aspects of film production. In order to analyze Guillermo Arriaga’s transnational career as a writer of novels and screenplays I contrast his work with that of other writers and filmmakers who have participated in both the cinematic and literary fields. The fact that Arriaga has crossed the lines between writing, adapting, and directing his own works in Spanish and English leads me to review the current relations of film and literature in general. Finally, by comparing Arriaga’s novels and films, I propose that the contemporary practice of film adaptation contributes to the “flexibilization” in the roles writers, actors, and directors play in filmmaking and in the circulation of cultural capital between film and literature in the current media markets

Book Review: the adaptation industry: the cultural economy of contemporary literary adaptation

Adaptation constitutes the driving force of contemporary culture, with stories adapted across an array of media formats. Until now, adaptation studies has been concerned almost exclusively with textual analysis, in particular with compare-and-contrast studies of individual novel and film pairings. The Adaptation Industry re-imagines adaptation not as an abstract process, but as a material industry. It presents the adaptation industry as a cultural economy of interlocking institutions, stakeholders and decision-makers all engaged in the actual business of adapting texts. Casey Brienza finds that the book is a fantastic contribution to the social scientific literature on cultural production and highly recommends it to all scholars in that fiel

A bout de souffle: the film of the book

Not the cinematic adaptation of a literary pretext: A bout de souffle (1960) by Jean-Luc Godard is based on an original treatment. Nor the book of the film: A bout de souffle (1960) by Claude Francolin is the literary adaptation of a cinematic pretext, but it is a bad book, unworthy of the film (though it was deemed worthy of re-publication in a Belgian book club edition the next year). This article describes the intertextual import of a single, six-second shot: a film of a book. Ten minutes from the end of A bout de souffle, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) scrutinizes a pile of books; Patricia (Jean Seberg) is in the room, Mozart is on the record player. In close-up, as Michel’s point-of-view, the camera pans down a book cover, delivering the following information: ‘Maurice Sachs | Abracadabra | roman | nrf | “Nous sommes des morts en permission” | LENINE’. A thumb of the hand holding the book is also in shot. The quotation from Lenin, ‘We are dead men on leave’, is on a publicity band wrapped around the book