Boredieu can be used when discussing "adaptation's centrality to an understanding of the relationship betweeen 'high' and 'low' culture and the acquisition of 'cultural capital'" according to Imelda Whelan 4
"Linking film versions with the very principle of representation...invariably involves the adaptation of a 'prior concept'. Therein lies a means of both retaining the adaptations' cultural centrality, yet ensuring that its specific features are not ignored." 4
"Mitchell insists that conflicts at the 'word-image threshhold' drive the development of human culture (mitchell 1987:44) For this reason, 'the tensions bewteeen visual and verbal representations are inseparable from struggles in cultural politics and political culture. (mitchell 1994: 3)...Mitchell's theory is grounded in examples from painting." 5
"Susan Sontag argues: 'the force of photofraphic images comes from their being...richly informative deposits left in the wake of whatever emitted them, potent means for turning the tables on reality' (Sontag : 1999:93). Photography replicates within itself the original dichotomy of (abstract) word and (concrete) image, freeing the image from its context, enabling it to partake in projects driven by ideological or commercial agenda, and balancing its links to objectivity with a capacity for the subjectivism normally associated with the word." 5
For Cardwell, the question of subordinating cinema to literature (or vice versa) does not arise, since both film and and text are adaptations which represent 'points on a continuum as part of the extended deveopment of a singular, infinite metatext (Cardwell 2002L 25). Thus, each new Macbeth is 'an adaptation of a sort of "Myth" and "ur-text" which stands outside and before each retelling of the stoy, and which contains the most fundimental parts of the tale without which an adaptation would lose its identity as that tale' (Ibid 26). 6
Western adaptations os nineteenth-centruy horror novel such as Frankenstein and Dracula, and Soviet adaptations of Socialist realist texts like Chapaev, filter the literary original through the stock of myths surrounding the central figures. Man of these myths arise not from the literary originals but from the installlation of by earlier screen adpatations of the narratives in teh popular consciousness. *" 6
"Rather than Cardwell's infintire variations on an essential ur text, we might be said to be dealing with a three-way struggle for representational pre-eminence between film, legend and text (a struggle to assert a claim to be the authentic representation of Dracula, or of Chapaev) inseparable from the material context in which the struggle unfolds. This comes close to Mitchell's notiion of a battle for 'Proproetary tights on nature' and the word-image threshold ad the site of a cultures' 'fundamental convlicts and tensions' (mitchell 1987:44)." 7
One problem post soviet film has had is "to reconcile within the screen adaptation Russian logoentrism with Western image-based commercial culture." 7
"During the 1960s and 70s, Soviet film adaptations bifurcated into adpataions proer and those freer adpatation defined as films according to the motifs of a literary source (po motivam...). Premepting Villasur's notion of the 'literary film', V. Kozhinov explains that the dividing line between the two is fulid, yet cites the distinction as evidence, on the one hand, of the strong heritage of teh written word in Russina culture (the tow catefories conver a vast range of Soviet films), and, on the other hand, of the reditions's elasticity (Kozhinov 1973: 12)." 11
"In a reprise of Stalinist policy, but to reverse ideological effect, established literary classics are now screened to bolster an officially sanctioned Russina national identity. Whereas Pushkin's portrayal of Pugachev's eighteenth -century peasant revolt was once appropriated into revolutionary mythology, it now emblematizes the stain on authentic Russian-ness that is Bolshevism's current symbolic status. Thus, the new Pushkin adapation polemicizes with a 1958 soviet ekranizatsiia of the tale, underscoring, as does Prisoner of the Caucausus, the fact that adaptations are interpretations (rather than translations) which establish intertexual relations with their predecessors, as well as with literary sources." 22
"We are dealing, then, with two intersecting realms of authority - the political and the literary - and the fact that the ekranizatsiia is locates at the point of intersection is in itself reason enough to pay it attention. However, the situation is rendered still more fraught by cinema's proximity to the levers of power. Heavily reliant on central funding, film tended to be both a more reliable barometer of shifts in policy during the Soviet period than literature, and a more rigorous implementer of the values on which those policies rested. For this reason, the ekranizatsii was liable to counter incipient literary centrifugalism with its own centripetal force, functioning as a vital corrective to literary waywardness and exchanging its authenticating activity for the reverse:that of guarantor of ideological rectitude." 61
"If war is the great universaling authentiator, then war children redouble that authenticating effect, rendering children's fiction paradidmatic of wartime are. Third, precisly because it is unsullied by 'trecherous' adult consciousness, the world of children can be separated off from society at large and made to model it from a distance as its metaphor, whilst at the same tiem aspiring, orphan-like, to be apoped into it. Forth, the screen adaptation of children's wartime fiction draws on differences in aestethic logic , target different audience and inscribed subject positions bewteen film and literature in order both to reinforce the functions of the literary sources and to add to them a new dimension: that of the adult viewer, the suspension of whose consicousness bewteen 'objective' parent and 'subjective' child plays out the tensions between individual and collective, bodily reality and abstract ideology, particular and general, by which Stalinist society is beset." 62
117,118 - scanned
"As a writer Shukshin understood the power of the word. But as a director, Shukshin also understood that literature and cinema are two different languages. Therefore, screening his own short stories , he acknowledged, was 'also translating from one language to another'. On the one hand, writers must understand that the very lines they insist should make it on to the screen will change in emphasis and meaning depending on the actor reading them and what the camera shows at the time. Directors, on the other hand, 'often do not fee that a word can also be and image', according to Shukshin, and therefore do not exploit the visual potential latent in words (Shukshin 1981: 169)." 119
"Most important of all , Shukshin frees his visual imagination and his cameraman to create a cinematic style that achieves what good film adapations should; he provides not just a film equivalent of his stories, but discovers in those stories though the mechanism of his adatation a depth and truth that reveals them anew to his movie audience."125
"Russia traditionally had a special relationship to literary classics. Soviet filmmakers were larely concerned with fidelity to the original and the political correctness of their interpretation. Soviet criticism tended to make the issue of the filmmaker's fidelity to the writer's intention a measure of his loyalty to the Russian classical heritage and, by extension, to the ideological correctness of his views within the value system of Social Realism. From this premise stems the common insistence by soviet critics that the merit of a screen adaptation lies in its 'accurate' and 'truthful' rendering of the original; any omission or addition equaled a distortion of the work. The literary adaptations for stage and screen in several leading Russian literary journals and newspapers in the 1970s. After the thaw, departing fro the original became common practice. Artists sought to express the text's significance for the present, while the return to nineteenth-century Russia frequently served as a backdrop for criticism of the present, albeit in a hidden and disguised form. This is particularly true for the theater, where more liberal and lax adaptations of the classics found their way on to the stage." 137
"Russian nature is impressive, all embracing and beutitful, but it is not a national space. Konchalovskii's Russia is a 'motherland' (rodina) with distinctly female qualities 9barenness, fertility) and therefore associated with the mother.daughter figures in Nest. Konchalovskyii's characters remember a precise historical or personal past associated with this motherland (famine in Uncle Vania, a mother's you in Nest)."142
"The image of a child in the Russian plains encompasses nostalgia for a Russia of the past. Oblomov wants to return to his childhood, Mikhailkov to nineteenth-century Russia. The sequences suggest Russia's expanse, its vastness, but - through the association with a child - its immaturity and, in the context of the narrative, the inability of the character to be at one with the present. The characters idealize a Russia of their childhood as the dream of a return to a sheltered past, not unlike Chekhov's Three Sisters associating the location Moscow with the past. The past is reconstructed in the final shots from a spatial and temporal distance that is not acknowledged, repeating the past in the here and now. The boy Andriusha could just as well be Illiusha; the past therefore equals the present and time is frozen, without a possibility for change." 144
"Seymour Chatman argues that, as description etails a stoppage of story-time, 'films do not and cannot describe.'. Filmic story time is, so to speak, a;wasy running, and the breif suspensions in which the author of a literary work migh freeze a moment in order to suppy descriptie detail are made impossible, or at least highly awkward, by the medium itself:
'whereas in novels, movements and hence events are at best constructions imaged by the reader out of words, that is, abstract symbols which are different from them in kind, the movements on the screen are so iconic, so like the real life movements they imitate, that the illusion of time passage simply cannot be divorced from them. Once that illusory story-time is established in a film, even dead moments, moments, when nothing moves, will be felt to be part of the temporal whole, just as the taxi meter continues to run as we sit fidgeting in a traffic jam.'" 153
Time in Moscow - as often it slows down in the gloom - for a child? - Just a few days are recorded. School, friends? The child is alone. Anton is reborn? Like in C &P?
Are the adult views made to fear for th life of the child?
The film's lack of actual magic. Budget reasons or on purpose? Keep it looking real and not fantasy?
a shift from the standard vampire film - no real focus on the vampires - they are a secondary them in the film.
What is Yegor's status as an orphan? he is happy to have Anton until he is abandoned a second time? or is it because he tries to kill Yegor a second time? Orphan trope from Ivanova Detstvo? Is Yegor the son of the NW or the DW? What is the authority in yegor's life? NW/DW? The son is better than the father - like in Starwars? Is Yegor fated to be great because he is the son of an Other? Father has unknown son - learns to love him. Anton picks up lost son in the vampire neighbor.
Compare NW to Ivanovo Detsvo and Molodaya Gvardia. Adoption during Putin period vs orphan during Yeltsin period. Metaphore for Putin years as super family - adoptive state?
Watch Tarkovsky! for camera work. color, black and white flashbacks from Mirror - it merges past and present
Rodina or birth as it pertains to NW. Is there a femininity or masculin - account for the times
Does yegor in the city look forward? Is there any nod to the past/pastoral Russia of Soviet period? Or for the future?
Anton is incapable of causing the chagne he desires. He doesn't let it go by unnotice, but cannot be the medium for change. He is not Darth Vader. He causes change, but runs around trying all the same. Does he look to the past - yes. But not to change it. He wants to change teh NW. Does he actually regret his past decisions or has he let them go?
How does the chaos in the apartments differ from that outside? Is yegor safe at home? Sort of. Home is lost as a sanctuary - all can get in or can call you out from it against your will. Outside is more chaotic - average person is asleep in their homes not knowing what happens around them, but few battle for the souls of all. Russia is not waking up, but a few are engaged in its future. "inactivity and somnomulism"
Is Anton a clown or a protector in NW?
Is there a show of Russia as a part of Europe or on it's own?
"in NW there is no encapsulated youth, no idealized Russian childhood, no coccooned existnace or dream of a retun to a sheltered past 149."
In NW is there any time stoppage - only when either NW or DW want time to stop - special effect - not a focus in the film as meaningful.
Significant that it takes place in Moscow and not St. Petersburg? Most and least Russian city - connection to power and past?
vengeance is a minor theme in the NW. THe vamp girl has other needs that bring her to hunt yegor, but it is a type of vengeance that she brings him in - however it is a lawful veangeance.
She wants the law and a trial to decide her fate. Are the DW after Anton as vengeance for killing the hair dresser? Vengence as an eye for an eye - Anton's giving in to DW in novel an film? You give, you get NW, then DW rule Moscow.
NW and DW as armies - commentory on who and how succeeds in battles?
What kind of a man in Anton? - not a good filed officer, but can't be at a computer - destined for something else, but not good at it. not with women unless they are literally cursed. Not with the boss. Not as a father. He is not a death dealing male. he does bring a bit of chaos to a situation since he doesn't do things by the book. he follows his gut and it saves him and others. he is like trying to bet against a novice poker player.
Ar men in NW emasculated? Can't just kill as vampire without a licese. Can't do good or bad without a consequence from the other side. Why would a man follow NW and the light and not go for the dark and DW? must be something wrong with him?
quoted Goscilo "verticle axis of intensivication' in the film vs "horizontal axis of plot accumulation" in literature.185
Quote Lotman "Death, sexual relations, birth"
Space - in apartmentss, offices, top of roof - battles are outside - on bridge/ on roof - temporal areas.
Subway and in salon, gorsvet offices in car/plane - enter/exit areas - what happens to plot?
Murnau's dracula "Cinema's ability to interpret a literary text through a director's bold imaginative reading and render it in visual terms." goscilo 192
Anton suggests anotehr way - not successfully, but he tries.
There is some benefit to Bekmambetov making a film from NW - few have read the novel - not like doing Dracula or Sherlock holmes or War and Peace aain. Little dialogue between novel and film for viewers and readers.
Bridge/ Roof - Chronotopes - Bakhtin - location .time - these tow create a dialog as bookends to the film mark begininng and end - a resolution of the crisis - the chronotope is crisis mode - a break in life "Time is essential, instantaneous, it is if it has no duration and falls out of the normal course of biagraphical time." BAkhtin 198
The twighlight - as from the "overcoat: and St. Peter fog? - the devil lights the lamps?
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