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Adapting patience (waiting): Robert Bresson's Journal d'un curé de campagne (1951)

2014; Taylor & Francis; Linguagem: Inglês

1758-9517

Thomas Deane Tucker,

Law in Society and Culture

AbstractIn an essay titled ‘The Stylistics of Robert Bresson’, Andre Bazin discusses the problem of fidelity surrounding film adaptations of literary works exemplified by Robert Bresson's Journal d'un cure de campagne. Despite Bresson's avowed intention to follow the book word for word, Bazin recognizes that the film is not a literal translation of Bernanos's novel, but that Bresson achieves a more ‘insidious kind of fidelity’. Bazin argues that Bresson's textual fidelity to the novel is so contradictory that the film version of Journal d'un cure de campagne is more literary than the novel, and the novel more cinematic than the film version. Bazin maintains that Bresson is faithful to the original text in his narrative emphasis upon its literary character, but also ironically in his stylistic ‘cutting’ away of parts of the novel. This fidelity is so paradoxical that the fragments left over are still part of the original. Although adaptation and translation are not identical operations, the screenplay adap...