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Nature scaled to body: literary adaptation, space, and genre in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) and G.W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918 (1930)

2019; Routledge; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17400309.2019.1563362

1740-7923

Jaimey Fisher,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

The issue of filmic adaptation of literature in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) has roused a wide range of responses from critics. A comparison to another important war adaptation – G.W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918, of Ernst Johannsen’s novel Four from the Infantry – reveals various issues relating to adaptation, particularly how filmmakers foreground embodied affect as a means to convey a novels’ anti-war message. Although many critics and scholars have cited F.W. Murnau’s Tabu (1931) as an influence, the comparison to Westfront yields more intriguing parallels, particularly in how the two adaptations work with, and against, the war genre. The films vary core elements of the syntax of the war genre in parallel ways, including: the diegetic distance from home; the scaling of the plot from individual to nation (and back again); and the deliberate transformation of scenic landscape into subjugated territory. These embodied and affective parallels in the adaptations complicate the visual hegemony that Paul Virilio has influentially emphasized, as well as the relationship among the perception-, movement-, and time-images in Deleuze’s Cinema model.