Alternative Inheritances: Re-Thinking What Adaptation Might Mean in François Ozon's le Temps Qui Reste [Time to Leave]
2008; Salisbury University; Volume: 36; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoFilm adaptation is frequently considered most narrow and provincial area of film theory by its detractors, who characterize it caught up in old debates about worth of film against other art forms (Andrew 28). Robert Stam argues that much of antipathy toward film adaptation comes from the myth of facility and idea that films are somehow suspiciously easy to watch, leading to a class prejudice, and a division of popularity versus prestige. Critics lambaste filmic betrayals of modernist novels, for example, while forgetting filmic redemption of many non-modernist novels. They denounce Joseph Strick version of Joyce's Ulysses, but forget to laud Hitchcock's innovative transmogrification of du Maurier's story The Birds (4). A familiar series of binary oppositions emerges: literature versus cinema; high art versus mass culture; original versus copy. Recent scholarship by James Naremore, Dudley Andrew, and Robert Stam has moved away from diese conceptions, focusing not on radier subjective question of quality of adaptations, rather [on . . .] more interesting issues of 1) theoretical status of adaptation and 2) analytical interest of (Stam 4). Indeed, radier than seeing adaptations a simple question of which form is best suited to particular ways of conveying meaning (for example, is book better than film?), Andrew argues that theories of adaptation are potentially as far reaching you like, referring to way in which adaptation partakes in a general theory of intertextuality (28). Considerations of categories such free and transfigurations have begun to move away from fetishizing of original over copy, into a more general examination of multiple influences exercised over new filmic text (Grant). In this article, I use this conception of adaptation interpretation, change, and influence, arguing that such an understanding of term celebrates possibilities of difference within textual (reproduction. The use of term reproduction is not an innocent one here, terms used to criticize film adaptation tend to be overwhelmingly sexual in nature. The film copy is condemned guilty of infidelity, betrayal, deformation, violation, bastardization, and vulgarization. Several of these terms conjure up not only aesthetic disgust but also moral and sexual outrage. The notion that a filmic adaptation has to be faithful to a source text resonates with a Victorian prudishness and perhaps fear of miscegenation: adaptation draws attention to its own reproductive act in which this reproduction aims to reduce difference far possible, to find correlative of one medium (literature) in another (film). My interest here is in film that works to introduce difference port of process of adaptation and that challenges notion of a straight inheritance to avow queerness both in its antecedent texts and its own body. Francois Ozon's Le Temps qui reste [Time to Leave] (2005) lends itself to this reading. A moving study of a young man's last few months alive, it belongs to more intimate strain in Ozon's work, and seems a less likely candidate for exploring adaptation than his more flamboyant 8 femmes (2002). There are however several reasons to study Ozon's film a critical reflection upon process of adaptation. First, it has attracted less critical attention with regard to its interest in hybridity and adaptation than other Ozon films, precisely because this interest is less obviously marked; second, because it borrows widely from other films, notably those of Eric Rohmer, Francois Truffaut, and Ingmar Bergman; and third, because its style and theme concern itself intimately with process of change from one art form to another (here, photography and cinema), with citation and representation, and with adaptation in largest sense of term, our coming-to-terms with change in our lives. …
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