INADAPTATION: FOR A CO-HISTORY OF LITERATURE AND CINEMA

Wednesday, 6 November, 6pm

Under what conditions can we speak of an authentic shared history – or a co-history – between literature and cinema? While, traditionally, emphasis is put on the central figure of the writer-director, I will advocate the study of the processes of adaptability. In other words, a complex dynamic, which involves commercial, script-writing and critical considerations, but above all a continuous process, in which the abandonment of projects is not reduced to failure. At the intersection of literature and cinema, then, lies a vast field of mis-adaptations – texts in a variety of forms that are neither directly literature, nor directly cinema (because a film, as a work, only exists once it has been fixed in images and projected onto a screen). For reasons involving authors’ rights and discretion with regard to abandoned projects, this extraordinarily productive in-between area remains mostly inaccessible to us: the example of the successive mis-adaptations of Malraux’s La Condition humaine nevertheless will give some idea of its scope and interest.

Prof. Jean-Louis Jeannelle (University Paris-Sorbonne) is a leading expert on the relations between literature and film, and on literary theory.

Prof. Jean-Louis Jeannelle: A Co-History of Literature and Cinema / Intermediality: Literature, Film and the Arts in Dialogue by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0