film adaptation

CANONICAL AND NON-CANONICAL IN LITERATURE AND CINEMA

07/05/2023

Boyko Penchev

Does Cinema Kill off the “Eternal” Baba Nedelya?

  • ABSTRACT

    The paper examines the transformation of narrative elements in the film adaptation of the collections “Roots” and “Eternal Times”, as realized in Assen Shopov’s 1974 film “Eternal Times”. Attention is focused on the differences in the construction of the image of Baba Nedelya in the literary text and in the film. The death of grandmother Nedelya, presented in the film, is seen as part of the overall strategy of cinema of this period, which dissolves the cyclical ‘eternity’ constructed by the literary text, locating it along the axis of socio-historical time.


07/05/2023

Nikolay Genov

Ready Player One on Screen: Cline and Spielberg’s Alternative Canon


01/14/2022

Alexander Panov, Prof. DSc.

REPETITION AS A PROBLEM OF CULTURE

  • ABSTRACT

    The article tries to answer the question of what are the reasons for the emergence of repetition as a sustainable cultural practice. The need for it is derived first of all from the fact that culture is a phenomenon that is not inherited biologically, and therefore in the process of its transmission from generation to generation its norms must be constantly recalled and updated. Hence the need for each new idea to be legitimized as inherited from tradition. However, in the epoch of modern literature and culture, which raises the individual-creative 37principle as its main principle, this need for repetition is a paradox. And especially a manifestation of repetition, known as a remake. Moreover, the definition of this phenomenon is based not simply on the development of sustainable motifs and plots, but on their processing in previous works of art, building a specific fund of culture, which the German researcher Elizabeth Frenzel defined with the term Stoff. To find an answer to this paradox, the article analyzes two typical cases: The two film adaptations of Indro Montanelli’s novel “Il Generale della Rovere” made by Roberto Rossellini in 1959 and Carlo Carlei in 2011, on the one hand, and on the other – the famous novel quatrain of Thomas Mann “Joseph and his brothers”, written on a famous biblical story. As a result of the analysis of these typical cases, the article comes to the answer to the question what is the function of repetition in culture. On the one hand, it aims to bring the existing order of problematization and revaluation in line with the needs of the changing social environment. On the other hand, pointing to the ancient roots of the developed motif, repetition provides identity and continuity of the world. And the phenomenon of remake, as a child of the postmodern era, introduces a very effective rule: Let us not be deceived that our way of seeing and appreciating the world is the only right one. It is much better to compare different ways, which provides a much more reliable basis for free moral judgment, while preserving the stability and identity of the world.