CANONICAL AND NON-CANONICAL IN LITERATURE AND CINEMA

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.

This research elaborates on the recognition that Woody Allen’s films and short stories are markedly linked to the literary canon. It features the reiterated indebtedness of his scripts to the classical Russian novel and the ancient Greek tragedy. The paper makes observations on the specificity of Allen’s interpretation of exemplary literary texts, and proposes a hypothesis about the mechanism behind the transmedia references analysed here.

Starting from several Eisensteinian publications from the late 1920s, this article discusses the problem of a deep, essential closeness between the language of cinema as the perfect symbiosis of language and technology (and the film camera as the perfect machine) and different modes of Eastern/Japanese traditional culture: haiku poetry, kabuki theater, traditional ukiyo-e painting, and the nature of pictographic writing itself. This “language” plot is considered as part of the large-scale turn in Western culture/ art in the early twentieth century as a radical crisis-renewal act of overcoming one’s own “classical” tradition of relation to reality. The “second” Heidegger and particularly “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer”(1953/54) was used as a philosophical paradigm of the plot.

This paper is part of a larger study on the essay film. It aims to explore more exactly the “essayistic” in and through film, where the essayistic indicates a kind of encounter between the self and the public domain, an encounter that measures the limits and possibilities of each as a conceptual activity. Appearing within many different artistic and material forms besides the essay film, the essayistic acts out a performative presentation of self as a kind of self-negation in which narrative or experimental structures are subsumed within the process of thinking through a public experience