there are several films produced from works originally published in books. Both the film and the book communicate with their audiences, but, naturally, as they are different means of communication, each has its advantages and disadvantages. The comparison between one and the other is unfeasible precisely because they are different ways of having contact with a content, they are different ways of interpreting the same point.
Comparing the literary works with film productions, it is possible to say that the former tend to have more sharpness of detail, whereas movies tend to lose in richness in their content, but gain angles, sound and other image treatments.
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This happens because both works make a real world representation, that is, what we have of immediate experience and, when it comes to representations of experiences, writing tends to have more objectivity, with reading being much more direct and contextualized. On the other hand, the film tends to allow a richer reading, although more subjective, because it does not have a point of view specific as the writing (linked to the narrator) - since it is an adaptation subject to changes in angles, cuts, edits and adaptations.
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The Adaptation Process
You books that become movies start to gain another interpretation, not meaning to be better or worse than the book itself, although many book adaptations for the cinema end up leaving a lot to be desired. The problem lies not in the adaptation of a linear medium to an imagery in itself, but in the forms used by the director to represent written history.
Thus, there are films that manage, through images and sound, to convey information as well as writing, however, each one in its own way. As an example, we will analyze the work below Death and Severe Life, by João Cabral de Melo Neto, and its respective film adaptation, as well as Blindness essay, by José Saramago and also adapted for the cinema.
Adaptation analysis
death and severe life
From left to right: film and book adaptation of 'Death and Severine Life'.
O poem, which has its musicality marked by rhymes and phonetic combinations, gains a specific musicality when narrated by the actor's voice. Although writing represents such musicality, it does not do so until the reader, on their own initiative, reads it aloud and with a certain intonation and adequate pauses.
According to the website Cinemateca Brasileira, the film, directed and produced by Zelito Viana, was released in 1977, fitting into the genre of musical. Both the written poem and the film portray the migrant's story severine, who, leaving Serra da Costela, is looking for a place where he can work and support himself.
running away from dry and of the hunger, the character goes through several places, among them the wake of another Severino, who, as the author describes, 'are singing excellencies for the deceased'. This scene in the book is described linearly in 23 stanzas. In the film, this scene gains not only musicality, but also an angle, a perspective, an illumination, which start to compose an interpretation of the situation.
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The image, from inside the dark and humble house that veiled the deceased, through a window, frames Severino da Serra da Rib arriving under strong sun, which can represent, in this scene, the life that exists in the sun through the illuminated image in severine alive, in contrast to the dark room that keeps Severino deceased. All this happens with the funeral songs, which the book describes in words.
Thus, the film was able to present a possibility of interpretation as the book did, but in a different way. It is noticed that both media (book and film) are capable of transmitting information, however, each one in its own way.
Blindness essay
From left to right: film and book adaptation ‘Essay on Blindness’.
Another work that was acclaimed not only in its written version, but also in its audiovisual version was the book Blindness essay, by José Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, being the only Portuguese-speaking author to win a Nobel; and his film, adapted in 2008 by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles. The film opened the Cannes Film Festival in the same year of its release.
Saramago said that ‘cinema destroys the imagination’, since, in fact, the image that the screen presents starts to configure the definitive image and, therefore, the author does not allowed numerous attempts at audiovisual interpretations of his work, for fear of compromising it with the image of his adaptation. However, the author himself was happy with Meirelles' adaptation.
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The book addresses an inexplicable phenomenon of white blindness that gradually reaches all the citizens of a city, generating fictional images that are quite strong both in terms of the content of characterization of space and history as well as the form of writing itself, which creates and explains in an engaging way how the vision of the characters, their understanding of themselves and their surroundings and also what the doctor's wife looks like, the only character capable of seeing the world and your real situation.
In history, the first ones infected with the supposed disease that caused white blindness - a blindness that made the white vision as if immersed in milk - they are quarantined in a kind of hospital and, there, in a little blind society, those who had more resources, such as knowing how to read Braille, began to violently command the others, reflecting on how society would be if everyone was blind, proving that the subjectivity of each one creates personal interpretations that do not always dialogue with the reality of other people in the surroundings.
For the adaptation of the book into film, techniques of focus and blur, overexposure and variations of tones in the image were used, which provided visual interpretations of the text analogous to those of writing, being, therefore, another means of interpreting it. story.
By M. Fernando Marinho