Adaptations, refractions, and obstructions: the

prophecies of Andr Bazin

Timothy Corrigan

Revista Falso Movimiento, n1

(http://revistafalsomovimento.com/adaptations-refractions-and-
obstructions-the-prophecies-of-andre-bazin-timothy-corrigan/ )
This essay is a rather odd look at a particular shape of adaptation today as what Ill call a refractive
environment, a look that may seem slightly less peculiar if we keep in mind that Im poaching my
fundamental terms and ideas and what they suggest from essays by Andr Bazin. Alongside my
abiding respect for traditional pathways into adaptation studies, my direction here has little to do
with cinematic adaptation in most of the usual senses. Instead I want to follow Bazins terms as
dynamic metaphors for some ways of thinking about adaptation studies today and, as a somewhat
more provocative move, of raising some questions about the advancement of adaptation studies
into todays environment as an evolutionary shift that might be best served by looking backward.
Here is where the 2002 film Adaptation becomes a clever allegory for adaptation studies today and
a reminder that theres no escaping our cultural environment and even we textual scholars are
capable of surviving. If this Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman film identifies the danger of adaptation
as a psychological and textual narcissism blocked and obstructed by its commitment to singularity,
the film follows that danger along a Darwinian path that moves from a romantic and solipsistic
individualism to its commercial transformation, from passionless fidelity to passionate infidelity.
The twins Charlie and Donald Kaufman become both an aesthetic and a biological image of
adaptation, two figures whose struggle to define and differentiate themselves madly expands and
redirects a tortured character study into a mystery about drugs and death, an action film with car
crashes, man-eating alligators, and ultimately about the triumph of life as the triumph of
commerce and industry. While infidelity permeates the plot involving Susan Orleans and her
orchid thief lover, in the end fidelity is ultimately reconstituted in the film as a personal and textual
commitment to faithful change and personal passion and environmental transformation. If
Donalds lesson is that change is not a choice, it is a learned lesson through which his paralytic
insistence on authorial expression and textual integrity gives way to the demands of a social and
industrial environment as the always evolving prism of both. The horror of mere duplication
embodied in twins becomes the triumph of continual environmental adaptation where to survive
is to follow your passions about what you love and not, as Donalds puts it, what loves you. As the
strangely hilarious climax of the film suggests, you can adapt to the world or be eaten by an
alligator.
1. Trends since 2000: The Environment of Multiplication
For me three recent trends stand out in adaptation practices of the last decade. First, the
proliferation of the adaptation of classical texts from Shakespeare to Austen and beyond has
increased to noticeable degree across different venues and different cultures. Second, blockbuster
adaptations, most notably of the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series, have figured as the
most economically and commercially reliable force in the industry today, generating sequel after
sequel, as serial duplications that advance canonized literary texts through a seemingly
inexhaustible series of reincarnations. Third and most distinctive, graphic novels, comic books,
and video games have now become primary and popular sources for films and repositories
themselves for adaptations that respond to the unique representational overlap between source
and adaptation as they re-cyle both visual images and graphic mise-en-scenes.
Related to this last trend have been the social and industrial changes of the last ten years that in
turn have often impacted and provided the environment for these textual directions. Here Im
referring to the multiplication and proliferation of technologies and contexts, across computer
games through internet sites, through which adaptations now circulate as part of a so-called
convergence culture, a cultural environment that has inflected, if not defined, how films and
other media are now received as a series of remediations, transmutations, and
intertextualities that transpose and translate texts as replications, interactive exchanges, and
more importantly as adaptations in the broadest and most resonant sense.
This particularly contemporary movement towards proliferation and replication has, Id argue,
been part of the adaptation evolution at least since Bazins work in the 1950s. Since the 1940s, in
fact, modern narrative cinema has provided numerous examples of where the activity and thematic
of adaptation has been about remediation as survival. Witnessed in Laurence Oliviers movement
between the stage and the cinematic scene at the celebrated transitional moment in Henry
V (1944), later in Godards crashing of cultures and texts in Contempt (1961), and more recently in
R. W. Fassbinders 1980 epilogue in his Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) that transforms the Doblin
novel into a personal psychic landscape, in each adaptations have aggressively reshaped, distorted,
condensed, extended, and reposition literary texts as a self-conscious testings of the material and
social limits of those texts and, concomitantly, of the films themselves. For me, these three films
act as exempla, calling (exaggerated) attention to a definitive, if less obtrusive, evolution in modern
adaptation and its theories: as the redistribution of texts through different technologies, as a
recognition that betrayal may be as cinematically productive as fidelity, and as the dissipation of
authorial expressivity within the social and material fabric of reception. For me, each of these films
anticipates the charged state of adaptation today in which adaptation for both filmmakers and
critics is ultimately about multiplication not as repetition or duplication but as a productive
refraction that is ultimately an act of criticism, an act of criticism in which critics of adaptation
have an obvious and important role to play.
A contemporary environment of redundancy and duplication can thus not only be seen as
subverting the traditional status of adaptation as a singular dialogue between two primary texts
but, more importantly I think, it can be seen as bringing into high relief adaptation as an act of
critical intervention in their historical and cultural environment. Rather than some sort of crisis,
this state of adaptation might be seen as a salutary call to reexamine questions of value through
the lens of adaptation, to ask in new ways what matters in this cultural field of multiplying
adaptation. And why. This becomes no longer a theoretical question about source texts or
transtextual movements in adaptation. It becomes a question of how adaptation practices, texts,
and studies answer or provoke new and old questions about the material world in which we live. It
is a question of how the adaptations that today suffuse a cultural environment and how the
adaptation studies that identify them can and should assume the stance of critical interventionist
within that environment. Lets recall that famous scene in Clueless where that surfer of
postmodern images, Cher, correctly counters an academic debate about Shakespeares Hamlet by
assuring her graduate student opponent that while the rival may think she knows her Hamlet Cher
knows her Mel Gibson.
Why adaptation studies are more important than ever and why they are more difficult and
challenging than ever in our contemporary environment is for the very same reason: adaptation
has more shapes, wider boundaries and much vaguer definitions than ever before and, in this
environment, has become pervasively about meaning and values in a far larger sense perhaps than
ever before.
2. Backward Evolution: Bazin, Refractive Cinema, and Aesthetic Biology
Its in this contemporary context that I wish to draw on what I tongue-cheek refer to as Bazins
prophetic observations and specifically his notion that adaptation is a refractive activity that
redirects, multiplies, and disperses different texts and perspectives. Writing in the 1950s, Bazin
introduces this notion of refraction as a model for a kind of adaptation when he describes Robert
Bressons adaptation of a Diary of a Country Priest (1951) as a dialectic between cinema and
literature that includes all that the novel has to offer plus. . . its refraction into the cinema (Bazin
1967: 143)1). He insists that there is no question here of translation. Still less is it a question of free
inspiration with the intention of building a duplicate. It is a question of building a secondary work
with the novel as foundation. . . . It is a new aesthetic creation, the novel so to speak multipliedby
the cinema (142). In an essay written three years earlier, he anticipates this idea when he describe
film adaptation as analogous to Andr Malrauxs imaginary museum in which adaptation refracts
the original painting into millions of facts thanks to photographic reproduction, and it substitutes
for that original image of different dimensions and colors that are readily accessible to all
(Naremore 2000: 19). Adaptation requires, Bazin says in another essay, a scientific knowledge
associated with the field of optics in which the complexity of an adaptation can bee seen as
compensation for the distortions, the aberrations, the diffractions of the lens (In Defense of
Mixed Cinema, in Bazin 1967: 69). All it takes, he says in a phrase that anchors my argument
here, is for the critic to have the eyes to see it (Naremore 2000: 20).
With Resnaiss brilliant 1948 Van Gogh as a primary example, adaptation as refraction becomes,
in short, a symbiotic multiplication of forms, putting into play a productive interaction of different
kinds of what Bazin calls aesthetic biologies (Bazin 1967: 142). This last phrase obliquely suggests
the physical and material terms of adaptation and the evolutionary pressure that dogs it. More
importantly, Bazins sense of adaptation as refraction anticipates, I believe, a contemporary
climate in which hierarchies and precedents lose their privileges as texts as they create a prismatic
environment of intersections, overlappings, and misdirections. As Bazin notes in another essay,
adaptations do not derive from the cinema as an art form but as a sociological and industrial fact.
(1967: 65).
The environmental nature of this refractive climate is spelled out more boldly by Bazin in his essay
on adaptation as digest. The majority of adaptations, he says, are condensed versions, summaries,
film digests (Naremore 2000: 21), and adaptations as refraction then become not so much about
the actual condensing or simplification of works but about the way they are consumed, the ease
of physical access creating an atmospheric culture (Id. Ibid.). Bazins example of this
atmospheric culture and the evolving proliferation of cultural texts and practices within it is radio
whose environment of consumption is a dim foreshadowing of our contemporary technological
environment, notably lacking the interactivity of Internet and other delivery systems today. The
emphasis on the consumption of a film adaptation within this environment is, however, most
critical here, as it relocates the expressive singularity that has always underpinned traditional
adaptation in the material environment of its reception. Well before it became both obvious and
fashionable, this environment brings seriously into question the traditional cornerstones of
adaptation: The ferocious defense of literary works, Bazin argues, is to a certain extent,
aesthetically justified; but we must also be aware that it rests on a rather recent, individualistic
conception of the author and of the work, a conception that was far from being ethically rigorous
in the seventeenth century and that started to become legally defined only at the end of the
eighteenth [], the birth of the new aesthetic Middle Ages, whose reign is to be found in the
accession of the masses to power (or at least their participation in it) and in the emergence of an
artistic form to complement that accession: the cinema All things considered, it is possible to
imagine that we are moving toward a reign of adaptation in which the notion of the unity of the
work of art, if not the notion of the author himself will be destroyed (Naremore 2000: 23-26).
Sounding a bit like Walter Benjamin here, he argues: The aesthetic energy is all there, but it is
distributed or, perhaps better, dissipated differently according to the demands of the camera
lens (Naremore 2000: 25) or, I would add, the many other cultural and material lenses through
which adaptations now pass.
In extending and re-adapting Bazins term refractive and emphasizing a practice of deflection or
dispersal, I am differentiating these films from the common characterization of films as (self)
reflexive or reflective cinema where works typically turn back on themselves or a literary
precedent to comment on their own making. Refractive suggests a kind of unmaking or
disturbance of an equilibrium of the work of art or the film (Bazin 1967: 68). Like the beam of light
sent through a refractive cube, refractive cinema breaks up and disperses the art or object it
engages, splinters or deflects it in ways that leave the original work scattered and redirected
through a world outside. This refractive cube of social, media, and material challenges provide, I
believe, the productive obstructions of contemporary adaptation.
Bazins remarks ask us not to think only about the aesthetics of adaptationthe genius behind it,
artistic strategies, or its emotional and imaginative communicationsand instead to
emphasize value as a fundamental part of adaptation studies. He suggests that adaptation is an
additive process, and refractive cinema makes adaptation an exponentially additive process that
demands, especially in todays climate, the additions of critical value (In Defense of Mixed
Cinema, in Bazin 1967: 70, 75). As in the films of Olivier, Godard, and Fassbinder, refractive
adaptations into our prismatic environment tend, in a variety of ways, to draw attention to where
the material and social environment act as productive obstructions, a term Im using in a large
sense. Obstructions here test the limits of different kinds of textualities and the strategies for
understanding of themfrom the technological to the political and aesthetic to the historical
subject formations, textual, social, and material obstructions clarify what counts and what doesnt
is a crucial mission for how criticism reacts to and adapts those practices. In one sense, we textual
scholars need today to sometimes be sociologists and scientists, discovering the flashpoints and
crashpoints that adaptations reveal in the world. To adapt Bazins wonderful analogy for the
adaptation of theater on film: without a central historical and critical chandelier today, wed do
well to move through media culture with historical and cultural flashlights that choose to
illuminate our evolutionary future through a past where adaptation studies had little direction and
fewer model. What matters then and now is why adaptation studies are important in a fundamental
and broad sense.

3. Surviving Obstructions
In her A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon has sharply updated Bazin within what she calls
a continuum model that positions adaptations specifically as (re-) interpretations and (re-)
creations (Hutcheon 2006: 172). At the opposite end of this continuum from fidelity, adaptation
now appears as various forms of expansion. At this expanding site on her coninuum a film like
Play It Again Sam (1972) that offers an overt and critical commentary on another prior film (in
this case, Casablanca [1942]) finds a place here, but so do, Hutcheon continues, academic
criticism and reviews of a work (171). This far end is where the contemporary culture of adaptation
seems to be settling, I believe, and Id extend Hutcheons suggestions even further to include the
continual flow of adaptive commentaries and recreations as DVD supplements and other
reinventions and interventions as one or more texts, palimpsests, or social commentaries
including the work we do as critical scholars adapting texts and films to the world and journals we
live in. Meanwhile this refractive consciousness and movement finds its way into the practice of
specific films, not just recognizable adaptations but even less literary films, as what I will call a
refractive cinema in an effort to distinguish it from the usual characterization of certain self-
conscious films as reflexive cinema. Sometimes these films do not look or act like adaptations in a
conventional sense, yet this is, in large part, because they work to dramatize the fault lines of
adaptation less as a textual practice and more as a social practice, opening itself up to the
obstructions of a material world and its multilayered cultures. Adaptations are about surviving the
technological, social, political, and economic obstructions, and one of the key opportunities in
adaptations studies today, Id argue, is about identifying what the encounter with those
obstructions tell us our environment and world.
My model for this project might be Lars von Triers 2003 The Five Obstructions, a film about a
refractive dialogue between von Trier and filmmaker Jorgen Leth. A tongue-in-cheek inversion of
cinema verit, the film describes an encounter in which von Trier proposes that Leth adapt his
avant-garde classic The Perfect Humana1967 film which features the minimalist movements and
abstracted living patterns of a perfect human and perfect textadapting it to five precisely
defined requirements or obstructions. Trier quite literally tests Leths abilities by asking him
to remake his original film according to specific experiential conditions proposed by von Trier as
five obstructions: 1) in Cuba with no take longer than 12 frames, 2) in the most miserable place
in the world, for Leth the red light district of Bombay, 3) as either a return to Bombay to remake
his failed first effort or as a film without rules, 4) as a animated film, and 5) as a text composed by
von Trier and read by Leth2).
The film interrogates Leths and by implication the films representational system to adequately
adapt to a world beyond its prescribed borders. Manufactured appropriately by a Dogme95
director with a flare for announcing theoretical rules, each of the obstructions or systemic rules or
laws tests and exposes, goads and examines Leths aesthetic. Von Trier, for instance, rejects
the second film for not following his instructions when it shows a crowd of Indian onlookers, and
then insists he remake it with complete freedom by returning to Bombay. Leth, however, wants
and needs those rules, and the film becomes punctuated by the director wandering, confused, or
dumbfounded, caught in his own long takes. With each failure, Von Trier demands that Lethe
needs to make a film that leaves a mark on you3).
As a series of adaptations that follows a refractive trail of obstructions, the film becomes at once a
game and a trial: a game in which film, especially the perfect film, will inevitably lose to its
adaptive world and not survive. If von Triers project is to adapt a little gem that were now going
to ruin, that plan is to proceed from the perfect to the human. In this series of adaptations there
can be no textual success since the human always exceeds the aesthetic. As one commentator put
it, The Five Obstructions is a hall of mirrors, shot through with ambiguities that aims to open
the cinema to the outside, to the flesh-and-blood richness of human life, and so becomes a work
of thinking as problematising (Constraint, Cruelty, and Conversation, Hector Rodriguez in
Hjort 2008: 53, 40, 55). Or in von Triers words, the film seeks to see without looking, to defocus!
(Hjort 2008: xvii), and I suppose what Im suggesting here is to think of adaptation studies as a
critically defocused activity.
A critical refrain in both the original film and the Von Triers game of adapation is I experienced
something today that I hope I understand in a few days and the relentless urging of that
understanding to think through the aesthetics of adaptation and the experience of adaptation is all
that remains when one is forced to see oneself finally as Lethe does as an abject human being,
constantly obstructed and excluded from some essential truth, where the essence of knowledge
may be only, as the films conclusion indicates, how the perfect human falls. If the commentator
of Leths original perfect human concludes wondering What is the perfect human thinking? and
Von Triers film opens with the query What was I thinking?, the unspoken question that lingers
at the end of Von Triers film and points for me towards adaptation studies today might be how
now do we rethink the imperfect artist through the resistant medium that is our world?
Conclusion
To conclude, my refractive wanderings here are, finally, just a shamelessly elaborate plug for our
flagship journal Adaptation 4). One of the pleasures and rewards of editing Adaptation with
Imelda [Whelehan] and Deborah [Cartmell] and the rest of the board has been the discovery of the
often unpredictably rich thinking and writing being done today on adaptation, and much of what
Im suggesting today I see acted out in the many daring and inventive essays that come to and
hopefully keep coming to the journal.
Few are more committed than I am to traditional textual studies and the singularity of certain films
and literary texts. Still, these focused studies seem to me most important and resonant when they
engage the contexts that trouble them, when they engage the obstructed circulation of adaptations
through the refracted cultural, textual, and technological paths as ways to identify and critically
intervene in how adaptation matters beyond texts. Although we are still some decades away, Bazin
provides us with this proleptic suggestion, slyly sneaking in a futuristic reference to the
film Adaptation: the critic of the year 2050, he says would find not a novel out of which a play
and a film had been made, but rather a single work reflected through three art forms, an artistic
pyramid with three sides, all equal in the eyes of the critic. The work would then be an ideal point
at the top of this figure, which is itself an ideal construct. The chronological precedence of one part
over another would not be an aesthetic criterion any more than the chronological precedence of
one twin over the other is a genealogical one (Naremore 2000: 26). That three-sided pyramid has
expanded appreciably in the fifty years since Bazin imagined the next fifty years of our future; and
now, with still forty years to go, it may be better conceived as a many-sided prismatic cube through
which films and other texts adapt and refract continuously. What we look at and the paths of
adaptation we critically engage are now more varied and less predictable. We need to explore the
cube as it tells us about the environment in which we live and the best ways to adapt to it. We need
to encourage the refractive spread of adaptation studies where evolutionary progress can also be a
return to positions that we may have archived too quicklyfrom Vachel Lindsay and Bela Balazs
to Bazin and Bellour and well beyond. For one way to see and value adaptations is as part of a
project of survival in which we need to find what historically matters, not just textually but as the
intellectual and social material of our lived experience. Remember Donalds words: that its what
you love, not what loves you that counts; remember, as Von Trier suggests, seek out adaptations
whose obstructions leave a mark on you as a mark on our culture. That may be, I think, the best
way for all of us to avoid that alligator.
References
Andrew, Dudley. 1984. Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Bazin, Andr [1948]. Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest, in James Naremore (2000), Film
Adaptation. New Brunswick & New Jersey: Rutgers University Press (19-27).
Bazin, Andr. 1967. What is Cinema?, Seleco e traduo de Hugh Gray. Berkeley, Los Angeles,
London: University of California Press.
Hjort, Mette (ed.). 2008. Dekalog 0.1: On the Five Obstructions. London: Wallflower Press / New
York: Columbia University Press.
Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge.
Naremore, James (ed.). 2000. Film Adaptation. New Brunswick & New Jersey: Rutgers University
Press.
Timothy Corrigan and Falso Movimento, 2014.
Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.