From tit to tat!!

Walter Benjamin once stated that the quality that provides a charismatic aura to any artwork or art form is it’s ‘unreproducability.’ Therefore, any adaptation must undergo semiotic changes, when a text is translated from one form to another. Whenever a literary text is morphed into a cinematic text, there is a shift in code structures to make the text congruent in the new medium. The domain of audio visual medium has the opportunity of regulating the space for imaginative approximation or appropriation which helps in consolidating the illusion. Illusion being the pivotal point on which the basis of the narrative rests. Thus, the dynamics of literary texts and their cinematic adaptations largely depend on the relationship of literary and cinematic semiology.

The adaptation begins only after literary texts are read by the film makers, thus, is dependent on the nature of reception of the reader. Therefore, what we get is the reflection of the reception of the film maker himself. In the process, the discursive space of the original text gets manipulated in some way or the other, resulting to what one may call as the distortion of subjectivity. Apu and Durga running in the fields and catching a glimpse of the train may have been Satyajit Ray’s successful attempt to incite nostalgia of the banal yet pristine childhood excitements in the popular Bengali psyche, but in BibhutibhushanBandyopadhyay’s literary version, the female, namely, Durga, never gets the opportunity to see the train in her lifetime. The ‘train’ was the totem of Modernity entering the rural scenario, and Durga not being able to see it insinuated at the deprivation of the females in the semi feudal rural social structure. Thus, by capturing Durga and the train in a single frame, a significant discursive political paradigm of gets blocked. Features like fidelity to plot and character sketching gets fundamentally more complex. That perhaps may explain the change in character of ‘Devdas’ in its innumerable cinematic adaptations. Thus, it is clear why Sanjay leela Bhansali’s Devdas is different from Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D, both being characteristically different from Sarat C. Chattopadhyay’s  ‘Debdash.’

Influence and reception play important roles in the matrix of intertextuality in literature and cinema as they do in the ambit of culture. The transition from ‘vaudevilles’ to a rigid art form called for a lot of additions and subtractions. While building a language for cinema, people like D.W. Griffith (read Hollywood or the institutional mode of representation) borrowed the structure of the narrative mode of the classic realist novel from literature, which limited the definition of cinema to an art form which caters to the innate human propensity and tendency of storytelling. The codification suggested by the above system has turned into the most popular narrative style all over the world; the triumph of Realism (which is a progeny of the capitalist social structure). People took more interest in the on screen struggle of the individual against the repressive social order, and their march to success against all odds. The illusion becomes so strong and effective that people forget that actually a story is being told to them, assuming themselves to be omniscient spectators, oblivious to the presence an invisible narrator. The verisimilitude with reality becomes the ‘Real’, slowly drugging the people to a point of political docility. This is the way the art forms are turned into institutional modes of repression. Beacons of human sensitivity become the batons that slander. The process being subtle and suave, just like anybody skin care lotion catch line may say, ‘it works within you even when you are not aware.’ Ladies and gentlemen, that’s hegemony for you!!