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Adaptation, Appropriation, Translation: Sebald on the Silver Screen

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Adaptation, Appropriation, Translation: Sebald on the Silver Screen Adaptation, Appropriation, Translation: Sebald on the Silver Screen Isa Murdock- Hinrichs F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, based on Bram Stoker’s epistolary novel Dracula, exemplifies the radical potentialities of adaptation, both in terms of the film itself as well as the extraordinarily diverse mutations it has spawned for almost a century. Having been refused film rights by Stoker’s widow, Murnau was forced to make significant alterations to character names and setting. The locale was moved from London to Wismar, and vampirism no longer allegorizes the ills of fin- de- siècle capitalism but the growing specter of fascist brutality (Grady 1996; Cohen 1996: 5). Remaking Murnau’s groundbreaking cinematic intervention, Werner Herzog, Guy Maddin, and Elias Merhige, to name a few, reconfigure the work by situat- ing it in different historical moments and/or foregrounding the conceptual aspects of film itself. Maddin’s operatic camera work in his 2002 Pages of a Virgin’s Diary retains elements of silent film yet transforms the text into a study of movement in cinema, and Merhige’s 2000 adaptation narrates the making of Murnau’s film and thereby suggests that cinema itself exhibits vampiric qualities. In addition to these more liberal interpretations, there are numerous boundary 2 47:3 (2020) DOI 10.1215/01903659- 8524455 © 2020 by Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/133/813780/0470133.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 134 boundary 2 / August 2020 shot- by- shot reproductions of canonical films, and many of these remakes have been recognized for their unique artistic merits. Gus Van Sant’s 2002 Psycho surgically replicates every facet of Alfred Hitchcock’s original, while Jill Godmilow’s remake of Harun Farocki’s 1969 documentary Inextinguish- able Fire changes only the cast and translates the German dialogue of the original into English. Cinema’s hunger for new sources of inspiration pro- pels it sometimes to other artistic and formal terrains. Film’s particular incli- nation to incorporate and adapt different media, like painting, theater, and literature—exemplified by the literal restaging of Eugene Delacroix’s paint- ing in Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion—raises profound questions about the nature and function of the cinematic image. Even though all these aforementioned titles can take refuge under the rubric of adaptation, the term itself fails to adequately capture the seem- ingly endless number of complex processes and permutations constituting the relationships between these works and their respective origins. The pro- liferation of words and phrases around the concept of adaptation (allusion, homage, simple quotation, remake, “based on,” “inspired by”) highlights a pervasive uncertainty. This confusion is symptomatic of a larger anxiety besetting the contemporary cultural sphere, which has become increas- ingly defined by the multiplicities of how “things come alive,” as W. J. T. Mitchell (2004) puts it. Images, language, and texts no longer cohere in a polarized relationship between antecedents and subsequents, originals and remakes. Ultimately, not just cinema but all cultural production is vam- piric, nourishing itself while simultaneously reproducing its mode of being. Roland Barthes’s theorization of the intertext forgoes definitive and polarizing categories and instead explores the interstitial spaces between them as the main site of artistic production. His declaration that every text is “an intertext” (1981) identifies an inherent intertextuality in all writing, palimpsests bearing the marks of an endless array of cultural and literary traces. Echoing Barthes, Julia Kristeva describes all literary endeavors as “living mosaic[s], dynamic intersection[s] of textual surfaces” (1986: 36). Julie Sanders has recently elaborated on this line of thinking by broaden- ing the semantic range of adaptation to encompass a variety of practices, including but not limited to “borrowing, stealing, appropriating, inheriting, assimilating . being influenced, homage, mimicry, travesty, echo, allu- sion . interpretation, imitation, proximation, graft, etc.” (2006: 3). In addi- tion to granting more dynamism and flexibility in imagining the connection between source and adaptation, Sanders’s conjecture runs afoul of the sacrosanct notion of originality. Whereas the dividing line between origi- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/133/813780/0470133.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Murdock-Hinrichs / Adaptation, Appropriation, Translation 135 nal and “fake” retains its visibility in certain contexts, the critical dialogue around questions of textual purity, adaptation, and appropriation has effec- tively marginalized the long- standing distinction between source and repro- duction (Eco 1991). While adaptation implies a kind of surplus to the original, an under- standing of the relationship between what Gérard Genette calls hypertext (adaptation) and hypotext (source) allows for more complex readings of each work (1997). Frequently, a hypertext imports its own cultural genetics, radically reconfiguring the hypotext to such a degree that it is more justly termed appropriation. Even though adaptation and appropriation are inti- mately interwoven as concepts, the latter entails a looser engagement with the original than the former, which, according to John Ellis, “[prolongs] the pleasure of the original presentation and repeat[s] the production of mem- ory” (1982: 4–5). Now that the boundary between hypotext and hypertext has been recognized as more porous than presumed, the resulting blend of source and original undercuts the stability of both signifiers. The fact that W. G. Sebald’s two most widely circulated books, The Rings of Saturn (1998) and Austerlitz (2001), are themselves deeply impli- cated in questions of translation, adaptation, and remediation magnifies the problems raised by the different strategies Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald) (2012) and Stan Neumann’s Austerlitz (2015) employ in their cine- matic reconfiguration of their respective originals. While Gee pursues the same strategic subversion of genre underwriting The Rings of Saturn, Neu- mann is far more faithfully attached to the basic narrative elements of what many see as Sebald’s most novelistic work (Verdolini 2013: 614). By trans- lating and appropriating the signature formal stylistics of The Rings of Sat- urn onto the silver screen, Gee fashions something involved as much with the author as it is with the text and the expert readers the film engages. The work echoes with a polyvocality that renders the influences, musings, and myriad psychological associations of Sebald’s text into externalized frag- ments that visually convey the interwoven processes of memory, percep- tion, and spatialization in The Rings of Saturn. Neumann, in contrast, initially focuses on the unnamed narrator’s encounters with the title character. Even though he faithfully reproduces Jacques Austerlitz’s observations, anecdotes, and confessions, Neumann shatters the visual representation of the plot and congeals different media into a single filmic text. Moreover, Neumann’s invention and superimposi- tion of himself as a “character” further undermine not only the claims to historical authenticity but also the possibility of a stable system of signi- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/133/813780/0470133.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 136 boundary 2 / August 2020 Figure 1. Patience (After Sebald) (Grant Gee, 2012). fiers. This deliberate intervention of the persona of the translator-filmmaker contradicts what Lawrence Venuti sees as the dominant trend in Anglo- American translations—namely, the erasure of the linguistic peculiarities of the individual translator (1995). To the contrary, it emphasizes the agency of the “translator” and the transformative properties of the text. Ultimately, both films are neither adaptations nor translations, but rather appropriate elements from Sebald’s work in order to trace the effects of his literary style. On the one hand, Gee, as I discuss in the next section, pursues these questions through experimental techniques, and Neumann, on the other hand, integrates them into the film’s plot and articulates them through the mouth of the title character, played by Denis Lavant. Lost in Language: Reality and the Individual Patience (After Sebald) begins with a brightly colored map of the world populated by little purple markers (Figure 1). Through staccato enlargements of the lower eastern corner of Great Britain, the East Anglian “landscape” reveals more and more of itself. However, the proliferation of arrows of different colors simultaneously magnifies the map’s intrin- sic abstract nature. Suddenly the two- dimensional picture of the map— morphed into a satellite image—unfolds into three-dimensional structures. When a purple marker finally identifies the particular site of “Norwich” (Figure 2), a voice-over begins to read the opening lines of The Rings of Saturn. Almost immediately, the succession of satellite images gives way Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/47/3/133/813780/0470133.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Murdock-Hinrichs / Adaptation, Appropriation, Translation 137 Figure 2. Patience (After Sebald) (Grant Gee, 2012). to a static shot of the book’s cover photo. As the spoken words on the soundtrack assume a kind of narrative agency, the first pages of The Rings of Saturn appear as a slightly
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