F0410 Narrative into Cinema, or How stories become films

The course will study the process of adaptation that narrative texts undergo in order to become films. Shooting a film out of a narrative text usually implies that changes have to be made in it either for technical or industrial reasons. The film poses not only the classic problem of fidelity to the so-called original but stylistic and thematic transformations brought about by film genre, visual language and director intervention.\r\n

The course would combine short lectures on theoretical problems and seminars where the class will engage in practical criticism of narrative texts and their film adaptation. Even more, the course will open with a practical case – the study of a film\'s sequence in order to introduce both theoretical problems and analytic tools. It should be clear that the aim of the course is to enable the students to produce a comparative exam of a narrative and its adaptation into a film. Topics dealt with will be the some basic notions of narrative theory as applied both to narratives and films (action, history and plot, narrator and point of view, style and tone, theme), the comparative approach itself, and general problems and processes of adaptation, bearing always in mind that between narrative and its film adaptation there is a script.

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The students will be required to discuss either individually or in groups at least one narrative text and the film adaptation during the course.

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The course does require some knowledge of the basic concepts of narrative theory and film language.

\r\nEach chosen film would be showed -partly or entirely- and discussed in the classroom in parallel to the story or novel from which it has been adapted. The films will mainly be adaptations from short stories or novellas, but some novels will be included too. Among the cinema adaptations –chosen from a variety of genres- to be to shown there will be: E. Hemingway\'s \"The Killers\" and Robert Siodmak\'s film; R. Chandler\'s The Big Sleep and H. Hawks film; the stories by G. de Maupassant (\"Boule de suif\") and E. Haycox filmed by J. Ford as Stagecoach; W. Irving\'s \"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow\" and Tim Burton\'s film; Daphne du Maurier\'s \"The Birds\" and A. Hitchcock\'s film; and Thomas Mann\'s Death in Venice and Luchino Visconti\'s film.