Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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.