Point of Departure

There has been some discussion in class of why Latin American literature briefly became the source material of choice for European auteurs, and why the resulting films have so little fidelity to the original texts. The prevailing opinion seems to have been that these texts were chosen over more well-known works precisely because of their obscurity; that directors like Antonioni felt more comfortable tampering with works that audiences were unfamiliar with and less attached to than classic or mainstream Anglo-European ones. To claim this is, in my opinion, both to forget the reality of art cinema adaptation in the 1960's and to ignore the remarkable mutual support and respect shared by avant-garde writers and filmmakers during this period.
To make this clear, I think it's important to look at the various different kinds of adaptations made by Antonioni during his career. The fact that most of his films were based on original, self-penned screenplays does not make him the best possible example (Amongst 1960s auteurs, Godard is a much better one), but I'll do my best. Of his 15 feature films, only three are adaptations. The first, Le amiche (1955), was based on a novel by Cesare Pavese, one of the most significant and popular of 20th century Italian novelists. Not having seen the film, I cannot speak to its fidelity. However, I expect that Antonioni, who had already developed a very unique style by the time he began work on this, his fourth film, made the material very much his own. His second adaptation, Blowup (1966), based of course on Cortazar's story, "The Droolings of the Devil", strays far from its source in terms of plot, character, setting and scope. At the same time, the central ideas and questions (the inescapability of subjectivity, the difficulty of delineating reality from fantasy, the interest in the process of photography) are the same in both film and short story. There is one, might say, a spiritual affinity between the two works. Antonioni found something in Cortazar's work that spoke to him, but acknowledging the impossibility and pointlessness of attempting to mimic the Argentinean's style (especially in another another language), he remade it in a way that better suited his personal vision and his medium.
Antonioni's last adaptation of another writer's work was Il mistero di Oberwald (1981), a remake of Cocteau's L'aigle à deux têtes (1948), itself an adaptation of one of Cocteau's own plays.
Antonioni's film is, by the usual standards, a very faithful adaptation. Unlike Blowup, the characters, setting and plot remain largely unchanged from the originals. But Oberwald is nonetheless a very unusual film, and Antonioni's interest in the project lies elsewhere. Oberwald was originally shot on 35mm film, then transferred to video. Once this had been done, Antonioni then used then radical video editing techniques to change the realistically, traditionally shot footage into a bizarre fantasia, filled with strange bursts of color. Certain characters glow with a purple haze, corners of otherwise ordinary rooms are suffused with turquoise, a green field becomes an otherworldly yellow. This done, Oberwald was transferred back from video onto 35mm film for projection purposes. In other words, Antonioni uses the work of Cocteau, one of the most respected French writers and filmmakers of his generation, as merely a frame on which to hang his own, chiefly aesthetic, concerns.

fig. A, B: Il mistero di Oberwald, Antonioni, 1981