Covering One's Tracks

I've made no secret of the fact that I have little love for either Manuel Puig's novel The Kiss of the Spider Woman or it's 1985 film adaptation, directed by Héctor Babenco. However, I would agree with what seems to be the general consensus class in that the film adaptation is inferior to the original text. In addition to making some questionable changes to the original text (the loss of the claustrophobia and intimacy of the cell, the realignment of Valentin's politics, the loss of most of the movies recounted by Molina), the film magnifies many of the problems that were already to be found in the novel. One of these issues is the only Molina-film to make the crossover to silver screen reality, Puig's invented Nazi fantasia, Her Real Glory.
My problem with Puig's original version was this. The character of Molina loves the film for its romance, for the "bravery" and tragedy of the heroine, for it's costumes, handsome men, for the overwhelming, perfumed fragrance of European luxury and decadence that hangs about the thing. This is all very well and good. His adoration is true to his character, and his ability to see beauty where most would only find "stinking Nazi Propaganda" is, in its own way, touching. As audience members with (hopefully) a less naive political worldview and understanding of mass media forms in the twentieth century, we have enough self control to not get entirely carried away by Molina's daydreams, to maintain a certain level of objectivity and criticize the obvious inaccuracies and cruelties of the film: its depiction of the French Resistance and of Jews.
However, Puig doesn't quite trust our capability to think for ourselves. He gets worried, nervous; he frets, "What if they think I'm a Nazi? What if they think I agree entirely with Molina? What if they like the German officer and his beloved horizontal collaborator?" So he camps up Her Real Glory with a preposterously foaming at the mouth, anti-Semitic press release (notably exterior to Molina's subjective reading and recounting of the film), so bizarre and belligerent that it could never have existed in reality, just to make absolutely dead certain that there can be absolutely no confusion as to where he stands on the Nazis. Terrified of offending or alienating his audience, Puig has his cake and eats it too, but it leaves a bad taste in our mouths. His inadvertent, ironic crime is that, in manipulating and brutalizing us into accepting that the film is pure propaganda, his own book becomes, in it's own way, political propaganda.
In the film Babenco takes this one step further, but in a direction that panders not just to the oversimplified, naive political expectations of a modern Democratic audience, but to the stigmas and prejudices that contemporary viewers have towards older, classic, especially Black and white films. Babenco's filmed version of Her Real Glory is an absurd pantomime, a ludicrous clown show with actors whose faces have been painted into the gave and whose stiff, exaggerated movements seem to outline glass boxes less often than real emotions. It's shot, not in true black and white, but in a faded, manipulated color, a crass compromise with a pampered audience. It is not a reasonable representation of a classic film, or even one as Molina might see it (his appreciation of the films is entirely unironic and uncynical), but as Babenco imagines his viewers expect a classic film to look.

Authorial Territories

In the post-Truffaut/Bazin/Sarris auteurist world we tend to discount the importance of screenwriters in the creation of the film as a unified work, instead giving the director almost sole claim to final authorship. Usually, we're not in error in doing so. Even in cases where a film is adapted from a text by a respected writer, the unique qualities of the adaptation tend to overwhelm those of the original text, especially in the realm of art film. All of this changes, however, when the respected writer becomes the respected screenwriter. The respected writer, used to directing his plots and characters with complete tyranny from the comfort of his own home, isn't about to let some upstart director muscle in on his territory completely. The results of conflicts like this are works like Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1942), made from a script by Thornton Wilder, and Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), undoubtedly great films, but ones where the signature touches of multiple creators are strongly in evidence.But what happens when you have not one, but two respected writers assuming screenwriting duties for an auteurist director? In 1969, Argentinean filmmaker Hugo Santiago made a film called Invasión. Santiago had previously only made two shorts, both adaptations of stories by Jorge Luis Borges, but showed such promise with them that Borges himself decided to write an original script for the young artist to direct.
To assist him in this enterprise, Borges brought on board his protege and frequent collaborator, Adolfo Bioy Casares, a writer who shared Borges enthusiasm for distortions of reality and Robert Louis Stevenson, but whose primary medium was the novel, not the short story, and whose work is chracterised by a black humor and playfulness often lacking in the older writer's work. Film had also long been a preoccupation in Casares writing. His most famous work, the 1940 novella The Invention of Morel, about a castaway obsessed by a woman who is eventually revealed to eb a mere holographic projection, was inspired by Casares' own unreasonable crush on the screen persona of Louise Brooks. Morel is also frequently cited as the (unackowledged) inspiration for Resnais and Robbe-Grillet's Last Year at Marienbad. Asleep in the Sun (1973) makes numerous references to Robert Wise's 1945 film The Body Snatcher, which was in turn based on a short story by Stevenson. (I hope to return to this relationship in a later post.)
Invasion is itself an adaptation of sorts, a recreation, like many of Borges works, of a classical text. Here, the starting point is The Iliad. It is the story of a city, one easily recognizable as Buenas Aires, but here disguised half-heartedly under the name Aquilea. The city is under attack. It is not clear by whom, or by what means, but the danger is nonetheless palpable and omnipresent. Men in suits and trenchcoats plot in cafes, an armada of civilian automobiles lurk ominously in a field.
The city is being defended by a secret group of only a handful of ragtag individuals, all with day jobs, all tired, all middle aged, except for their leader, a decrepit old man whose most deliberate action in the film is a shopping trip. At the same time, they have the romantic, desperate air of characters in Martin Fierro; they're getting older, but they'll still die fighting.
Somewhat surprisingly, plot is rather thin on the ground in Invasión. We have no real investment in the story or the chracters that move it along, partly because the characters don't move the story along; they're just archetypes playing a role, being pulled along by a historical plot that's been played out many times before and will be played out again. In this respect, the film shows some similarities with Borges stories like "The Immortal" and "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero". So, instead of engrossing it's audience in a narrative, the film focuses on atmosphere, on image and sound.
It's shot in very high contrast black and white, with many night time scenes, all filled with the glare of car headlights or the brief flares of gunfire. Odd sirens are constantly, inexplicably whining in the background, their peculiar high pitched wails closer to caterwauling than an ordinary klaxon. Unusual architectural spaces are exploited to their utmost, filled with the enigmatic figures of trenchcoated men and their unnaturally extended shadows.
It is this remarkable atmosphere, this focus on the cinematic above all else, above plot, character, even intellectual concepts, that makes it clear that Santiago was not merely some hack at the mercy of all of "Biorges'" whims and wishes. At the same time, the film is unmistakably marked by the two writers, could never have existed without them.
Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares wrote one more script for Santiago, resulting in 1974's Les autres, but cinema would not return to Aquilea until 1986, when Santiago made Les trottoirs de Saturne, a film about Aquilean political refugees living in Paris. The latter was made without the participation of Borges or Casares.
Fig A: Shadow of a Doubt, Hitchcock, 1942; Fig B: Last Year at Marienbad, Resnais, 1961; Fig C, D, E, F, G, H: Invasion, Santiago, 1969; Fig I: Les trottoirs de Saturne, Santiago, 1986

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