When filmmakers choose to “adapt” (for lack of a better word) a work of literature for the screen, they cross a border not unlike the work of composers or sculptors who create a ballet or sculpture based on literary texts. The filmmakers face many challenges, including some that arise from economic and cultural constraints that may drive artistic decisions: expectations of the production and distribution companies determine budgets that have an impact on every subsequent decision, including time for production and length of the final film. Within these parameters, filmmakers choose which of the literary fabula events, characters, motifs, and so forth they can and cannot include. They must also choose how to convey information encoded in the literary text in the narrator's discourse and the internal monologues of characters, all of which in turn may have aesthetic features such as sound play, imagery, symbolism, metaphor, and so forth. Filmmakers must contend also with that which authors have not specified, or unbestimmtheiten; for example, the narrator of a literary text focuses his/her attention on the fact that Ostap Bender enters an office with swagger, not what clothing he is wearing. As we read, we imagine that Ostap is neither naked, nor wearing a tutu; either of those two alternative options (naked or wearing a tutu) would in the cultural context have to be the focus of the scene, but since they are not, we assume Ostap to be clothed. The filmmaker adapting The 12 Chairs for the screen must make a decision about costuming for this and every character in every scene, often without guidance from the literary author, just as s/he must do with every set. Filmmakers adapting works of literature for the screen must also make decisions about uniquely cinematographic devices, such as the question as to whether to use a deep or shallow focus in any scene, whether to use a long shot or short shots with rapid transitions, how to use light and color, how to use diegetic and non-diegetic sound, and many more.
Filmmakers adapting literary works created in one culture for a film to be screened primarily in another, such as Vladimir Popkov's adaptation of Jack London's Hearts of Three or Mel Brook's adaption of Il΄ia Il΄f and Evgenii Petrov's The 12 Chairs have additional borders to cross: what cultural references and cues will resonate in the hearts and minds of the viewers; in what ways will the literary text resonate as universal for the viewers; and in what ways will it present the culture of the text's origin as interesting, either option sufficient to bring audiences to the film. And lastly, what will be the reactions of audiences in the culture of origin, should the film be played there, as was the case, for example, of Joe Wright's 2012 film, Anna Karenina: some Russian critics judged the film “not Russian enough.” Lastly, some filmmakers cross a border in time, adapting a work written in one historical period, such as Anna Karenina, for viewers who live in a vastly different historical period. In the Russian context, even a decade or two of difference between literary and filmic texts can make a big difference in interpretation in the context of the changing nature of political control in the USSR and post-Soviet space.
Border Crossing: Russian Literature into Film is a volume edited by Alexander Burry and Frederick H. White, with an introduction by Burry and a concluding essay by White. The book consists of eleven essays by individual authors, mostly on a single work of film, with some comparing multiple works of film based on a single literary text. The vast majority of essays focus almost exclusively on fabula components and character discourse, comparing the literary source text (the hypotext) and the filmic destination text (the hypertext), showing how these elements combine in different ways to create similar or different meanings for readers and audiences. Some of these essays fail to take up more than ever so briefly the uniquely filmic artistic decisions of the filmmakers, dwelling instead exclusively on the narrative connections between the hypo- and hypertexts (fabula and dialogue). Any such analysis is, in my view, incomplete. The essays that are most compelling in this volume are those by Olga Peters Hasty, on Bresson's Pickpocket (adapted from Crime and Punishment) and by Yuri Leving, on the suicide scene in several different fim versions of Anna Karenina. Each of the essays in the volume would be useful to an expert seeking more information about a particular work, and here I would especially commend Ronald Meyer's analysis of White Nights, Alexander Burry's essay on Ward No. 6, Frederick White's chapter on He Who Gets Slapped, and Robert Mulcahy's essay on Mel Brooks's The Twelve Chairs. Dennis Ioffe's and Otto Boele's essays take up the challenge of temporal crossings with regard to Nabokov's Despair (Ioffe), recast in the context of Nazism that Nabokov wouldn't have known when he wrote the novel, and with regard to Aksenov's Starry Ticket (Boele) turned into My Younger Brother with substantial political intervention by Soviet cultural authorities. The introductory and concluding essays are useful contributions to the field, and together with the bibliography and filmography constitute a comprehensive reference to important works. The essays by Olga Peters Hasty and Yuri Leving in this volume stand out as significant contributions to a framework of how to analyze other pairs of texts precisely because the essays take up not only the narrative components of hypo- and hypertext, which by their very nature privilege the hypotext, but also the filmic devices of the hypertext, creating far more compelling arguments. As such, these essays are important not merely in connection with the texts they analyze, but constitute a contribution to the method for analyzing such border crossings more generally.
